Poor Richard's Almanack was a yearly almanac published by Benjamin Franklin, the American inventor, statesman, publisher and printer who adopted the pseudonym of "Poor Richard" for this purpose. Poor Richard's Almanack was printed continually from 1732 to 1758. It was a best seller for a pamphlet published in the American colonies. Even with much competition print runs of 10,000 per year were claimed.
Ben Franklin, achieved much of his financial success with Poor Richard's Almanack. His almanac was very popular in colonial America, with people reading it for the calendar, seasonal weather forecasts, poems, sayings, astronomical and astrological information it contained. Franklin also included the occasional mathematical exercise, and the Almanack from 1750 features contained an early example of demographics. It is chiefly remembered, however, for being a repository of Franklin's aphorisms and proverbs, many of which live on in American English. These maxims typically counsel thrift and courtesy, with a dash of cynicism.
One of Ben Franklin sayings from the almanac is often quoted even today, "Early to bed and early to rise Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." However it should be noted that this quote, like many used in the almanac were not original. Versions of this proverb have been around for much longer. The exact version was first published in 1639 in the book Parœmiologia Anglo-Latina or 'Proverbs English, and Latin'.
The Connecticut Courant began as a weekly on October 29, 1764 and was started by Thomas Green. The word "courant" was a popular name for English-language newspapers, borrowed from the Dutch. The daily Hartford Courant traces its existence back to the weekly, thereby claiming the title "America's oldest continuously published newspaper" and adopting as its slogan, "Older than the nation." (A reborn The New Hampshire Gazette, which started publication in 1756, but disappeared and reappeared, trademarked the title of oldest paper in the nation. The Gazette is a bi-weekly, while the Courant has not missed a week since its inception.
The Courant was purchased in 1979 by Times Mirror, the Los Angeles Times' parent company. The first years of out-of-town ownership were described by a former Courant reporter in a book titled Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper. One criticism was that the new owners were more interested in awards, and less interested in traditional Courant devotion to exhaustive coverage of local news.
The Courant won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for inquiring into problems with the Hubble Space Telescope (a Connecticut company was involved in the construction), and it won a 1999 Pulitzer Prize in the Breaking News category for coverage of a 1998 murder-suicide that took five lives at Connecticut Lottery headquarters.
We live in Arizona and love Arizona, but few people know what the word Arizona means. Even the experts disagree on its origin. In printing it is important to know the right words and the meaning. Many words like state and city names, we never give a moments thought to their origin or meaning. Knowing the correct meaning of a word allows us to know that we are saying in print what we meant to say. This makes sure we won't be misunderstood in our communications.
The word Arizona comes from one of the following (its origin is not certain): the Aztec Indian word "arizuma," that means "silver-bearing," from the Tohono O'odham Indian word "Aleh-zone" which means "small spring," from the Papago arizonac, meaning little spring or few springs or the Pima Indian word "Ali shonak" which also means "small spring". Although there are other possibilities, so this origin should not be taken as a certainty.
Many believe the name Arizonat comes from the Spanish arida (dry) + zona (area). This is certainly not the ultimate origin, although it is likely that this Spanish combination influenced the form and adoption of the word in both Spanish and English.
