Who Knew Wednesday

A Memorial Who Knew!

There’s a difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day, but not everyone is entirely sure what that difference is! CNN wrote a good article explaining the difference, check it out below!

Memorial Day: Celebrated the last Monday in May, Memorial Day is the holiday set aside to pay tribute to those who died serving in the military.

The website for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs recounts the start of Memorial Day this way:

“Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) — established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. It is believed that date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country.”

The passage of the National Holiday Act of 1971 by Congress made it an official holiday.

Veterans Day: This federal holiday falls on November 11 and is designated as a day to honor all who have served in the military. According to Military.com, Veterans Day began as Armistice Day to honor the end of World War I, which officially took place on November 11, 1918.

“In 1954, after having been through both World War II and the Korean War, the 83rd U.S. Congress — at the urging of the veterans service organizations — amended the Act of 1938 by striking out the word “Armistice” and inserting the word “Veterans,” the site says. “With the approval of this legislation on June 1, 1954, November 11 became a day to honor American veterans of all wars.”

There is a really neat website that will tell you all about Memorial Day and you can check out all the history and ways to celebrate Memorial Day here!

Our word of the day today was: malleable
adjective || MAL-ee-uh-bul

This means: capable of being extended or shaped by beating with a hammer or by the pressure of rollers, capable of being altered or controlled by outside forces or influences, or having a capacity for adaptive change.

There is a hint about the origins of malleable in its first definition. The earliest uses of the word, which first appeared in English in the 14th century, referred primarily to metals that could be reshaped by beating with a hammer. The Middle English word malliable comes to us from Medieval Latin malleabilis, which in turn derives from the Latin verb malleare, meaning “to hammer.” Malleare itself was created from the Latin word for “hammer”: malleus. If you have guessed that maul and mallet, other English words for specific types of hammers, can also be traced back to malleus, you have hit the nail on the head.

Thanks for listening!
-Lilly

May 24, 2017 0

World Telecommunications Day Who Knew!

We can’t be a radio station and not celebrate World Telecommunications Day, right? Today we talked about the history behind the day, and also the history and fun facts about the types of telecommunication that we have! Check it out below!

History of World Telecommunications Day:
In November 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society called upon the UN General Assembly to declare 17 May as World Information Society Day to focus on the importance of ICT and the wide range of issues related to the information society raised by WSIS. The General Assembly adopted a resolution in March 2006 stipulating that World Information Society Day shall be celebrated every year on 17 May. The first World Information Society Day took place on Wednesday, 17 May 2006.

A Brief History of Radio:
During the 1860s, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of radio waves. And in 1886, German physicist Heinrich Rudolph Hertz demonstrated that rapid variations of electric current could be projected into space in the form of radio waves, similar to those of light and heat. In 1866, Mahlon Loomis, an American dentist, successfully demonstrated “wireless telegraphy.” Loomis was able to make a meter connected to one kite cause another one to move. This marked the first known instance of wireless aerial communication.

A Brief History of the Telephone:
Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876. Elisha Gray, 1876, designed a telephone using a water microphone in Highland Park, Illinois. Tivadar Puskás proposed the telephone switchboard exchange in 1876. That first patent by Bell was the master patent of the telephone, from which other patents for electric telephone devices and features flowed.

Here’s an info-graphic about age correlating to type of phone owned.

Age Any type of phone Smart Phone Non-Smart Phone

Ages 18-29	100%	92%	8%
30-49	99%	88%	11%
50-64	97%	74%	23%
65+	80%	42%	38%

A Brief History of the Fax Machine
Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile. Scottish inventor Alexander Bain worked on chemical mechanical fax type devices and in 1846 was able to reproduce graphic signs in laboratory experiments. He received British patent 9745 on May 27, 1843 for his “Electric Printing Telegraph.” Frederick Bakewell made several improvements on Bain’s design and demonstrated a telefax machine.

Our Word of the Day today was: Castigate.
Verb || KASS-tuh-gayt
“To subject to severe punishment, reproof, or criticism”

Castigate has a synonym in chastise. Both verbs mean to punish or to censure someone. Fittingly, both words derive from the same root: the Latin castigare, formed from the words for “pure” (castus) and “to drive” (agere). (Castus also gave us the noun caste, meaning “social class or rank.”) Another verb derived from castigare is chasten, which can also mean “to discipline by punishment” but more commonly means “to subdue or make humble” (as in “chastened by his foolish error”). Castigate is the youngest of the three verbs in English, dating from the early 17th century, while chasten dates to the early 16th century and chastise has been found in use as far back as the 14th.

