A Few Things, Quickly.

Here’s a quick post to tell you that today, in the span of a few hours, I learned the following:

That in 1864, Nathan Bedford Forrest captured some Union troops in Tennessee. He sent the enlisted men to Selma to the Cahaba prison camp and the officers to Enterprise, Mississippi. Why is this interesting? One of the officers was Eli Lilly, future pharmaceutical giant.

That the Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, published in 1934, contained an error: the word dord, which was defined as density. The chemistry editor at Webster’s sent in a slip that said, “D or d” – meaning the letter d in both capital and lowercase form – with the intention that the definition “density” would be added to the list of things the letter d can abbreviate.

That last fiscal year (July 2008-June 2009), MLC’s reference department answered 5693 questions! (Can you tell I’m working on my annual report?)

Back to it!