Well, the baseball gods giveth and take it away. In 1938, Foxx won the AL batting championship despite the fact he did not have the highest batting average. Foxx hit .349, but Taffy Wright of the Senators hit .350. Wright did qualify for the championship, but wasn’t given it.
Back then, you qualified for the batting championship if you appeared in 100 games. Wright appeared in exactly 100, but around 40 of those were a single plate appearance. He had a total of only 282 PAs as compared to Foxx’s 685. The league said, “to hell with the rules” and awarded official recognition to Foxx.
The etymology of “news” is that it’s the adjective “new” used as a noun in the plural: “new things.” Same story in several different languages. In Spanish, it’s usually noticias, but once in a while you’ll come across the word nuevas, which is what led me to lookitup. Here’s the Wikipedia entry:
FTR, while the story is accurate — I recall it being part of a “Victory in Vietnam” roadshow in the mid-60s — the picture isn’t even remotely accurate. It appears to be an updated Essex class fleet carrier (around 875’ overall length), while the Card was a Bogue class escort carrier (495’ overall) which had been repurposed as an aircraft transport.
Discourse is still being balky about inline media, so here’s a picture of the Card. It’s from WWII, but the overall structure wouldn’t have changed much.
Today I learned that the word “Apu” is considered a slur against East Indian Americans, ranking up there with the “N” word for blacks or the “K” word for Jews. I had not previously known that. (Can I use that word here, since it’s considered a slur on top of being a Simpsons character?
Apu is a real name, so no, not a slur like the ‘n’ word. Curious where you learned that. But of course, I can see it used as one depending on the context.
Another “K” word was used to describe South African Blacks in the Apartheid era. I remember seeing it in local newspaper financial pages when referring to South African gold companies - referring to them as “K” Gold companies.
I can’t find the cartoon online at all, and I personally thought it was hilarious.
It was Vivek R-what’shisname at a rally with 3 people in attendance, all of them men in MAGA hats; one is yelling “MUSLIM!”, another is hollering “Show us your birth certificate!” and the third one says, “Get me a slushee, Apu!”
This area has a large Indian-from-India community (and no, they’re not all physicians who buy McMansions, although quite a few are) so they must have pointed this out to the editorial staff.
Though the expression “eke out” has degenerated evolved to mean (more often than not) “scratch out”, its correct original meaning was “stretch out”, or supplement, so you might for instance have a job as a schoolteacher but eke out your living doing private tutoring. It was this sense of “eke” that gave us “ekename” for an alternative though unofficial appellation. It became “nickname” by the same metanalytical process that made a norange an orange, a nadder an adder, etc.
