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March 23, 2025
Mar 23, 2025
Word
aperçu
noun
Definition
  1. a brief survey or sketch : outline
  2. an immediate impression; especially : an intuitive insight
Example
"On every other page, there's a nice apercu: breath is 'cooked air'; perfume is 'liquid memory'; when astronauts are weightless in their spaceship, they lose their sense of smell…." - Anatole Broyard, New York Times Book Review, 29 July 1990
Origin
In French, "aperçu" is the past participle of the verb "apercevoir" ("to perceive" or "to comprehend"), which in turn comes from Latin "percipere" ("to perceive"). (The same verb also gave us "apperceive," meaning "to have consciousness of oneself," and the noun "apperception," meaning "introspective self-consciousness" or "mental perception.") "Aperçu" in French is also a noun meaning "glimpse" or "outline, general idea." English speakers borrowed the noun "aperçu," meaning and all, in the early 19th century.
Webster's Dictionary
Idiom
not have a bean
Be destitute or penniless, as in He doesn't have a bean, but she's set on marrying him. Bean has been a slang term for a guinea or a sovereign coin since the early 1800s. The precise expression was first recorded in 1928.
The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms
Fun facts
  1. Miami installed the first ATM for inline skaters.
  2. There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
Snapple's under-the-cap 'Real Facts'
Artist
Lajos Kassák
Mar 21, 1887 - Jul 22, 1967

Lajos Kassák was a Hungarian poet, novelist, painter, essayist, editor, theoretician of the avant-garde, and occasional translator. Self-taught, he became a writer within the socialist movement and published journals important to the radical intellectual culture of Budapest in the early 1900s.

Although he cannot be fully identified with any single avant-garde movement, he adopted elements of expressionism, futurism and dadaism.

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Wikipedia, Google Arts & Culture
Historical figure
Hillary Clinton
Born Oct 26, 1947

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is an American politician, diplomat, lawyer, writer, and public speaker. She served as the 67th United States Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, as United States senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, and as First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president of the United States by a major political party when she won the Democratic Party nomination in 2016. She was the first woman to win the popular vote in an American presidential election, which she lost to Donald Trump.

Raised in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Clinton graduated from Wellesley College in 1969, and earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1973. After serving as a congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas and married future president Bill Clinton in 1975; the two had met at Yale. In 1977, she co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. She was appointed the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978, and became the first female partner at Little Rock's Rose Law Firm the following year. Clinton was the first lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992.

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Wikipedia, Google Arts & Culture
Historic event
Italian campaign
Jul 10, 1943 - May 8, 1945

The Italian campaign of World War II consisted of Allied and Axis operations in and around Italy, from 1943 to 1945. The Joint Allied Forces Headquarters was operationally responsible for all Allied land forces in the Mediterranean theatre and it planned and led the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, followed in September by the invasion of the Italian mainland and the campaign in Italy until the surrender of the German Armed Forces in Italy in May 1945.

It is estimated that between September 1943 and April 1945, 60,000–70,000 Allied and 38,805–150,660 German soldiers died in Italy. The number of Allied casualties was about 320,000 and the German figure was over 330,000. Fascist Italy, prior to its collapse, suffered about 200,000 casualties, mostly POWs taken in the invasion of Sicily, including more than 40,000 killed or missing. Over 150,000 Italian civilians died, as did 35,828 anti-fascist partisans and some 35,000 troops of the Italian Social Republic.

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Wikipedia, Google Arts & Culture
Quote
The most wasted of days is one without laughter.
E.E. Cummings