9 August 2013

bellygod

[BEL-ee god]

noun

– One who takes great pleasure in eating; a glutton.

ETYMOLOGY:
A bellygod is one who makes a god of his belly, i.e. a glutton. From Old English belig (bag) + god. Earliest documented use: 1540.

USAGE:
“Hudibras becomes the puritan bellygod par excellence:
Our knight did bear no less a pack
Of his own buttocks on his back.”
Kristen Poole; Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton; Cambridge University Press; 2000.

“The figure of Hercules [rebuked] Comus the belly-god for his ‘drunken orgies’ and addiction to swinish pleasure.”
Ian Donaldson; Ben Jonson: A Life; Oxford University Press; 2011.

Today’s aphorism

You can not save people, you can only love them

– Anais Nin

On this day

9 August 1936 – Jesse Owens, an African-American athlete, wins his 4th gold medal at the Berlin Olympics – much to Adolf Hitler’s chagrin. Hitler had hoped the games would show-case white Aryan ideals, and was disgusted that a black athlete had achieved more than the white athletes.

9 August 1945 – USA drops an atomic bomb, called ‘Fat Boy’ on Nagasaki, Japan. It is estimated that between 60,000 to 80,000 people died within four months of the bombing, with half that number dying on the day of the bombing.