We have so much technology and so many opportunities to use it, but do we always use it right? As a radio station, we have the greatest privilege to be able to use this telecommunication platform as a light for Christ. We are called to spread the good news of God, and we literally have the means to do so at our fingertips. So, my encouragement to you is to start making social media and our other forms of telecommunication places of light in this dark world. We can do it.

Thanks for listening!!
-Lilly

May 17, 2017 0

Today we took Who Knew Wednesday to talk about Mother’s Day, and all the who knew’s that go along with it!

Here’s some history and fun facts!

Mother’s Day is a holiday honoring motherhood that is observed in different forms throughout the world. The American incarnation of Mother’s Day was created by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became an official U.S. holiday in 1914. Jarvis would later denounce the holiday’s commercialization and spent the latter part of her life trying to remove it from the calendar. While dates and celebrations vary, Mother’s Day most commonly falls on the second Sunday in May and traditionally involves presenting mothers with flowers, cards and other gifts.

The origins of Mother’s Day as celebrated in the United States date back to the 19th century. In the years before the Civil War, Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia helped start “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” to teach local women how to properly care for their children.

These clubs later became a unifying force in a region of the country still divided over the Civil War. In 1868 Jarvis organized “Mothers’ Friendship Day,” at which mothers gathered with former Union and Confederate soldiers to promote reconciliation.
The official Mother’s Day holiday arose in the 1900s as a result of the efforts of Anna Jarvis, daughter of Ann Reeves Jarvis. Following her mother’s 1905 death, Anna Jarvis conceived of Mother’s Day as a way of honoring the sacrifices mothers made for their children.

After gaining financial backing from a Philadelphia department store owner named John Wanamaker, in May 1908 she organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration at a Methodist church in Grafton, West Virginia. That same day also saw thousands of people attend a Mother’s Day event at one of Wanamaker’s retail stores in Philadelphia.

Our Word of the Day today was holus-bolus.
This is an adverb, and it means all at once or altogether.
Holus-bolus, like the much earlier hocus-pocus, is a mock-Latin phrasemeaning “whole lump, whole bolus (a round mass of medicine).” An etymologyof sorts has holus-bolus as a Latinization of Greek hólos bôlos “whole lump,clod of earth, nugget.” The term entered English in the 19th century.

Thanks for listening!
-Lilly

May 10, 2017 0

National Day of Prayer Who Knew!

Good afternoon! It was a nice, sunny day here in Mt. Vernon, and today we brought you ‘who knew’s’ about tomorrow’s event, the National Day of Prayer.

Our National Day of Prayer gathering is going to be tomorrow night, at 7 o’clock.
If it’s raining, this event will be held in Thorne Performance Hall in the Chapel of MVNU.
If it’s not raining, it will be held on the public square in Mt. Vernon.

If you’d like to check out their website, you can do that here!

Here’s some fun facts about the National Day of Prayer!

The mission of the National Day of Prayer Task Force is to mobilize prayer in America and to encourage personal repentance and righteousness in the culture.

The National Day of Prayer is an annual observance held on the first Thursday of May, inviting people of all faiths to pray for the nation. It was created in 1952 by a joint resolution of the United States Congress, and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. Our Task Force is a privately funded organization whose purpose is to encourage participation on the National Day of Prayer. It exists to communicate with every individual the need for personal repentance and prayer, to create appropriate materials, and to mobilize the Christian community to intercede for America’s leaders and its families. The Task Force represents a Judeo-Christian expression of the national observance, based on our understanding that this country was birthed in prayer and in reverence for the God of the Bible.

“Fasting and prayer are religious exercises; the enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the time for these exercises, and the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and right can never be safer than in their hands, where the Constitution has deposited it.”

—Thomas Jefferson, 1808

1st John 5:14 says:
“This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, He hears us.”

And in Ephesians 3:20&21, it reminds us of this…
“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we askor imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, ²¹to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”

Our word of the day today was ‘minatory’!
This is an adjective that means menacing or threatening.

Minatory is from the Latin minārī, which means “to threaten,” Another derivative in Latin is the Late Latin noun minātor, which its’ definition lends itself more to cattle, and it means: “one whodrives cattle with threats, drover.” This “country” usage persisted in French, in which the verb mener, a direct descendant of Latin minārī, means “to lead.”Minatory entered English in the 16th century.

