Merriam-Webster said it saw a “substantial increase” in searches for the word in 2023, which the dictionary publisher says was “driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity and social media.” Merriam-Webster said people are searching for the word because it has a number of different meanings, including “not false or imitation” and “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.”
So now you know.
Today is Electronic Greetings Day. So sending your greetings are now just a click away.
November 29, 1940 -
W.C. Fields at his peak - The Bank Dick, premiered on this date.
Mahatma Kane Jeeves (the pseudonym used by W.C. Fields as screenwriter) is a play on words from stage plays of the era. "My hat, my cane, Jeeves!" And in fact, at the end of the film his butler does hand him his hat and his cane.
November 29, 1945 -
Remarkable for it frank portrayal of alcoholism (for it's day), The Lost Weekend, opened in Los Angeles on this date.
Ray Milland actually checked himself into Bellevue Hospital with the help of resident doctors, in order to experience the horror of a drunk ward. Milland was given an iron bed and locked inside the "booze tank." That night, a new arrival came into the ward screaming, an entrance which ignited the whole ward into hysteria. With the ward falling into bedlam, a robed and barefooted Milland escaped while the door was ajar and slipped out onto 34th Street where he tried to hail a cab. When a suspicious cop spotted him, Milland tried to explain, but the cop didn't believe him, especially after he noticed the Bellevue insignia on his robe. The actor was dragged back to Bellevue where it took him a half-hour to explain his situation to the authorities before he was finally released.
November 29, 1950 -
Jean Cocteau's beautifully lyrical, Orphee, opened in the US on this date.
Both Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo were approached about playing the mysterious Princess. Both declined.
November 29, 1969 -
The Beatles' double A sided single Come Together/ Something, (their twenty-sixth release in the United States,) went to # 1 on the Billboard charts, on this date. Come Together / Something became the group's 18th US No. 1.
John Lennon was inspired by Timothy Leary's campaign for governor of California titled "Come together, join the party" against Ronald Reagan giving him the idea for the track. Something was the first Beatles song written by George Harrison to appear as an A-side.
November 29, 1975 -
Silver Convention's single Fly, Robin, Fly hits #1 on the Billboard Charts for the first of three weeks. The disco tune has very few lyrics because the German group can't speak English.
This was the first #1 US hit with a species of bird in the title. Rockin' Robin - both the Bobby Day original and Michael Jackson cover - stalled at #2. The next bird song to reach the top was When Doves Cry by Prince in 1984.
November 29, 1992 -
U2's first TV special, called U2's Zoo TV Outside Broadcast, aired on Fox-TV on this date.
The show contains footage from their concerts at Yankee Stadium in New York and the Houston Astrodome, earlier that year.
Today's guest programmer
Today in History:
November 29, 1777 -
José Joaquín Moraga proved that he knew the way to San Jose on this date,
when he established, for Spain, el Pueblo de San Jose de Guadelupe, the first civil settlement in California.
November 29, 1864 -
The Sand Creek Massacre occurred, on this date, when Colorado volunteers led by Colonel John Chivington, in retaliation for an Indian attack on a party of immigrants near Denver, massacred at least 400 Cheyenne and Arapaho noncombatants (mostly children, women, physically- and mentally-challenged, and elders) inside Colorado Territory.
It also generated two Congressional investigations into the actions of Chivington and his men. The House Committee on the Conduct of the War concluded that Chivington had "deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the varied and savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty."
The American Government has so much to be proud of with their dealings with the Native Americans.
November 29, 1924 -
Italian composer Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels before he could complete his opera Turandot. Franco Alfano finished it.
His death marked the end of a 300-year tradition of Italian opera.
November 29, 1929 -
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd (on a break from his experiments with frozen vegetables) radioed that he'd made the first airplane flight with pilot Floyd Bennett, over the South Pole: "My calculations indicate that we have reached vicinity of South Pole." (He was wrong. )
After briefly loitering around the Pole, Byrd and his crew headed back to their home base, Little America and more intense testing of frozen zucchini.
November 29, 1935 –
Once the cat is in the box, do you know if it really alive, or dead? (Don't tell the PETA people about this.)
Physicist Erwin Schrödinger published his famous thought experiment ‘Schrödinger’s cat’, a paradox that illustrates the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
November 29, 1944 -
File this under: - Things they didn't tell you in school -
The first open heart surgery was performed at Johns Hopkins hospital, on this date.
A surgical fix for a fetal heart defect, tetralogy of Fallot or blue baby syndrome, was first performed at Johns Hopkins by surgeon Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas, a black assistant who actually perfected the procedure. Thomas 'contribution to the lifesaving surgery remained largely unacknowledged, outside of the medical profession.
November 29, 1951 -
The United States set off the first underground nuclear explosion named "Uncle" at Frenchman Flats in Nevada on this date.
It was a great success, except for the giant spiders, ants, grasshoppers and other insects left in the aftermath.
November 29, 1961 -
The US sent the chimpanzee Enos into space, aboard the Mercury Atlas 5 capsule from Cape Canaveral on this date.
Enos returns to earth safely but died less than a year later before he could sign with the William Morris Agency.
November 29, 1972 -
Pong, the first commercially successful video game, was released on this date by Nolan Bushnell (who was also the co-founder of the video game company, Atari.)
Pong is similar to digital tennis or ping-pong, and its great success was a big part of the early beginnings of the video game industry.
November 29, 1986 -
I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.
82 year old Archibald Leach, better known as Cary Grant, suffered a major stroke in his hotel room prior to performing in his one man show An Evening With Cary Grant at the Adler Theater in Davenport, Iowa, on this date. He died later that night at St. Luke's Hospital.
November 29, 2001 -
The Beatles will exist without us.
The "quiet" Beatle, George Harrison was silenced by cancer on this date.
November 29, 2004 -
Godzilla received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on this date.
In honor of the event, the Toho star was allowed to run rampant through Little Tokyo that afternoon.
And on a personal note:
Oh yeah, millions of years ago (or at least more than half a century ago) the earth cooled and formed a hard crust, huge dinosaurs ruled the land and John was there to see it all. Happy Birthday John.
About a decade later, vast plains with wildflowers sprung up and Mary skipped along them all.
Before you go - you thought I was done with holiday commercials - I would have never expected this from a multinational corporation -
I should have reminded you to get your tissues.
And so it goes
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