Cultural Literacy curriculum

An allusion points at something you are assumed to know already, a story, a person or a text, without spelling it out. Call an overdue cleanup an Augean task and you have pointed at the stables Hercules cleaned in a single day, so two words carry the sense of a huge, filthy backlog. The word comes from Latin alludere, to play with.

An allusion works only if you recognize what it points to. An idiom is a fixed expression whose sense cannot be worked out from its words. A cliche is a stock phrase repeated until it says little, what The King's English called a trite phrase, from Latin for rubbed or worn out. The word cliche itself began as a printer's term for a stereotype plate, a cast that prints the same page over and over.

An allusion leans on something the reader is supposed to know, so it pays off only for readers who do. The King's English warned that a writer packed with literary allusions speaks to a small circle who read the same books, and can seem rude to everyone else. It liked quotations neither hackneyed nor wholly strange, ones that wake a memory, and called a botched allusion fatal: a reader who catches it decides you are not worth reading.

To bury the hatchet is to make peace, from a North American Indian practice of hiding the war hatchet. In Cicero, a tyrant hung a sword by one horsehair over a flatterer who praised his luxury, to show that power brings constant fear; the phrase now just names a source of danger. Cut loose, sense can drift: a custom "more honored in the breach than the observance" is, in Hamlet, one better broken, not one often broken.

Broadcast first described sowing, flinging seed by hand in every direction, and explain once meant to spread out flat. Used with no thought of those pictures, such words are what The King's English calls dead metaphors, as opposed to living ones still felt as images. Careless company can wake a dead one: the book quotes a writer who gave an incentive keenness and impelling force, reviving the musical idea in the word and muddling the sentence.

Context, the surrounding text that throws light on a passage, is often enough to decode a reference you have never met. Read "Clearing ten years of unanswered mail was an Augean job" and the clearing and the decade of neglect tell you the word means a huge, dirty backlog. The King's English urged writers to build allusions this way, so a reader who knows the story gets a small extra pleasure and everyone else still sees the point.

Canon comes from a Latin word for a measuring rule and named the books received as genuine scripture; the references a writer can count on form a looser canon of the same kind. The King's English noted that literary allusions reach only readers who know about the same books. Words built on old references drift too: jovial once meant of the planet Jupiter, a sense long marked obsolete, and hector, from a Trojan hero, now means to bully.

Greek myth ranked twelve gods above the rest. After overthrowing their father, Jupiter (Zeus) took the sky, Neptune the sea and Pluto the dead; others held war (Mars), love and beauty (Venus), wisdom (Minerva), and trade and messages (Mercury). Jupiter, Neptune, Mars, Venus and Mercury also name planets, and March is Mars's month. Jovial, mercurial and martial are relics of an old belief that the planets shaped temperament.

In Hesiod the Titans are children of Heaven and Earth, an older generation that Zeus and his allies defeated and chained far below in Tartarus. Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetus, tricked Zeus and stole fire back for mortals in a hollow fennel stalk. Zeus bound him and set an eagle to eat his liver, which grew back each night. English keeps titanic for enormous and Promethean for life-giving or inspiring.

In Hesiod, Zeus had the gods fashion Pandora, the all-endowed, as the price of the stolen fire. She lifted the lid of a great jar, the evils scattered among people, and Hope alone stayed under the rim. Hesiod gives her a deceitful nature but no stated reason for opening it; later retellings add curiosity, and the box arrives in later versions too. Pandora's box has since become shorthand for a source of many evils.

In E. M. Berens's handbook, the dead cross the Styx in Charon's boat, and he takes only those given funeral rites who bring his fee, a small coin called an obol usually placed under the tongue. Three-headed Cerberus lets every shade in and none out. The blessed go on to the Elysian Fields, and the river Lethe brings forgetting. So Stygian means hellish, Elysian means blissful, and a Cerberus is any watchful guard, especially a surly one.

The three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, spun each life's thread and cut it with shears; fate comes from Latin fatum, a prophetic declaration. The Furies punished crimes, and fury now means rage, or a raging woman. Nemesis stood for the gods' anger at the proud, and in Ovid she grants a spurned lover's curse on Narcissus. At its core, a nemesis is retributive justice, punishment that is deserved.

In Ovid, Juno punishes the nymph Echo for stalling her with long stories: from then on she can only repeat the last words she hears. Echo loves Narcissus, who scorns her; a spurned admirer's curse is granted, and he falls for his own face in a pool, realizes it is himself, and wastes away. In one study, laypeople most often linked narcissism with selfishness and vanity; narcissistic personality disorder is a separate DSM-5 diagnosis.

In Ovid, Midas asks Bacchus that all he touches turn to gold, then finds his bread hardening into gold and his wine flowing as liquid gold, and begs to be freed. In the Odyssey's underworld, Sisyphus pushes a huge stone uphill that always rolls back, and Tantalus stands in a pool that drains when he stoops to drink, under fruit the wind tosses away. Sisyphean means endlessly recurring; to tantalize is to keep a desired thing just out of reach.

Hercules, Heracles in Greek, was bound through Juno's scheming to serve his cousin Eurystheus, who set him twelve labors, the first two being the Nemean lion and the many-headed Hydra. Another was the stables of King Augeas, whose 3,000 oxen stood in stalls left uncleaned for thirty years; he cleaned them in a day by turning two rivers through. Herculean means very great or difficult. Augean adds filth: corruption piled almost past remedy.

Daedalus built the labyrinth in Crete as a maze of winding passages that seemed to have no beginning or end, and the Minotaur inside was fed on human victims. Theseus volunteered to go in, and Ariadne, the king's daughter, gave him a sword and a ball of thread to find his way out. Labyrinth now means any bewildering tangle, and clue, once a ball of thread, came to mean whatever guides you through a mystery.

Daedalus escaped the tower where King Minos had shut him but could not leave Crete by sea, so he built wings of feathers held with thread and wax for himself and his son. He told Icarus to keep a moderate height: fly low and the damp would clog the wings, fly high and the heat would melt them. Icarus, thrilled by flight, soared upward, the wax softened, and he fell into the sea later named for him. Icarian means soaring too high for safety.

Sent to bring back Medusa's head, Perseus borrowed Minerva's shield and Mercury's winged shoes and curved sword. In this telling Medusa had been a beautiful woman whom Minerva turned into a snake-haired monster, and any living thing that looked at her became stone. Perseus spotted her image in the bright shield and cut off her head. A gorgon now means anything horribly ugly, and petrified, turned to stone, also means paralyzed.

Jason gathered bold young men of Greece, Hercules, Theseus and Orpheus among them, on the ship Argo, and they were called Argonauts after it. In Colchis he yoked fire-breathing bulls and sowed dragon's teeth that sprang up as armed men; a charm taught by Medea, a stone thrown among them, set them killing each other. Medea also put the fleece's dragon to sleep. A forty-niner of the 1849 California gold rush was also called an argonaut.

Told at Delphi that he would kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus fled Corinth to spare the couple he took for his parents, not knowing he was adopted. On the road he killed a stranger, his real father, then solved the Sphinx's riddle of the creature on four feet, then two, then three: a human, crawling, walking, then using a staff. Freud named a small child's tenderness for one parent and rivalry with the other the Oedipus-complex.

When his bride Eurydice died of a snakebite, Orpheus went down to the dead and sang so movingly that Pluto and Proserpine let her follow him out, as long as he did not turn to look at her before they reached the upper air. Almost at the outlet, wanting to be sure she was still behind him, he glanced back, and she was swept away for good. The loss comes at the last step, from love and impatience, not malice.

Left out of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, Eris, goddess of discord, threw in a golden apple marked for the most beautiful. Juno, Minerva and Venus each claimed it, and Jupiter handed the choice to Paris, a son of Priam then tending flocks on Mount Ida. Juno offered power, Minerva glory in war, Venus the fairest woman as his wife. He chose Venus, won Helen, and the Trojan War followed.

Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta, left with Paris for Troy, and the Greek chiefs bound by an oath to defend her sailed to bring her back. The line hailing her as "the face that launch'd a thousand ships" comes from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Homer's Helen is less of an icon: watching from Troy's walls, old men admire her beauty yet want her sent away, and she wishes she had chosen death instead.

In a legend Homer never tells, Thetis dipped her baby Achilles in the Styx to make him invulnerable, but the heel she held stayed dry, and there he got his death wound. The Iliad ends with Hector's funeral, and in it a spear even draws blood from Achilles's arm. It opens instead on his anger: when Agamemnon takes his prize Briseis, Achilles stays by his ships nursing his rage while the Greeks suffer.

The horse is not in the Iliad, which ends before Troy falls; the Odyssey and the Aeneid tell it. The Greeks pretended to sail home and left a huge wooden horse, said to be an offering to Minerva, with armed men inside. The priest Laocoon pleaded, "Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse," but the Trojans hauled it in. In computing, a Trojan horse is a program that seems useful but hides a potentially malicious function.

Apollo gave Cassandra, a daughter of Priam, the gift of prophecy; when she broke her promise to him, he could not take it back, so he made sure no one would believe her. She foresaw what the wooden horse would bring, and, in Dryden's Virgil, "All heard, and none believ'd the prophecy." The name has long been applied loosely to anyone with gloomy views of the future, but the myth's sting is that she was right.

