March 1

On the 1st in 1912, Albert Berry made the first parachute jump from a moving airplane. I wonder why this entry appears, in several sources, as it does. At the beginning of the 20th century, were there hordes of people making parachute jumps from stationary airplanes? That strikes me as being just a bit silly, but hey, who am I to judge?

February 28

I tend to take a rather casual approach to the proofing of my writing. Oh, on occasion, I have been known to pick up a dictionary and actually look up a word but for the most part, I let spell check handle that sort of business. I think, however, in the future I am going to look words up in a couple of dictionaries, both online and off. Why? Isn’t that just a useless waste of time? Isn’t one dictionary enough? Aside from the fact that wasting time is something I’m good at, on the 28th in 1939 an editor at G and C Merriam Company (later named Merriam-Webster) was thumbing through the firm’s product line and came across the word ‘Dord’ in the second edition of the companies’ New International Dictionary. Puzzled because the definition of the word, ‘noun, Physics & Chem. Density’ lacked its entomology he investigated further. He found that Dord is not a word. The Science editor at the company had sent a rather sloppily written entry to the writers and his note ‘D or d’ was more of a question than a word. My guess is that some poor proofreader lost their job over that one slipping through. However, if someone were to send me a tee shirt with Dord on it I certainly wouldn’t object.

February 27

George Byron, 6th Baron Byron, is referred to simply as Byron, because it just took far too long for people to say ‘Good morning, George Byron, 6th Baron Byron’ when they met him on the street. Byron was more than a wealthy dilettante who went around acting smug all the time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. No, he was a wealthy dilettante with a social conscience. On the 27th in 1812, he assumed his seat in the House of Lords and gave his first speech in that body. He defended the members of the Luddite movement from his home county of Nottinghamshire who, in response to the increasing industrialization in England and, feeling that their jobs were threatened, went around ransacking factories and occasionally burning those factories to the ground. It’s my guess that Byron did not own any of the factories.

February 26

Thomas d’Urfey died on the 26th in 1723. One brief biography of him lists him as an ‘English writer and wit who composed plays, songs, poetry and jokes’. I know what a writer is but I am uncertain of the job description for a ‘wit’, though I suppose it’s a respectable position because most people referred to as wits are generally o.k. Otherwise, they would be called wise-asses. One quote from d’Urfey that I particularly like is "All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”