Now there’s the animal the Minotaur, which you’d think has some roots to the word ‘minatory’, but it actually doesn’t. A minotaur is part bull, and part man. The word Minotaur he term actually finds its roots from the Ancient Greek Μῑνώταυρος, a compound of the name Μίνως, which translates as Minos, and the noun ταύρος, which means “bull“, translated as “(the) Bull of Minos”. And Minos, in Greek Mythology, was the first King of Crete. And Minos was the son of Zeus and Europa.

You get a little bit of a double dose of definitions and a history lesson today for the Word of the Day, so I hope you enjoyed it 🙂

Thanks for listening, and we hope to see you tomorrow for the National Day of Prayer!
-Lilly

May 3, 2017 0

The boss’s secret weapon…

wednesday
…is the Administrative Professional…and we celebrate them today. Author Jan Jones calls them that secret weapon…

Thanks to those who called in to recognize the special people, the glue, as Hannah called them, that keep our businesses and organizations running smoothly:

Angie Shuman – The Freedom Center
Gina Stephens – New Life Church of the Nazarene
Tressa Daley – MVNU Music Department
Joyce Applegarth – MVNU School of Arts and Humanities
Christa Adams – WNZR

Did you know there are 4 million administrative professionals in the workplace? (source: 2014-15 Bureau of Labor Statistics report)
Did you know 97% of AP’s are women?
Did you know office and administrative support is the largest occupational group, making up nearly 16 percent of total U.S. employment?

Our Word of the Day is cartographer, a noun that simply means – a map maker!

Thanks for listening!
-Joe

April 26, 2017 0

Who Knew it was Banana Day?

wednesday

There’s Banana Bread day on February 23rd, Banana Lovers Day in August, but today is regular ol’ Banana Day! Here are some Who Knew facts from the website companion to the kids’ book The Banana Police…Did you know that:

the most common type of banana is called Cavendish
bananas are technically berries – they grow from bulbs, not seeds
they’re in the same family as lilies, orchids and palms
more than 100 billion bananas are eaten every year around the world, which makes them #4 among the top agricultural products, along with #1-2-3, wheat, rice and corn
Uganda has the highest per capita consumption of bananas in the world? (average resident eats 500 pounds of bananas per year; Americans eat an average of 27 pounds per person per year)
India produces more bananas than any other country; 28% of the worldwide crop; China is #2, the Philippines #3 and Brazil #4
the banana’s scientific Latin name is musa sapientum, which means “fruit of the wise men”
there is a Banana Club Museum in Mecca, California

Bananas

Also, did you know the Cavendish banana could be endangered? Read more from the UK newspaper The Guardian here.

Our Word of the Day is, appropriately, sapient, an adjective: having or showing great wisdom or sound judgment.

Thanks for listening!
-Joe

April 19, 2017 0

Who Knew? Christmas, Cheese and GPS

We’ve got a mix of topics for you today on WHO KNEW WEDNESDAY…

Our annual partnership with Operation Christmas Child kicks off this month, April 23rd is OCC’s National Volunteer Week. Find out how you or your church/organization can connect with OCC by clicking here. We also gave away one of these today!

April-OCC Tervis Tumbler

Congratulations to Darlene from Fredericktown who won our monthly prize, the OCC Tervis Tumbler!

Other who knew tidbits today:

It’s Grilled Cheese day! Celebrate with some melted goodness between two pieces of your favorite bread.

grilled cheese

and is GPS turning off your brain? Scientific American has the details about a recent study in the UK: read more here from MIT Tech Review.

Our word of the day: rebarbative (re-BAR-buh-tiv) an adjective meaning something that causes irritation, or annoyance.

Thanks for listening!
-Joe

April 12, 2017 0

Deep Dish Pizza!

wednesday

Deep Dish Pizza Day is today! A chance to celebrate Chicago-style, pan or stuffed pizza.

Just look at this wonderful image!

giordanos

Here are some links to some of the top Windy City deep dish ‘joints’ out there:

Lou Malnati’s

Pizzeria Uno (nationwide chain)

Giordano’s (nationwide chain)

Geno’s East (in your grocer’s freezer)

Here’s a recipe from Taste of Home magazine to try it yourself.

Our WORD OF THE DAY is…yes, you guessed it…PIZZA! A flat, open-faced baked pie of Italian origin, consisting of a thin layer of bread dough topped with spiced tomato sauce and cheese, often garnished with anchovies, sausage slices, mushrooms, etc.