Before returning to battle, Hector reaches for his baby son, who shrinks from the horsehair plume nodding on his helmet; Hector laughs, sets the helmet down and prays for the boy. Near the end, old King Priam comes alone to Achilles, kisses the hands that killed his sons and begs for Hector's body, and the two enemies weep together. Oddly, English turned hector into a word for bullying.

The Iliad opens by asking the goddess to sing of Achilles's anger, an invocation. Horace praised Homer for skipping the backstory and hurrying the reader into the midst of events; the Latin tag in medias res means into the midst of things. An epic simile is a comparison drawn out over several lines. A fixed epithet is a descriptive tag that recurs with a name, as in rosy-fingered Dawn or Hector tamer of horses.

Homer's poem follows Ulysses, Odysseus in Greek, through ten years of storms, monsters and detours between the fall of Troy and his return to Ithaca, where he still has to clear the suitors from his house. Calling a journey an odyssey compares it to that wandering: long, roundabout and full of setbacks. A routine flight with a short delay is a trip; a three-day struggle through cancellations and reroutings has a claim to the name.

Circe warns Ulysses that whoever hears the Sirens never gets home, and bones lie heaped around them. So he stops his crew's ears with wax and has them tie him to the mast, with orders to bind him tighter if he begs to be freed. He does beg. Their song offers not only sweetness but knowledge of all that will happen in the world. A siren song is any enticing appeal that is dangerous or deceptive.

Circe tells Ulysses the strait holds the six-headed monster Scylla on one rock and, a bowshot away, the whirlpool Charybdis, which swallows the sea three times a day. There is no safe line through. Her advice is to hug Scylla's side and row hard, since it is better to lose six men than the whole crew. The phrase itself means a great peril on either hand; taking the smaller loss is the story's tactic, not part of the idiom.

Ulysses's scouts were treated kindly by the Lotus-eaters, who meant no harm and simply shared their food. The men who tasted the lotus stopped caring about home and wanted to stay there munching it. Ulysses dragged them weeping to the ships, tied them under the benches and sailed before anyone else could taste it. The threat is contentment, not violence: a lotus-eater has given up effort for ease and daydreams.

Circe drugged his men's food so they would forget home and turned them into pigs that kept human minds. Armed with an herb from Mercury, Ulysses made her restore them, and the crew then stayed a whole year feasting until the men urged him to leave. Calypso kept him seven years and offered to make him immortal, yet he chose home and a mortal wife. Circean means pleasing but harmful.

With Ulysses gone, Penelope told her suitors she would choose one when she finished a burial pall for his father, Laertes, then undid each day's weaving by torchlight; the trick lasted three years until a maid betrayed her. Mentor was the old friend Ulysses left in charge of his house, and the goddess Minerva often took his form and voice to guide Telemachus. A mentor is a wise and faithful counselor.

The usual pairs: Jupiter is Zeus, Juno is Hera, Neptune is Poseidon, Mars is Ares, Venus is Aphrodite, Minerva is Athena, Mercury is Hermes, Vulcan is Hephaestus, Diana is Artemis, Ceres is Demeter and Bacchus is Dionysus. Apollo kept his Greek name. Not every god had a true twin: Saturn was an old Italian god whom Roman poets tried to identify with Greek Kronos, and Janus has no Greek counterpart at all.

The Aeneid opens on a man driven by fate from Troy who endures long trials before building his destined town and founding the line from which the Alban fathers and Rome would come. In Carthage he and Queen Dido become lovers, until Jupiter sends Mercury to remind him of Italy. Grieving but resolved, he obeys and sails, and Dido takes her own life. His standing epithet, pious, means dutiful, devoted to gods, family and country.

In Livy, a usurping king makes the twins' mother a Vestal and orders the babies thrown into the Tiber. Left at the flood's edge, they are suckled by a she-wolf and raised by the shepherd Faustulus. Livy notes that some said his wife was called Lupa, she-wolf, because she was a prostitute, and that this started the story. Of Remus's death he gives two versions; the commoner says Romulus killed him for leaping the new wall.

Janus guarded gates and doorways, and he was shown with two faces because every door looks two ways. He opened the year, so the first month, Januarius, bears his name; Latin janua means door. His temple at Rome stood open in war and shut in peace, and in Livy's day it had been closed only twice since King Numa. In English, Janus-faced turned that two-way watchfulness into double-dealing.

Vesta, the Roman Hestia, was goddess of the public and private hearth. Her temple kept a holy flame in the care of six virgin priestesses, the Vestals, and since the city's safety was tied to the flame, letting it go out was severely punished. Livy credits King Numa with paying them from the treasury and requiring virginity, and a Vestal who broke her vow could be buried alive. As an adjective, vestal means pure or chaste.

Carpe diem comes from a Horace ode that pairs seizing the day with trusting tomorrow as little as possible. Quid pro quo is one thing given as the equivalent of another; ad hoc means for this purpose; status quo is the state things are already in; bona fide means in good faith, genuine. Cui bono is the classic trap: it asks who benefits, a Roman lawyer's question for tracing a crime, not what good is it.

The old Roman year began in March, so its fifth and sixth months were Quintilis and Sextilis, later renamed July for Julius Caesar and August for Augustus. September, from septem, seven, kept its name after becoming the ninth month. The Ides were the 15th of March, May, July and October and the 13th of other months. In Plutarch, a seer warned Caesar of danger on the Ides of March, the day he was killed.

The Rubicon was the small river at the edge of Caesar's province, and leading an army across it against Rome's ban started a civil war. Suetonius has Caesar pause at the riverbank and say they could still turn back, but past this little bridge only arms would decide. Then he crossed, saying "The die is now cast." Both phrases mark a choice you cannot undo, not merely a hard one.

King Pyrrhus beat the Romans at Asculum, and Plutarch reports his reply to a man who congratulated him: one more such victory would utterly undo him. He had lost a great part of his army and almost all his closest friends and commanders, with no one to recruit, while Rome refilled its camp as if from a spring. The point is cost against what you can replace, so a close score alone does not make a win Pyrrhic.

At Gordium, Alexander saw a chariot tied with a knot whose ends were hidden inside it, and local tradition promised the empire of the world to whoever untied it. Most writers, Plutarch says, report that he cut it through with his sword, though Aristobulus claimed he simply pulled the pin from the pole. Webster's 1913 gives the sense: a Gordian knot is an inextricable difficulty, and cutting it means removing it by bold measures.

In his tenth satire, Juvenal mocks the Roman people: they once handed out military commands, consulships and legions, and now they anxiously want only two things, bread and the games of the circus. The circus here is the Roman racecourse for chariot races and public shows, not a tent of clowns. Calling a policy bread and circuses repeats his charge that a crowd fed and entertained has stopped caring who rules it.

Plutarch says Draco's code made death the penalty for almost every offense, so idleness or stealing a cabbage was punished like murder, and an Athenian later quipped that the laws were written in blood, not ink. Solon, given power to remake the laws, repealed all of Draco's except those on homicide, and by most accounts canceled debts. Webster's 1913 defines a Solon as a lawmaker, adding that the word is often used ironically.

Plutarch's life of Lycurgus credits the Spartan lawgiver with replacing gold and silver coin with heavy iron money, so luxury withered away, and with training children to pack much meaning into few words. Asked why his uncle made so few laws, one king replied, "Men of few words require but few laws." Laconic comes from Laconia, the land of the Spartans, and Webster's 1913 glosses Spartan as hardy and undaunted.

At Thermopylae, Herodotus says, a local man showed the Persians a mountain path around the pass. Leonidas fell in the fighting, and his Spartans and the Thespians, who chose to stay, fought on with daggers, hands and teeth until overwhelmed. The marathon race, first run at the 1896 Olympics, recalls a legend of a runner bearing news of victory from Marathon to Athens. Herodotus's runner, Pheidippides, ran to Sparta for help instead.

In Genesis, God lets Adam eat from every tree in Eden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent persuades Eve, both eat, and they are sent out of the garden. Eden, from a Hebrew word for delight, now names any delightful place, and forbidden fruit any coveted, unlawful pleasure. Genesis never names the fruit: the apple is a popular notion, the same one behind the name Adam's apple.

In Genesis, Cain, a farmer, kills his brother Abel, a shepherd, after God accepts Abel's offering and not his. Asked where Abel is, he answers, "I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?", an evasion that denies any duty to watch over another. Sentenced to wander, Cain fears being killed, and God sets a mark on him for exactly that reason: "lest any finding him should kill him."

In Genesis, God has Noah build an ark of gopher wood before rain falls forty days and forty nights. To learn whether the waters have gone down, Noah sends out a dove, which returns with "an olive leaf pluckt off" and later does not come back at all. God then sets the rainbow as the token of a covenant against another flood. An ark now means any refuge, a deluge anything overwhelming, and an olive branch an emblem of peace.

