It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience. Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)  

niggle Definition: (verb) Worry unnecessarily or excessively. Synonyms: fret, fuss Usage: I realize now that the things which used to niggle me did not really matter. Discuss.  

Jeanne Mance (1606) Mance was a member of a French association that planned a utopian colony at Montreal. With the support of the French queen, Anne of Austria, she sailed with the first settlers in 1641. Mance, who had cared […]

Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear preoccupateth it. Francis Bacon (1561-1626)  

clavicle Definition: (noun) Bone linking the scapula and sternum. Synonyms: collarbone Usage: He will be out for the rest of the season thanks to a broken clavicle. Discuss.  

Benjamin Banneker (1731) Banneker was a free African American who was largely self-educated in astronomy and mathematics. In 1761, he drew attention by building a wooden clock that kept precise time for some 50 years. He accurately predicted a solar […]

It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: […]

light-minded Definition: (adjective) Showing inappropriate levity. Synonyms: flippant Usage: The light-minded woman had been discovering good matches for her daughter almost from the year of her birth. Discuss.  

Hermann Rorschach (1884) Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist, devised his eponymous inkblot test to gauge the perceptions, intelligence, and emotional traits of his patients and used it to gather data for his 1921 book Psychodiagnostics. Based on the idea that people […]

Whence come the highest mountains? … They come out of the sea. That testimony is inscribed on their stones, and on the walls of their summits. Out of the deepest must the highest come to its height. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) […]

refutation Definition: (noun) The speech act of answering an attack on your assertions. Synonyms: defense Usage: His refutation of the charges was short and persuasive. Discuss.  

Konrad Lorenz (1903) As a boy, Lorenz nursed sick animals from the local zoo. He became a zoologist and studied the behavior of birds, emphasizing innate as opposed to learned behaviors and focusing on imprinting, a rapid learning process in […]

If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon. George Eliot (1819-1880)  

cleave Definition: (verb) Separate or cut with a tool, such as a sharp instrument. Synonyms: rive, split Usage: The axe had cleaved open the back of his skull. Discuss.  

James Naismith (1861) While teaching physical education in 1891, Naismith was tasked with creating a safe and inexpensive indoor sport to occupy his students during the Massachusetts winter. His game involved throwing a soccer ball through suspended half-bushel peach baskets, […]