Words! Words! Words!

On June 25, 1876, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his troops were killed in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana Territory. On this day in 1950, the U.S. World Cup team beat England. On this day in 1951, CBS broadcast the first commercial TV program in color, but nobody had a color TV, so nobody saw it. And on this day in 2009, the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, died.

See how you fare in today’s vocabulary quiz. Select your answer below for each question. When done, you'll see your score and the correct answers.

This is the day, in 1959, that the music died. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper lost their lives in a tragic plane crash in Iowa. On this day in 1966, the first controlled landing of a spacecraft on the moon occurred (see below). In 2005, Alberto Gonzales became the first Hispanic U.S. attorney general. And in 1924, President Woodrow Wilson died. Let’s see if you can keep your word skills among the living, and even get them off the ground. Comprende, mi amigo?

On January 5, 1933, construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge, as workers began excavating 3.25 million cubic feet of dirt for the structure’s huge anchorages. The Golden Gate Bridge officially opened on May 27, 1937, the longest bridge span in the world at the time. The first public crossing had taken place the day before, when 200,000 people walked, ran and even roller skated over the new bridge.

On January 5, 1531, Pope Clement VII sent a letter to King Henry VIII of England forbidding him to remarry under penalty of excommunication. Speaking of which, in the first record of a legal divorce in the American colonies, Anne Clarke of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was granted a divorce from her absent and adulterous husband, Denis Clarke, by the Quarter Court of Boston, Massachusetts, on this day in 1643.

Can we all just get along and bridge the gaps between us? Try hard with today’s vocabulary quiz.

On this day in 1954, the world’s first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, was commissioned by the U.S. Navy. On this day in 1947, the World Series was broadcast on TV for the first time. In 1938, the ill-fated Munich Pact was signed by British and French prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier and Germany’s Adolf Hitler. And in 1822, José Mariano (Joseph Marion) Hernández became the first Hispanic to be elected to the United States Congress.

Take our quiz today and 1) see if you can finish it without refueling, 2) be the first to broadcast your high score nationwide on Zoom, 3) make your country proud, and 4) win in less than seven games.

On March 12, 1933, eight days after his first inauguration, FDR delivered his first nationwide radio address – or fireside chat. He started out with “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.” Ninety percent of American homes had radios. FDR delivered thirty more fireside chats between March 1933 and June 1944.

On this day in 1969 the London drug squad appeared at the home of Beatle George Harrison with a warrant and drug-sniffing canines. Harrison came home to find his house ransacked, and told the officers, “You needn’t have turned the whole bloody place upside down. All you had to do was ask me and I would have shown you where I keep everything.” On this date in 1894, Coca-Cola came out in bottles for the first time. It had previously been available only as a fountain drink. Let's see how calm you can be as you raid your brain for answers that refresh.

We recently proofed some documents for a Hollywood writer who was putting together a book about famous singers and actors. A teaser article mentioned a John Deutschendorf Jr. One of the first thoughts of the proofreader was how did someone with a moniker like that make it past the turnstile at the talent agency. She dug deeper into the text and it turns out it’s the given name of the very famous late singer, John Denver (RIP).

Lots of people seeking fame and fortune change their birth names. After all, would you go see a movie starring Issur Herschelevitch Danielovitch? Or Tom Mapother? Probably not. But you’ve likely seen more than one movie starring Kirk Douglas or Tom Cruise. Check out the list here as we take a turn from the usual vocabulary words. If you get them all, let us know your new stage name. (Note: the more you recognize, the older you are, no doubt.)

It was Mark Twain who is widely credited for writing “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Some sources say, however, it was actually his writing partner Charles Dudley Warner, with whom Twain wrote the novel, The Gilded Age, who gave us that adage. Well, as much as we wish we could do something about the droughts that are occurring in the U.S. and Canada, we’re here only to talk about weather some more, in the form of today’s vocab words.

What’s your forecast of your score? See how you weathered this quiz by checking the table below.

On September 25, 1867, the pioneering cattleman Oliver Loving died from gangrene poisoning in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. A few weeks before, Loving had been trapped by 500 Comanche braves along the Pecos River. Shot in the arm and side, Loving managed to escape and reach Fort Sumner. Though the wounds alone were not fatal, Loving soon developed gangrene in his arm, a common infection in the days before antibiotics. Sometimes referred to as the “Dean of the Trail Drivers,” Loving had been braving the Comanche territory along the Pecos in order to make his second pioneering drive of cattle from Texas to Denver.

Loving and his partner Charles Goodnight proposed to drive a herd of cattle directly to the growing population centers in New Mexico and Colorado where they could avoid middlemen and earn higher prices per head. The result was the Goodnight-Loving Trail, a 700-mile route through west Texas and New Mexico that eventually brought the cattle right into the booming mining regions of Colorado.

Okay, tenderfoot… head ‘em up and move ‘em out. Let’s see how you round up today’s word herd and how you rate in the table below the quiz.

There’s a prominent and beautiful lake house on Long Lake, Maine, that was built by “a millionaire Texas oilman” in the 1930s. Upon investigating, we learned that it wasn’t ‘Texas tea’ or ‘black gold’ the man had exploited to his good fortune. Unlike the stereotypical Texas wildcatter, roustabout and roughneck, this man made his (and his heirs’) significant fortune on cottonseed oil…you know, the stuff Crisco and Wesson oil were originally made from. So not everybody has to be Jed Clampett to strike it rich in the oil business. Let’s see if you can make a slick fortune on words today. Then see how you rate in the table below the quiz.

Seems everybody’s a scientist these days…deciding when masks are required and when they’re not, when schools should open and when they should close, what kind of cough is OK in public. If you’re not sick of it all yet, you must be a world-class epidemiologist who thrives on diseaseiology (I just made that word up). Or maybe a wannabe. Or in-between. Whatever. Take our test today and see if you’re the one Dr. Birx has been looking for all these trying months.