In Genesis, people sharing one language set out to build a city and a tower reaching to heaven, to make a name for themselves. God confounds their language so they cannot understand one another and scatters them, and the place is called Babel. English babel now means a scene of noise and confusion. Babble looks related, but Webster's 1913 gives it another origin: probably imitation of a child saying "ba."

Moses tells Pharaoh, "Let my people go," and leads the Israelites out of Egypt toward "a land flowing with milk and honey." In the wilderness they live on manna for forty years, and Moses only sees the land before he dies. English took the story whole: an exodus is any large departure, manna any heaven-sent supply, a land of promise a better state you hope for. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called Harriet Tubman "Moses."

In 1 Samuel, the Philistine champion Goliath, six cubits and a span tall and armored in brass, challenges Israel. King Saul tells David he is "but a youth" against a lifelong man of war. David tries on Saul's armor, takes it off because he has never tested it, and goes out with a staff, a sling and five smooth stones. One stone fells the giant, and the text stresses there was no sword in David's hand. The allusion's point is that mismatch.

Job, "perfect and upright," loses his children and wealth and says, "the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away," though in chapter 3 he curses the day he was born; "the patience of Job" is a phrase from the Epistle of James. At King Belshazzar's feast in Daniel, a hand writes on the palace wall. Daniel reads it: God has numbered the kingdom, the king is weighed and found wanting, and the realm will be divided. That night the king is slain.

Asked who counts as a neighbor, Jesus tells of a man beaten by thieves: a priest and a Levite pass by on the other side, but a Samaritan binds his wounds and pays an innkeeper for his care. The helper is an outsider, since John's Gospel notes that "the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans." GAO reported in 2021 that most states have Good Samaritan laws shielding people who call 911 for an overdose victim from certain criminal penalties.

In Luke, a younger son takes his share of the estate, "wasted his substance with riotous living," and ends up feeding swine. He heads home hoping to be a hired servant, but his father runs to meet him and kills the fatted calf, while the dutiful elder brother is angry. The word prodigal never appears in the King James text; it labels his spending, meaning lavish and wasteful, so coming back from a trip does not make anyone prodigal.

In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus quotes the old rule of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, then sets his own teaching against it: "whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." The passage goes on to giving up the cloak as well as the coat and walking two miles when forced to go one, and soon after comes "Love your enemies." The phrase names a chosen refusal to retaliate, set against a rule of matching harm.

In Matthew, Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, asks the chief priests what they will pay, and they settle on thirty pieces of silver. His agreed sign is a kiss: "Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he." When Jesus is condemned, Judas repents, throws the silver down in the temple and hangs himself, and the priests buy a potter's field with it. A Judas kiss now means a deceitful, treacherous kiss.

In John's Gospel, Thomas misses Jesus's appearance to the other disciples and tells them he will not believe unless he sees the print of the nails and puts his hand into Jesus's side. Eight days later Jesus invites him to do just that; Thomas answers "My LORD and my God," and Jesus says, "blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." The story ends with Thomas convinced, so the label fits a demand for proof, not settled disbelief.

In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus warns against giving what is holy to dogs, "neither cast ye your pearls before swine," and gives the reason: they will "trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you." So the saying is advice about where not to spend something valuable, and its second half warns that the giver may be attacked, not merely ignored. In use, the swine are any audience unable to appreciate what is offered.

Webster's 1913 defines apocalypse as the revelation given to John that forms the last book of the New Testament, or anything seen as a revelation or disclosure; the King James Bible titles that book The Revelation. In chapter 6, as seals open, riders come out on a white horse, conquering, a red horse with power to take peace from the earth, a black horse whose rider holds a pair of balances, and a pale horse whose rider is named Death.

Townsend's preface to his Aesop names the parts: one simple action, a moral that follows plainly from it, and characters true to type, the fox always cunning and the hare timid. Animals, birds and trees are given speech so the reader takes the advice without feeling lectured. Webster's 1913 draws a contrast: a parable keeps to things that could happen among people, while a fable can let beasts and objects act.

In Aesop's fable, a shepherd boy brings the villagers running three or four times by shouting "Wolf! Wolf!" and laughs at them for coming. When a wolf really comes and he begs for help, no one answers, and the wolf destroys the whole flock at leisure. Townsend's moral: "There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth." Credibility works like a reserve here: each false alarm draws it down until a true warning is worthless.

In Aesop's fable, a hare mocks a tortoise's short feet and slow pace, and the tortoise challenges him to a race. The tortoise never stops for a moment, while the hare lies down by the wayside and falls asleep; he wakes and runs his fastest, only to find her already at the goal. Townsend's moral is "Slow but steady wins the race." The hare loses through overconfidence, so the fable rewards persistence, not slowness for its own sake.

In Aesop's fable, a starving fox tries every trick to reach clusters of ripe black grapes on a vine, fails, and turns away, hiding her disappointment by saying the grapes are sour and not ripe after all. Webster's 1913 defines sour grapes as things people pretend to despise because they cannot have them. The precise sense is that pretense: belittling the prize to save face after failing, not simply disliking something.

Matthew's Gospel has the wording, warning of false prophets "which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." Aesop has a similar story with a different point: a wolf wears a sheepskin to get at the flock, is shut in the fold, and is killed by the shepherd, who takes him for a sheep to eat. Townsend's moral there is "Harm seek, harm find." In modern use the stress falls on the disguise and the threat it hides.

In Aesop's fable, a cottager and his wife own a bird that lays one golden egg every day. Sure it holds a lump of gold inside, they kill it, find it is like any other bird, and lose the gain they could count on day by day. Townsend's translation makes the bird a hen; Joseph Jacobs's makes it a goose, with the moral "Greed oft o'er reaches itself." The lesson is to protect a reliable return rather than grab at once.

In Aesop's fable, a dog lies in a manger, the trough that holds fodder for cattle, and growls and snaps so the oxen cannot eat their hay. One ox sums it up: the dog cannot eat the hay himself, yet will not let those who can. Webster's 1913 defines a dog in the manger as an ugly-natured person who keeps others from enjoying what would benefit them but is none to him. The fault is spite: the dog gains nothing by it.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first volume of their Children's and Household Tales in 1812; the seventh and final edition, of 1857, held 210 tales, 35 of them from one village storyteller, Dorothea Viehmann. The tales can be harsh: in Margaret Hunt's translation of their Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off a toe and a heel to fit the shoe, and birds peck out their eyes. Perrault's Cinderella forgives hers.

Cinderella takes her name from the cinders: made a drudge by her stepfamily, she sits in the chimney corner among the ashes. In Perrault's telling, a fairy godmother turns a pumpkin into a coach and gives her glass slippers, warning her to leave the ball by midnight; the slipper she leaves behind identifies her. In the Grimms' version, help comes from a hazel tree on her mother's grave. Calling an underdog a Cinderella borrows that reversal.

In Andersen's tale, two rogues posing as weavers claim their cloth is invisible to anyone unfit for office or very simple, then work busily at empty looms. Afraid of seeming foolish, the officials, the emperor and the crowd all praise a suit that is not there, until a little child says the emperor has nothing on and the people take up the cry. Even then he walks on in the procession, and his attendants keep carrying a train that does not exist.

In Browning's poem, a piper in a coat "half of yellow and half of red" (pied means patched with different colors) pipes Hamelin's rats into the river Weser for a promised thousand guilders. The Mayor calls the bargain a joke and offers fifty, so the piper plays a new tune, and the children follow him merrily into a door in Koppelberg Hill that shuts behind them. Browning's closing moral is to keep any promise you have made.

In Andersen's tale, the last chick to hatch in a duck's nest is so big and ugly that the ducks peck him, the chickens beat him and the turkey cock flies at him. After a hard winter, he sees his reflection and finds he has become a graceful swan, and the other swans welcome him. The tale's own verdict: being born in a duck's nest does not matter to a bird hatched from a swan's egg. He never changed what he was; others misjudged him.

In the Grimms' Briar Rose, a fairy left off the guest list curses the baby princess to die by a spindle in her fifteenth year, and another softens it to a hundred years' sleep. When it strikes, the whole palace sleeps with her: horses, dogs, the flies on the walls, even the fire, the cook just about to box a boy's ear. A thorn hedge grows round it until the hundred years end; then a prince's kiss wakes her and everything resumes where it stopped.

In Malory, a sword fixed in a stone declares whoever draws it "rightwise king born of all England," and Arthur draws it. On Merlin's advice he takes Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, and the Round Table comes with his bride Guenever. He holds court at Camelot. The Grail, in some medieval legends the cup of the Last Supper, would vanish if approached by anyone not perfectly pure; many of Malory's knights vow to seek it, and Galahad achieves it.

In Hamlet, the ghost of the dead king tells his son to "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder." Hamlet fears the spirit "May be the devil," so he has actors stage a similar killing to "catch the conscience of the King," his uncle. Later the ghost returns to sharpen his "almost blunted purpose." The line "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" is spoken by Marcellus, a guard, not by Hamlet.

Three witches hail Macbeth as one "that shalt be king hereafter." He first muses that chance may crown him without his own effort, then admits only "Vaulting ambition" spurs him, and he kills King Duncan himself, so the prophecy comes true through his own act. Lady Macbeth, who laid the daggers ready, later walks in her sleep rubbing her hands and cries "Out, damned spot!" as if the blood will never wash off.

