1066

oooh! oooooooh! i just was checking that my most recently added entry was formatted correctly, and i noticed that my site counter is at 1066 visitors! this is exciting because 1066 is one of those red-letter days that is burned into my memory first because the world history teacher i had in 10th grade was really really cute (mr. kelly. cross-country coach, world history teacher, generally cool guy. he quit teaching eventually and went off to see a guru in india) and he told us we ought to know that date. then, later, when i was a linguistics major in college, i would've learned that date because it's linguistically important, but i already knew it because of mr. kelly.

so. 1066. do you know what happened? (yes, this is the day of quizzes in borogovesland). the answer is written below in white type. highlight the white space below to find out if you were right...

1066 saw the battle of hastings in england, during which william the conqueror of normandy invaded england and won. this started a 300-year period during which the french ruled england. the upper classes were therefore obligated to speak french (the peasants were not so obligated), and a lot of french words found their way into the english language. thus, today, english (a germanic language) has quite a lot of words of romance origin. linguists cite 1066 as the boundary between old english (the language beowulf was originally written in) and middle english (the language the canterbury tales was written in). (modern english is said to have started with shakespeare near the end of the 16th century.)

other red-letter dates that i remember for whatever reason:

• 15 june 1215, the signing of the magna carta
• 1703, the founding of st. petersburg, russia
• 1688, the glorious revolution whereby king william and queen mary came to the throne of england, deposing james II. it was 'glorious' because it was also bloodless--a peaceful revolution
• 1844, the election of james k. polk to the american presidency (well, perhaps not a red-letter date as such, but one that i remember because of the they might be giants song)
• 1492, columbus discovered the new world
• 25 october 1918, the communist revolution in russia. not currently celebrated, but until yeltsin came to power, was celebrated in november, because the soviets used the julian calendar back in 1918, and the julian calendar is off by 13 days from the gregorian calendar, which we use today (read about it here).
• 1616, shakespeare died.
• 1819, founding of the university of virginia by thomas jefferson
• 4 july 1776, signing of the declaration of independence

okay, that's all i can remember off the top of my head.