Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Words to use



De rigueur  (duh ree-GUHR)  Required by fashion, custom, or etiquette.  From French de rigueur (literally, of strictness), from Latin rigor. Ultimately from the Indo-European root streig- (to stroke or press), which also gave us strait, strike, streak, strict, stress, and strain. Earliest documented use: 1850.


The Riot Act: Many people were displeased when George I became king of England in 1714, and his opponents were soon leading rebellions and protests against him. The British government, anxious to stop the protests, passed a law called the "Riot Act." It allowed public officials to break up gatherings of 12 or more people by reading aloud a proclamation, warning those who heard it that they must disperse within the hour or be guilty of a felony punishable by death. By 1819, riot act was also being used more generally for any stern warning or reprimand. Although the law long ago fell into disuse and was finally repealed in 1973, the term that it generated lives on today.

Laissez-faire or laisser-faire: 1. The practice of noninterference in the affairs of others.2. The economic policy allowing businesses to operate with little intervention from the government. From French, literally “allow to do”. 

Sacrilegious: Sacrilegious comes to us from sacrilege, which is ultimately derived from a combination of the Latin words sacer ("sacred") and legere ("to gather" or "to steal"). Its antecedent in Latin, sacrilegus, meant "one who steals sacred things." There is no direct relation to religious (which is derived from the Latin word religiosus, itself from religio, meaning "supernatural constraint or religious practice"). The apparent resemblance between sacrilegious and religious is just a coincidence.





“Sometimes all it takes is the touch of someone new to remind us that there’s so much more out there, so much more if you just look a little bit longer and a little bit closer
                                                                                                                      Henley Zichova



Girl on a Tractor
 Joyce Sutphen

I knew the names of all the cows before
 I knew my alphabet, but no matter the
 subject; I had mastery of it, and when
 it came time to help in the fields, I
 learned to drive a tractor at just the right
 speed, so that two men, walking 
 on either side of the moving wagon
 could each lift a bale, walk towards
 the steadily arriving platform and
 simultaneously hoist the hay onto 
 the rack, walk to the next bale, lift,
 turn, and find me there, exactly where
 I should be, my hand on the throttle,
 carefully measuring out the pace.