The prologue calls Romeo and Juliet "A pair of star-cross'd lovers," star-crossed meaning ill-fated. They are born to two Verona households locked in an "ancient grudge" that only their deaths bury. In the scene now called the balcony scene, Romeo sees Juliet through "yonder window"; the word balcony never appears in the play. She speaks her thoughts aloud not knowing he is below, listening.

A soothsayer warns Caesar, "Beware the Ides of March," the 15th of March in the Roman calendar. On that day the conspirators stab him, his friend Brutus last, and his dying line begins in Latin: "Et tu, Brute?--Then fall, Caesar!" At the funeral, Antony says he comes "to bury Caesar, not to praise him," then keeps repeating that "Brutus is an honourable man" until the praise curdles into accusation and the crowd riots.

Iago tells Othello to beware jealousy, "the green-ey'd monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on," while he is the one planting it. He names grudges, being passed over for Cassio as lieutenant and a rumor about his own wife he admits he cannot confirm, yet at the end he refuses to explain: "What you know, you know." Coleridge called Iago's soliloquy "the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity."

Lear splits his kingdom among his daughters by asking which one loves him most. Goneril and Regan outdo each other in praise. Cordelia, the youngest, answers "Nothing, my lord," and says she loves him as her duty binds, "no more nor less," so he disowns her. Soon his Fool, the one voice free to mock him, tells him plainly he had "little wit" when he gave his golden crown away.

Miranda, raised on an island, sees a crowd of strangers that includes her father's usurping brother and cries "O brave new world," brave in its old sense of fine. Prospero answers, "'Tis new to thee." He also says "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on," with on, not of. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock's bond names a pound of flesh, and Portia defeats it by its own letter: it gives "no jot of blood."

In Act 3, Hamlet asks whether it is nobler to suffer "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" or to end one's troubles. He likens death to sleep, then balks at the dreams that sleep might bring. Who would bear life's insults, he asks, if he could end them "With a bare bodkin," a dagger? What holds people back is "the dread of something after death." The skull, "poor Yorick," belongs to a later graveyard scene.

Wherefore means "for what reason; why," not where. So when Juliet sighs "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" she is asking why he has to be Romeo, a Montague, the enemy house, and she goes on: "Deny thy father and refuse thy name." She is not looking for him; she does not even know he is below, listening. Her next thought, "What's in a name?", grows from the same wish.

Jaques, a melancholy lord in As You Like It, takes up the exiled duke's remark about the world as a "wide and universal theatre" and runs with it: "All the world's a stage," and each person plays seven parts. The ages run from the mewling infant and whining schoolboy through lover, soldier and justice to the slippered pantaloon, a doddering old man, and at last "second childishness," "sans everything," without anything at all.

Iago says that showing his true heart would be like wearing it upon his sleeve "For daws to peck at"; he never will: "I am not what I am." Othello says a reported dream "denoted a foregone conclusion," with foregone meaning gone before; the phrase now means a result settled in advance. Mercutio's wild-goose chase is a contest of wits, Trinculo is drunk when asked how he got "in this pickle," and Tranio hopes a suitor will "break the ice."

Much Ado About Nothing uses ado in its sense of fuss or bustle. All's Well That Ends Well echoes an older proverb, "All is well that endes well," found in John Heywood's book of sayings, first printed in 1546, before Shakespeare was born. Richard III opens with Richard's "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York." The winter is already over, and quoting only the first line flips the sense.

A dictionary's earliest citation shows only the oldest example its editors found, and editors who knew Shakespeare better than earlier writers credited him with words already in use. Many "Shakespearean" phrases are older: elbow room was in use by 1540, and "All is well that endes well" by 1546. Even wild-goose chase, first known from Shakespeare, turns up in other writers soon after, which suggests it was ordinary speech.

A soliloquy is a character talking alone, thinking aloud; an aside is a remark that, by stage convention, the rest of the cast does not hear. Both hand the audience knowledge the characters lack. That gap is dramatic irony: words carry a meaning the audience grasps but the speaker or others on stage miss. Iago lays out his plot in soliloquy early in Othello, so each time Othello trusts "honest Iago," the audience knows better.

Chaucer's narrator meets about twenty-nine pilgrims at the Tabard inn in Southwark, all bound for the shrine at Canterbury. The Host proposes a game: each will tell tales on the road, and the best teller wins a supper paid for by the rest. Before any tale, the General Prologue describes each pilgrim's rank, dress and manner, starting with the Knight. The plan outran Chaucer, and far fewer tales exist than the Host proposed.

In Paradise Lost, Satan answers defeat with defiance: "The mind is its own place," and it is "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." His demons meet in Pandemonium, "the high capital / Of Satan and his peers"; the name came to mean any lawless, riotous place. Blake thought Milton wrote most freely of devils and Hell, calling him "of the Devil's party without knowing it," though the poem aims to "justify the ways of God to men."

Lilliputian comes from Lilliput's tiny people and means very small; Brobdingnagian, from the land of giants, means colossal. A yahoo, from the filthy man-shaped brutes ruled by rational horses, the Houyhnhnms, is any brutish person. The fantasy is satire: Lilliput fights a long, bloody war over which end of an egg to break, and Gulliver ends up calling his own countrymen Yahoos who will not mend their ways.

The first line, "It is a truth universally acknowledged," is ironic: the next sentence shows the "truth" is only what local families with daughters assume about any rich newcomer. Money sets the stakes. The Bennet estate is entailed, legally bound to pass to a male heir, here a distant relative, and Charlotte Lucas weds a dull suitor because marriage was "the only honourable provision" for women of small fortune.

In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is a "squeezing, wrenching, grasping" old miser who brushes off Christmas as "Humbug!" In Oliver Twist, starving workhouse boys draw lots to ask for more gruel, and the lot falls to Oliver: "Please, sir, I want some more." The master aims a blow at his head with the ladle. Later Oliver lands with Fagin, an old man who drills boys to pick pockets through what he presents as a game.

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is told by Jane herself, a governess at Thornfield Hall. She hears an odd laugh on the third story and takes it for a servant, Grace Poole. At her wedding the truth breaks: her dark, stern employer, Rochester, already has a wife, Bertha Mason, whom he calls mad and keeps shut away in the house. Jane flees and wanders, lost and alone, across the moors.

Sherlock Holmes reasons from small clues: meeting Watson, he reads an army doctor back from Afghanistan in a sun-darkened face and a stiffly held arm. Holmes does say "Elementary" in "The Crooked Man," but "Elementary, my dear Watson" appears in none of the Holmes novels or stories. Oscar Wilde wrote epigrams, short, sharp witticisms, in his own voice and for his characters: "I can resist everything except temptation" is Lord Darlington's.

In Melville's Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab lost a leg to a white whale and turns a whaling voyage into revenge, vowing to chase it "round perdition's flames before I give him up." The narrator calls this monomania, a mind fixed on one object: Ahab heaps every grief he has onto the whale. In the end the harpoon line snatches Ahab from his boat, the ship sinks, and only Ishmael survives to tell it.

In Hawthorne's novel, set in Puritan New England, Hester Prynne is sentenced to wear a red letter A on her breast after bearing a child outside marriage; the A on her gown is ringed with gold-thread embroidery. The child's father, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale, keeps his secret while holding a high place in the town. The book never spells out the word behind the A, and in time many people say it stands for Able.

Huck and Jim, a man escaping slavery, drift down the Mississippi on a raft, and Huck tells it in his own dialect-rich voice; Twain notes that the book's several dialects were drawn with care. In one scene Huck tears up a letter that would betray Jim: "All right, then, I'll go to hell." Along the way Twain treats the hypocrisy, racism and violence they meet with satire and humor.

In The Great Gatsby, the green light at the end of Daisy's dock is what Gatsby reaches for across the bay; the last page makes it "the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us." Gatsby is self-invented: born James Gatz of North Dakota, he changed his name at seventeen and lived up to "his Platonic conception of himself." The phrase American Dream never appears in the novel, though it is read as a tale of that myth of success.

J. D. Salinger's 1951 novel is told by Holden Caulfield, sixteen, and covers three days after his expulsion from prep school, which he spends drifting around New York City, disillusioned and contemptuous of the phoniness he sees in adults. He has stood ever since for teenage alienation and angst, and his outlook is credited with shaping both the Beats of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

Harper Lee's 1960 novel won the Pulitzer Prize and has had more than 30 million copies in print. Its hero, Atticus Finch, is a small-town lawyer who defends a Black man wrongly accused, and he stands among the most enduring heroic characters in American fiction. A 1961 review judged that the novel would do more for tolerance than any weight of sermons on the subject.

In Poe's "The Raven," a man grieving for "the lost Lenore" questions a midnight bird, and every answer is "Nevermore." In "The Tell-Tale Heart," a narrator who insists he is not mad kills an old man over his "vulture" eye, then confesses to a heartbeat the officers never hear. In "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau recalls a night in jail for refusing a poll tax; in Walden he wrote that a man out of step may hear "a different drummer."

Dante's Inferno descends through circles of Hell, from Limbo down to the frozen lake of traitors, where Lucifer holds Judas, Brutus and Cassius. The gate warns, in Longfellow's English, "All hope abandon, ye who enter in!" Punishments can mirror sins: Bertrand de Born, who set a father and son against each other, carries his own severed head, and calls his fate "lo contrapasso," which Longfellow renders "the counterpoise."

Cervantes's hero reads so many books of chivalry that he loses his wits and rides out as a knight. Seeing thirty or forty windmills, he takes them for giants, ignores his squire Sancho Panza's warning, and charges with his lance, the old sense of tilt, until a sail throws him and his horse to the ground. Quixotic, from his name, means romantic to extravagance and easily deluded; Sancho, who saw only windmills, is his plain-sighted partner.

In Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a scholar who dreams of a world "Of power, of honour, of omnipotence" signs a deed in his own blood: Mephistophilis will serve him for twenty-four years, and then Lucifer takes him "body and soul." Goethe's Faust instead makes a bet with Mephistopheles: if he ever begs a passing moment, "Ah, still delay--thou art so fair!", he is lost. Either way, his soul is the stake.

Anna Karenina opens, in Constance Garnett's translation, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," then turns to a household upset by a husband's affair. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has argued that an "extraordinary" man may overstep "certain obstacles" for the sake of an idea. He kills an old pawnbroker and her sister with an axe, is tormented, confesses, and is sent to prison in Siberia.

The suffix -esque means in the manner of, so Kafkaesque points to Kafka's own fiction. The Trial opens with Josef K. arrested one morning though he has done nothing wrong; the officials cannot even say whether he is charged, and the court's offices turn out to be in the attic of a tenement. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself changed into monstrous vermin, the German word Ungeziefer.

In The Arabian Nights, a sultan betrayed by his wife marries a new bride each evening and has her killed the next morning. Scheherazade weds him anyway and starts a tale that breaks off at daybreak; he spares her to hear the end, and the pattern repeats. "Open Sesame," the command that opens the robbers' den in "The Forty Thieves," now means a magic password. The tales were written down and then changed at different times.

Magic realism, or magical realism, is fiction that lets fantastic or mythical events into a story told in an otherwise realistic way. It is related to fantasy and to surrealism, but the everyday frame holds. The Nobel-winning Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014), author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, wrote in a style often called magical realism.

George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four imagines a police state whose posters warn that Big Brother is watching, while a patrol helicopter peers into windows; Justice Brennan recalled that scene in a 1989 dissent on police helicopter surveillance. Orwellian now names that kind of state watching. A 1950 Herblock cartoon of a fortress blaring "White is black" recalled the regime's numbing speech, Newspeak.

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, a "more equal" pig is dominant. The phrase contradicts itself: equality has no degrees, so saying some are more equal exposes a ranking that still claims to be fair. Herblock's 1961 cartoon put "Some are more equal than others" on a sign held by a cigar-smoking pig sitting on a ballot box marked "1 rural area vote = 100 city votes," mocking districts where few rural voters outweighed many in cities.

The phrase is Miranda's in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Raised on an island, she sees the shipwrecked courtiers and cries, "O brave new world, That has such people in't!", brave in its old sense of splendid; Prospero answers dryly, "'Tis new to thee." Aldous Huxley took it for his 1932 novel of babies grown in incubators and fixed in advance to set roles, borrowing a wonder that Prospero's reply already deflates.

In Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22, a black comedy about military bureaucracy, the hero Yossarian pleads insanity to get out of combat, but wanting out of combat shows he is not crazy. The title came to mean a no-win situation, and at its sharpest a rule that defeats itself: in 2025 the Supreme Court called it a catch-22 that Alabama made unemployment claimants finish an administrative process before suing over that process's delays.

William Golding's first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), strands British boys on a tropical island after their plane is shot down in a future war. Ralph and Piggy set up rules, a signal fire and meetings called by blowing a conch shell, but fear of a beast and Jack's hunters wear that order away until Simon and Piggy are killed and the island burns. Golding wrote against older castaway tales in which British boys stayed civilized.

In Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein is the surname of Victor, the Ingolstadt student who builds a living being. The book calls what he makes a creature, monster, wretch or fiend but never names it, and audiences later used "Frankenstein" for both maker and monster. The subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, recalls the Titan who in myth shaped humans from earth and water, stole fire for them, and was punished for defying Jupiter.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is told through journals, letters, telegrams, a ship's log and newspaper cuttings, arranged, an opening note says, so the story may "stand forth as simple fact." Van Helsing sets out the rules: the vampire casts no shadow or reflection, may not first enter a house unless someone there bids him, and loses power before garlic. Daylight does not destroy him; his power ceases, and he is seen on Piccadilly by day.

"That man is like a fox" is a simile: it states the comparison openly, with like or as. "That man is a fox" is a metaphor: it identifies one thing with another and leaves you to work out in what respect. Aristotle treated the simile as a metaphor plus an explanatory word, and said metaphors teach: to see why old age is called stubble, you must find what the two share, a lost bloom.

Every irony needs a gap between surface and reality. Verbal irony says the opposite of what it means, and listeners are meant to catch it. Dramatic irony hides the truth from a character but not the audience: Oedipus vows to fight for the dead king as for his own father, not knowing the king was his father and that he killed him. Irony of situation is a gift meant to win back love that kills instead. Mere coincidence, with no gap, is not irony.

Hyperbole is exaggeration nobody is meant to take literally, as in "I've told you a million times"; it has been called the figure that lies without deceiving. Understatement runs the other way. Meiosis makes a thing seem smaller than it is, and litotes softens a claim, as when "a citizen of no mean city" means a citizen of a great one. Both work through the gap between the words and the plain truth.

Metonymy puts one word for another that suggests it: the crown for the sovereign, keeping a good table for serving good food, reading Virgil for reading his poems. Synecdoche swaps part and whole, or kind and class: fifty sail for fifty ships, hands for workers, a creature for a man. A quick test: if the stand-in is a part of the thing, or a class it belongs to, it is synecdoche; if it is only associated with it, it is metonymy.

An oxymoron joins a word to an epithet of contrary meaning, as in cruel kindness or laborious idleness, so the clash sits inside a phrase. A paradox, by contrast, is a complete statement that sounds self-contradictory or absurd yet may turn out true. John Donne ends a sonnet with "Death, thou shalt die!", which resolves once you follow his argument: after one short sleep, the dead wake forever and death is no more.

Aristotle named three means of persuasion. Ethos works through the speaker's character: a speech persuades when it shows good sense, virtue and goodwill, and it must earn that credibility in what it says rather than lean on reputation. Pathos works by stirring emotions, which change how hearers judge. Logos works through argument, proving or seeming to prove the point. Asking which one a passage leans on shows how it is trying to move you.

Aristotle says the best tragic hero falls not through vice but through "some error or frailty," his hamartia, a word first meaning a bad shot and too loose to settle whether he means a mistake or a flaw. Tragedy stirs pity and fear to bring catharsis, purification or purgation, a word he never explains. Hubris is insolent pride. A deus ex machina, a god brought on by stage crane, should not resolve the plot, he says; it must untangle itself.

A sonnet is a poem of fourteen five-stress iambic lines. The Italian form rhymes abba abba in an eight-line octave that introduces and develops one subject, pauses, then turns it in a new direction in a six-line sestet, often rhymed cde cde. The English form, used by Shakespeare for his 154 sonnets, runs three quatrains, abab cdcd efef, then a closing couplet, gg, that often sums up like an epigram.

An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in alone or despair, and iambic pentameter sets five in a line: da-DUM five times. Unrhymed, it is blank verse, the line of nearly all Elizabethan drama and Paradise Lost. Hearing the beat helps you read aloud, but natural speech stress often pulls against the pattern, and forcing every beat turns a line into sing-song.

In "The Road Not Taken," from Robert Frost's 1916 book Mountain Interval, a traveler chooses between two roads, yet admits that travel had worn them "really about the same." Only in the last stanza does he picture himself, "ages and ages hence," saying with a sigh that he took the one less traveled. Read whole, it can seem less a salute to nonconformity than a poem about how people tell their choices afterward.

In Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias," published in 1818, a traveler describes two vast, trunkless legs of stone in the desert and a shattered face with a "sneer of cold command." The pedestal reads "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!", yet nothing else remains but lone and level sands. The irony is built in: the works he told the Mighty to despair at are gone, so the boast now mocks the pride it was meant to project.

Carpe diem, seize the day, comes from an ode in which Horace tells Leuconoe to stop consulting Babylonian fortune-tellers' tables about how long she will live, and to seize the present, trusting tomorrow as little as she can. Later English poems press the same urgency: Herrick's "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" urges young women to marry before their prime is spent, and Marvell's speaker hears "Time's winged chariot hurrying near."

Emily Dickinson's poem turns an abstraction into a bird: "Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul," singing a tune without words, sweetest in a gale, and never asking the speaker for a crumb. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an early editor, wrote that she printed only three or four poems in her lifetime. After her death in 1886, her first editors supplied titles such as "Hope" and turned her dashes into commas and semicolons.

Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is a villanelle, nineteen lines of five tercets and a quatrain built on two repeating refrains, one urging rage against the dying of the light; his father was said to be gravely ill when he wrote it. Rudyard Kipling's "If--" is a father's list of tests for manhood: keep your head "when all about you / Are losing theirs," and treat Triumph and Disaster as "two impostors."

Socrates spent his days questioning anyone he could persuade, probing what courage or moderation really is. In Plato's Apology, told that the Delphic oracle called no one wiser, he examined men reputed wise and found his only edge: they thought they knew and did not, while he neither knew nor thought he knew, a narrower claim than "I know that I know nothing." "Know thyself" was one of the famous inscriptions at Apollo's temple at Delphi.

For Plato the world your senses show is a flawed copy of a more real realm of Forms, eternal, changeless patterns such as goodness and beauty. In the Republic's cave, chained prisoners see only shadows cast by firelight on a wall and take them for reality. "Platonic" can point to that philosophy or, in "platonic love," to a pure, spiritual affection without sexual desire, a kind of love Plato championed.

Aristotle held that each virtue of character lies between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency: courage sits between cowardice, which flees every danger, and rashness, which faces them all. The mean is not an arithmetic midpoint. If ten pounds of food is too much and two too little, six is not automatically right; it depends on who is eating. When a situation calls for it, even great anger can be the mean.

Descartes resolved to reject whatever could be doubted: his senses, his reasoning, even waking life, which might be a dream. Yet while doubting he had to exist as the one doubting, so "I think, therefore I am" became his first certain principle. From it he concluded the mind is wholly distinct from the body, the substance dualism tied to his name; in geometry, Cartesian coordinates, his invention, locate a point by distances from fixed lines.

Ockham's razor warns against positing more entities than you need: if two explanations fit the evidence equally, prefer the one assuming fewer things exist. The slogan "must not multiply entities beyond necessity" is not in the writings of William of Ockham, the medieval thinker it is named for. Fewer entities and simpler laws can pull apart: unseen Neptune added an entity, yet explained other planets' orbits without complicating the laws.

Kant's categorical imperative binds you whatever your goals: act only on a rule you could will to become a universal law, and treat humanity, in yourself or others, never merely as a means but always also as an end. You may use a taxi driver's work, not treat the driver like a horse. Utilitarians judge acts wholly by consequences; the early precursor Francis Hutcheson praised the act that brings "the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers."

Sartre's "existence precedes essence" means no fixed nature makes you; you define yourself by your choices. Existential anxiety is not fear of an outside thing but dizziness before open possibilities only you answer for. Bad faith denies that freedom, or your real limits. Camus's absurd is the clash between our need to ask what life means and a silent universe, pictured as Sisyphus forever pushing his rock; Camus denied being an existentialist.

An early printed version is Voltaire's, published in English in 1733: in 1666, away from Cambridge because of the plague, Newton saw fruit fall from a tree and asked whether the power that pulls bodies down might reach as high as the moon and hold it in orbit. The tale casts discovery as deep thought set off by an everyday sight. Its basis has been questioned: his 1831 biographer, David Brewster, wrote that he could find no authority for it.

In Vitruvius's account, King Hiero suspected his contractor of swapping some gold in a new crown for silver of equal weight. Getting into a bath, Archimedes noticed that the deeper he sank, the more water ran over, and ran home naked shouting "Eureka" ("I have found it"). The method was displacement: silver is bulkier than the same weight of gold, so the crown spilled more water than pure gold of equal weight.

"Survival of the fittest" was coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin; in the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species (1872), Darwin called it more accurate than his own term, natural selection. Fittest means best suited to one's conditions, not strongest: Darwin used struggle in a large, metaphorical sense that includes depending on others and, above all, leaving offspring, as a plant at a desert's edge struggles against drought.

Schrodinger's cat is imagined, not performed: a cat is shut in with a Geiger counter, radioactive material and a flask of poison, with an even chance an atom decays within the hour and kills it. Taken literally, quantum mechanics then mixes living and dead cat in equal parts, which Schrodinger found an unacceptable picture of reality. On one reading of Bohr, the cat is dead or alive before anyone looks; DeWitt's many-worlds view keeps both.

In physics a quantum is the smallest discrete unit of something, and an electron in an atom can have only certain energy levels, unlike a baseball, which can have nearly any energy. A change of level is therefore a jump between allowed values, on the scale of one atom. In everyday speech a quantum leap or quantum jump means a sudden, radical change, and it can mean a big advance: the popular sense keeps the abruptness and drops the tiny scale.

E = mc^2 says mass and energy are equivalent: when a body at rest absorbs or emits energy, its mass rises or falls by that energy divided by c^2, the speed of light squared. Because c is huge, the change is usually tiny; charging a battery raises its mass by about one part in a million million. "It's all relative" borrows the name, yet special relativity rests on something fixed: light's speed is the same in every inertial frame.

In Thomas Kuhn's 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a paradigm is a field's shared model of problem-solving; when anomalies pile up into crisis and researchers adopt a new model, that is a paradigm shift, and some old explanations are lost. Pavlovian goes back to Ivan Pavlov, whose dogs, conditioned to salivate at a sound paired with food, are the classic case of conditioning; in speech it means a conditioned, automatic response.

Leonardo painted Lisa, wife of the Florentine Francesco del Giocondo; Vasari, in his 16th-century Lives, says he worked on it four years, left it unfinished, and gave her a smile 'more divine than human.' Global fame came later. On August 21, 1911, former Louvre worker Vincenzo Perugia stole it, and two years of headlines made it world famous before its recovery in Florence in December 1913.

Michelangelo carved the David from a tall marble block that another sculptor had botched and that had sat unused for years; his biographer Giorgio Vasari called it a miracle to 'restore to life a thing that was dead.' On the Sistine Chapel ceiling, God stretches his right hand toward Adam. Vasari stresses the labor: no helper even to grind his colors, and for months afterward he could read letters only with his head tilted back.

Van Gogh's 1913 translator wrote of a painter 'a former generation had spurned' whose fame came after his death. The letters show more calculation: he planned to 'paint a starry night, with cypresses,' judged some canvases 'not so marketable,' and was confident his 'poetical subjects' would appeal to many people. The same translator warned that later high prices prove nothing about an artist's worth.

In The Scream, Norwegian painter Edvard Munch shows a figure on a long bridge under flaming clouds, hands at his ears and mouth wide open; the cry is meant as an 'infinite cry of nature' the figure feels. By 1915 a critic joked that the figure looked seasick, and in later decades a protest poster and a 1994 cartoon borrowed Munch's screaming man.

Guernica is Pablo Picasso's response to the bombing of the Basque village of Guernica on April 26, 1937, by German aircraft acting under orders from Spain's Francisco Franco. He created it just six weeks later and was photographed before it at that year's World's Fair in Paris. It remains among the most enduring works of protest art, so invoking it signals art that indicts war.

Several style names began as criticism or nicknames. Vasari, in the 1500s, called medieval pointed-arch building monstrous and barbarous and blamed it on the Goths, though they had been gone for centuries; the label Gothic stuck. Webster's 1913 still defined baroque as 'in bad taste; grotesque; odd.' The Impressionists took a name first applied to them as a nickname, and a 1904 history called its origin obscure.

The Renaissance ideal of broad mastery is what historian Jacob Burckhardt called the 'all-sided man,' citing Leon Battista Alberti, gifted in athletics, music, speech and more. American Gothic, Grant Wood's 1930 painting of Iowa farmers, often works as a template: Gordon Parks restaged it in 1942 with a government charwoman, and cartoonists have posed Jimmy Carter and struggling farmers in its frame.

'It ain't over till the fat lady sings' warns against calling a result before the end: her song is the signal that it is over. Cartoonists have drawn her as Brunnhilde, the horned-helmet heroine of Wagner's Ring, whose long final scene comes near the cycle's close. Pat Oliphant used the line in 1982 as the Equal Rights Amendment deadline loomed, and a 2003 Ann Telnaes cartoon made her singing mark the end of competition.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, in C minor, opens with a four-note figure, short-short-short-long, and is among his most recognizable works; a disco version, 'A Fifth of Beethoven,' is heard in Saturday Night Fever (1977). Its fate label comes from a remark attributed to Beethoven, given in Alexander Teetgen's old commentary as 'So knocketh Fate at the portal,' which Teetgen used to hear the music as a struggle with fate.

Calling something Wagnerian compares it to Richard Wagner, whose Ring is four music dramas meant for four successive evenings. Its leitmotifs, or leading motives, are short themes that recur with a character, object or idea; the critic Henry Krehbiel argued they are more than labels, since one can sound before its character appears. Film took up the device: John Williams gave Darth Vader a brassy Star Wars theme that recalls the Ring.

In Greek tragedy the chorus was a band of singers and dancers who watched the action and sang the feelings it stirred. Aristotle wanted the chorus treated 'as one of the actors,' part of the plot, and faulted later poets whose choral songs were mere interludes. The critic A. W. Schlegel called the chorus 'the ideal spectator,' giving the audience a musical voice for its own emotions.

Many theater professionals call Macbeth, Shakespeare's tragedy set in Scotland, 'the Scottish play,' fearing that saying its name inside a theater will bring disaster. 'Break a leg' is what you say to a performer about to go onstage, and a Library of Congress reference search found its origins 'particularly obscure.' Like baseball's rituals, these customs survive as habits of the trade.

A swan song is a last performance, from the old fable that a swan sings as it dies. In Plato's Phaedo, Socrates, on the day of his death, likens himself to the swans and argues they sing then from joy, not lament. Encore, French for 'once more; again,' is what audiences call out to demand a repeat, and the noun names that call, as in 'the encores were numerous.'

Jazz works as a model for teamwork because its players invent together in real time. Across its styles it relies on group interplay and unpredictable improvisation, and early New Orleans bands had cornet, clarinet and trombone improvising at once. Improvising is not starting from nothing: singers turn a plain pop song into jazz through phrasing, syncopation and theme and variation. Webster's 1913 already let you 'improvise a peace.'

Webster's 1913 already defined Machiavellian as politically cunning and crafty. The Prince argues something narrower: a ruler forced to choose is safer feared than loved, yet must avoid being hated, and should seem merciful and faithful, since most people judge by what they see. 'The ends justify the means' is not its wording; Marriott's translation comes closest with 'one judges by the result' and 'the means will always be considered honest.'

Both labels squeeze an era into one idea. Renaissance means new birth, and even Jacob Burckhardt, in his well-known study of the Italian Renaissance, granted that naming the whole period after the revival of antiquity was one-sided. Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant saw enlightenment as a process, not a period: thinking for yourself without another's guidance. And the Age of Reason set reason against faith, not against the senses.

If you hear 'Let them eat cake' pinned on Marie Antoinette, note that Rousseau's Confessions, drafted in 1766 and 1767, already recalls 'a great princess' who, told the country people had no bread, said they should eat pastry; Marie Antoinette, born in 1755, was about eleven. The guillotine is named for Dr. Guillotin, who in 1789 proposed ending beheading by ax or sword; the machine itself was devised by Dr. Antoine Louis.

Meeting your Waterloo means a final, decisive defeat, after the battle that settled the contest with Napoleon; even his carriage was captured there. The tiny-Napoleon image is shakier. His valet Constant gave his height as five feet two in French measure, and in a note on Napoleon's stepson Eugene, the translator turns five feet three or four French into about five six or seven English. Constant still notes his short stature.

In 1938 Hitler wanted to annex part of Czechoslovakia, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich seeking a guarantee of no further German aggression. Winston Churchill criticized this policy of appeasement. Hitler then occupied Prague and in September 1939 invaded Poland; Britain and France declared war. Churchill later called it the Unnecessary War, which he felt firmness toward aggressors after World War I would have prevented.

A witch hunt pursues enemies on flimsy accusations. In Salem in 1692, a witchcraft alarm in the minister's household spread until many were jailed on frivolous grounds and nineteen were hanged; one man was accused after refusing to make more arrests. In the 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy alleged Communist influence in the government and press; some senators judged his accusations reckless, and the Senate censured him in 1954.

In March 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman there, Winston Churchill warned of Soviet expansion and said an 'iron curtain' had come down across Europe, bringing that division to world attention. A 1972 break-in at Democratic headquarters in Washington's Watergate hotel and office complex led to President Nixon's resignation in 1974; a Library of Congress guide agrees later scandals are measured against it.

'We hold these truths to be self-evident' opens the Declaration's case by naming premises it will not argue: that all men are created equal, with unalienable rights including 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,' and that just government rests on 'the consent of the governed.' Self-evident means plain without proof. Jefferson's rough draft first called these truths 'sacred & undeniable.'

Taking the Fifth invokes the Fifth Amendment's rule that no one 'shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.' The same sentence bars taking 'life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.' 'It's a free country' points to rights like those in the First Amendment, whose text begins 'Congress shall make no law': it is addressed to Congress, not to private people.

'Four score and seven years ago' means 87 years, a score being twenty, so Lincoln's opening in November 1863 counts back to 1776 and the Declaration's claim that all men are created equal, which he calls the nation's founding proposition. Brevity is part of its legend: the featured speaker, Edward Everett, spoke for two hours, and Lincoln's two-minute speech ended before most of the crowd knew he had begun.

Colonists angered by Parliament's Sugar Act and Stamp Act condemned taxation without representation as a breach of British constitutional law. Patrick Henry's 'Liberty or Death' speech came on March 23, 1775, at St. John's Church in Virginia, but no written copy survived; William Wirt rebuilt the text in 1817 and admitted embellishing it. Print carried the argument as well: Thomas Paine's Common Sense was on sale in Philadelphia in 1776.

'Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free' is from Emma Lazarus's sonnet 'The New Colossus,' written November 2, 1883, for an auction funding the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. It was not part of the statue at first: the poem faded until a friend revived it, and a plaque went into the pedestal in 1903. Its 'Mother of Exiles' casts the statue as a symbol of immigration, an association it still carries.

Martin Luther King Jr. gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, attended by an estimated 250,000 people. The march pressed concrete demands: a fair living wage, fair hiring, desegregated schools and a civil rights bill. The day's words were pointed as well as inspiring, so quoting only the dream drops that context.

'Melting pot' is the central image of Israel Zangwill's 1908 play The Melting-Pot, whose hero calls America 'God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot' fusing Europe's peoples; an early critic said it left out Black Americans, and Zangwill disputed that. Manifest destiny was the mid-1800s belief in a God-given right to expand. Backers of the war with Mexico invoked a racial destiny; antislavery congressmen saw a bid to spread slavery west.

These words name who rules: one person, a few, the many, elected representatives (a republic), priests speaking for God (theocracy), the rich (plutocracy), or no one (anarchy). Aristotle added a test of whose good is served: kingship, aristocracy and rule by the citizens serve all, while tyranny, oligarchy and democracy serve only the ruler, the rich or the poor. For him oligarchy meant rule by wealth, not small numbers.

Inflation is a general rise in the overall price level, so one item getting pricier is not inflation. In oil markets, which the Energy Information Administration likens to an auction, buyers must pay more when demand is high or supply is low, and rising prices signal that more supply is needed. A black market is illegal trade; in 1943 an Office of War Information caption taught shoppers under rationing how to spot black-market meat.

A proverb is a short saying that states a practical truth drawn from experience, and some carry their own reason. Poor Richard, in Franklin's The Way to Wealth, says do not squander time, "for that is the stuff life is made of": the first half is the claim, the second the warrant, the reason that justifies it. When the reason goes unstated, supply it yourself and ask whether it fits your case.

Proverbs often give opposite advice. "Look before you leap" urges caution, while "Strike while the iron is hot" urges speed; "Many hands make light work" meets "Too many cooks spoil the broth." Neither side is a law. Walter Kelly's 1859 collection warns that rumor proverbs like "It never smokes but there's a fire," taken too absolutely, lead to uncharitable conclusions, and tempers them with "Common fame is a common liar."

Several everyday phrases are sailors' terms, defined in Admiral Smyth's 1867 Sailor's Word-Book. Sails are taken aback when a sudden wind shift presses on their front, and Smyth notes the phrase's use for being surprised. The bitter end is the inboard end of an anchor cable; paid out that far, nothing is left. Three sheets in the wind meant unsteady from drink, and a sheet is a rope at a sail's corner, not the sail.

Some stock phrases come from old firearms. A flash in the pan was the priming powder flaring in a flintlock's pan without firing the shot, hence a sudden effort that comes to nothing. Lock, stock and barrel names three parts of a gun and means the whole thing. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations records "Hold the fort! I am coming!" as a signal General Sherman sent on October 5, 1864.

Card tables and betting gave English several phrases. Aboveboard means above the table, hence open and without trickery; Webster's 1913 dictionary reports Johnson's claim that it comes from card players who changed cards under the table. To hedge a bet is to bet on both sides to limit loss; Webster also lists a separate speech sense, to qualify so you commit to nothing. To follow suit is to play the led suit, hence to copy an example.

Animal idioms turn a scene into a judgment. Webster's 1913 dictionary defines a wild goose chase as the pursuit of something unattainable, and the phrase already appears in Romeo and Juliet. A dark horse is a racehorse or candidate whose chances nobody knows. To let the cat out of the bag is to tell a secret, and a pig in a poke is a blind bargain; a poke is a bag.

Be wary of a word origin that rests on one person or one memorable incident. Ernest Weekley's The Romance of Words treats such tales with suspicion until contemporary evidence turns up, and shows the test. Tram is tied to a Mr. Outram of about 1800, yet the word appears in 1555. The story that a king knighted the sirloin fails too, since the word comes from French surlonge, over the loin.

An eponym is a name derived from a person's. Boycott is named for Captain Boycott, an Irish land agent in County Mayo who was shunned this way in 1880; the saxophone for its inventor, Adolphe Sax; the sandwich for an Earl of Sandwich. The guillotine is named for Dr. Guillotin, who urged a less clumsy way of beheading, yet Webster's 1913 dictionary says Dr. Antoine Louis invented it and similar machines were known earlier.

Some words come from fictional characters and carry their traits. Webster's 1913 dictionary defines quixotic as like Don Quixote, romantic to extravagance, and malapropism, after Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan's The Rivals, as a grotesque misuse of a word; her "as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of Nile" shows the habit. Lothario, a seducer, comes from Rowe's play The Fair Penitent.

Some words grow from place names. Laconic means brief and pithy, in the style of the Laconians, the people of Sparta, and spartan itself means hardy. Bedlam is a shortened form of Bethlehem, the name of a London hospital for the insane, and now means any scene of uproar. The limerick, a five-line nonsense poem, is said to be named for an Irish song whose refrain named Limerick.

Genericide happens when the public adopts a trademark as the ordinary name for a kind of product, whoever makes it. Courts held that aspirin, cellophane and thermos went this way. The test is the word's primary significance to the public: does it say who made the thing, or what it is? In 2017 a federal appeals court ruled that people saying they googled something did not, by itself, make Google a generic name for search engines.

English keeps many French phrases whole, each with a precise sense. A faux pas, literally a false step, is a mistake. Laissez faire, "let alone," names a policy of government not interfering in trade. A coup de grace was the mercy stroke that ended a condemned person's suffering, hence any finishing blow. Carte blanche means unlimited authority, and a tour de force is a feat of strength or skill.

Zeitgeist joins German zeit, time, and geist, spirit, and names the intellectual and moral temper of an era. A doppelganger is a ghostly double of a living person, and a hinterland, from behind plus land, is the region lying behind a coast. Schadenfreude is pleasure at others' misfortune; Richard Trench's On the Study of Words argues that a language having such a word is evidence the feeling exists.

I.e., id est, means that is; e.g., exempli gratia, means for example. Fowler's The King's English calls confusing the two very common and corrects a writer who put i.e. before a single illustration, where e.g. was wanted. Cf. means compare, viz. namely, and et al. and others. Sic, thus, says an odd or wrong-looking word is copied exactly; Fowler keeps it for cases where a reader might suspect a misprint, never for sneering.

An allusion that does not explain itself works only for readers who know its source. Fowler's The King's English warns that a writer thick with literary allusions writes for a small circle who have read the same books, and suggests making allusions explain themselves. Federal plain-language guidance agrees: terms a writer knows well may mean nothing to the audience. Give enough of the story that a newcomer still gets the point.

A mixed metaphor joins two live images that cannot coexist, so the sentence turns absurd. Fowler's The King's English cites the stock case "I smell a rat ... I will nip him in the bud," where the rat ends up nipped like a bud. The clash needs both images alive and grammatically linked: a burning question that threw a chill fails, while a dead metaphor, one no longer felt as an image, beside a live one does no harm.

A quotation repeated until it is hackneyed no longer adds charm. Fowler's The King's English says the welcome quotations are those that are neither hackneyed nor so obscure they shame the reader, but that wake dormant memories. He lists worn ones to avoid, such as "there's the rub" and "more sinned against than sinning," unless given a genuinely new twist, and warns that dodging a stock phrase by reversing it can be worse.

Famous lines drift as they circulate, and the original text settles them. The King James verse reads "the love of money is the root of all evil," not money itself. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" appears in Samuel Butler's poem Hudibras; the nearest Bible verse says "He that spareth his rod hateth his son." And in none of Conan Doyle's four Holmes novels or five story collections does Holmes say "Elementary, my dear Watson."

A title built on a famous line brings that line's associations; Fowler's The King's English says writers quote to add charm of expression or association. Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd echoes a line of Gray's "Elegy," and Hemingway prints the Ecclesiastes passage behind The Sun Also Rises as an epigraph. A heading meant to guide readers through a document differs: federal plain-language guidance asks for clear, descriptive headings.

Before you build a sentence on a quotation or story, find it in the original. Fowler's The King's English calls a wrong allusion fatal, since a reader who catches it decides the writer is not worth reading; one of his examples calls Shakespeare's Cassio an honorable man, which the play never does. The check is often quick: Bartlett notes that Gray's "Elegy" says "noiseless tenor of their way," usually quoted as "even tenor."

Kitchen idioms turn food into judgments. To eat humble pie is to submit or apologize abjectly; the pie was made of umbles, a deer's entrails served to servants at a hunting feast, and Ernest Weekley notes the word has no etymological tie to humility. To eat your words is to take back what you said, your bread and butter is your living, and to save your bacon is to save yourself from harm or loss.

Body idioms let a body part stand for an attitude. To give someone the cold shoulder is to treat them with neglect, to keep a stiff upper lip is to keep up your courage, and to lose your head is to lose your presence of mind. Another comes from scripture: escaping by the skin of your teeth echoes Job in the King James Bible, "I am escaped with the skin of my teeth."

The phrase the eleventh hour appears in a parable in Matthew 20: laborers hired about the eleventh hour are paid, when evening comes, the same as those hired early in the morning. The nick of time is the exact, critical moment. John Camden Hotten's Slang Dictionary glosses a blue moon as an unlimited period, the sense behind once in a blue moon.

Color and weather words become figures for mood and character. The blues, short for blue devils, means low spirits; a black sheep is the troublemaker who differs from the rest of the family; a red-letter day is a fortunate one, after the red letters marking holy days in old calendars. A fair-weather friend shows up only in good times. Old reference books disagree on why it rains cats and dogs.

To pass the buck is to shift responsibility to someone else. The Truman Library says the phrase is said to come from poker, where a marker, often a buckhorn-handled knife on the frontier, showed whose turn it was to deal; Truman's desk sign, "The Buck Stops Here," draws on it. Elbow grease is hard manual effort, and red tape, slow officialism, has been traced to the tape that tied official papers.

In the Younger Edda, Odin is called Alfather, father of all gods and men, and he gave one of his eyes for a drink from Mimer's well of wisdom. Thor, the strongest of gods and men, wields the hammer Mjolnir against the giants. Loki is "fair and beautiful of face, but evil in disposition," a trickster who often lands the gods in trouble and often gets them out again. Wednesday is Woden's, or Odin's, day and Thursday is Thor's.

In the Younger Edda, the gods live in Asgard and humans in Midgard, and the ash Yggdrasil spreads its branches over the whole world on three roots. Valhalla, literally the hall of the slain, is where Odin gathers warriors who fall in battle. The ending is foretold: at Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the wolf swallows Odin and Thor dies of the serpent's venom, and then a green earth rises again from the sea.

In Budge's retellings, Ra the sun-god reigns as king of the gods and has Thoth, "the Scribe of Truth," write down the names of all in the Other World and punish sinners. Osiris, murdered by Set, becomes king of heaven and judge of the dead. Webster's 1913 gives Anubis, conductor of departed spirits, a dog's or fox's head and Thoth an ibis head, and shows Osiris as a mummy in a royal cap. Budge found no connected Egyptian account of Osiris.

Upanishadic and Buddhist texts share samsara, a cycle of rebirth governed by karma: good acts bear pleasant fruit for the doer, evil acts unpleasant. Liberation from the cycle is the goal, which Buddhists call nirvana. The Trimurti joins Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer, and an avatar was first a god's descent to earth, chiefly Vishnu's. The Ramayana follows Rama and Sita; the Mahabharata holds the Bhagavad Gita.

Yang first named the sunny south side of a mountain and yin the shaded north side; the pair came to stand for the forceful and bright against the yielding and dark. Tao, or Dao, means the Way, and the Tao Te Ching, said to be by Laozi, opens in Legge's translation: "The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao." Festivals carry other traditions: on Dia de los Muertos, altars hold offerings in memory of loved ones.

Torah is Hebrew for law or divine instruction and names the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Law of Moses. The Quran, the scripture of Islam, says it was sent down in the month of Ramadan. Muslims keep five pillars: the declaration of faith, prayer five times a day, almsgiving, the Ramadan fast and the pilgrimage to Mecca. Genesis makes Abraham "a father of many nations," and the Quran calls him "neither Jew nor Christian" but a Muslim.

The pyramids at Giza, a royal burial ground begun by the pharaoh Khufu around 2550 BC, are the only one of the ancient Seven Wonders still standing. Rome's Colosseum, finished in A.D. 80, was the biggest amphitheater in the Roman world. Columned facades follow orders that Vitruvius explains by the body: Doric has a man's proportions, Ionic a woman's slenderness, Corinthian a maiden's.

Several superlatives depend on the yardstick. NOAA calls the highest mountain debatable: Everest tops sea level at 8,848 meters, but Mauna Kea measures over 10,210 meters base to peak. USGS lists the Nile at 4,132 miles and the Amazon at 4,000, noting that length depends on where the source is set. The Pacific is the largest ocean basin. USGS names the Sahara the largest desert, but NOAA says that by rainfall alone Antarctica is larger.

Firsts blur easily, so tie each to its record. The National Park Service dates the Wright brothers' first powered flight to December 17, 1903, when Orville flew about 120 feet. Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space on April 12, 1961, orbiting Earth once; Alan Shepard followed on May 5 as the first American and second person in space. Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole in December 1911, ahead of Robert Scott.