We took an the AirTrain to our shuttle, and checked-in at the Fairfield Inn.
We're in Jamaica, NY technically, so we have to take a bus to the subway, and from there into Manhattan! I'm sure it'll be an adventuresome day in the big city.
Until my next post, maybe someone can help me with these two questions:
- Where did the B.C countdown system start? What year is the furthest away BC? How did the people before this system date history?
- Where did the word sneakers come from? How does it relate to tennis shoes?
6 comments:
The Anno Domini system was devised by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus (born in Scythia Minor) in Rome in 525.
During the first six centuries of what would come to be known as the Christian era, European countries used various systems to count years. Systems in use included consular dating, imperial regnal year dating, and Creation dating.
The word "sneaker" is often attributed to Henry Nelson McKinney, an advertising agent for N. W. Ayer & Son, who, in 1917, coined the term because the rubber sole made the shoe stealthy. All other shoes, with the exception of moccasins, were unsuitable for sneaking due to the noise they inevitably produced. However, the word was in use at least as early as 1887, as the Boston Journal of Education made reference to "sneakers" as "the name boys give to tennis shoes".
Good luck on your trip!!
Glad to hear you made it okay! Don't sleep too much, the time will pass by fast - enjoy every minute, but be good!
Love you!
Mom
Matt! I miss ya, you didn't CALL ME BEFORE YOU LEFT!
(what a bad brother ;)
Anyway,
I was thinking and you should get a bike while you're over there...it'll be really good for getting out into the country a bit more, and find a better "big italian hill."
And also I suggest reading the book "Searching for God Knows What" if you haven't yet, I'm reading that one right now and I think you'd like it...it'd be cool if we were both sitting on our respective hills reading the same book thousands of miles apart!
Love you lots!
beks
by the way,
if you end up getting bored in the airports while you wait, or something, one of my professors gave me the link to this website, which is pretty cool:
http://www.freedocumentaries.org/
some of the documentaries are kind of controversial, but you know...
The most important thing to note about the calendar is that we divide all of human history around Jesus Christ.
Everything before Him we say was BC, before Christ, and everything after Him we say was "Anno Domini," Latin for "Year of our Lord."
From Encarta:
Problems with the earlier Julian calendar meant that by
1582 the vernal equinox (see Ecliptic) occurred 10 days early and church holidays did not occur in the appropriate seasons. To make the vernal equinox occur on March 21, as it had in AD 325, the year of the First Council of Nicaea, Pope Gregory XIII issued a decree dropping 10 days from the calendar. To prevent further displacement he instituted a calendar, known as the Gregorian calendar, that provided that century years divisible evenly by 400 should be leap years and that all other century years should be common years. Thus, 1600 was a leap year, but 1700 and 1800 were common years.
The Gregorian calendar, or New Style calendar, was slowly adopted throughout Europe. It is used today throughout most of the Western world and in parts of Asia. When the Gregorian calendar was adopted in Britain in 1752, another correction of an 11-day discrepancy was made; the day after September 2, 1752, became September 14. The British also adopted January 1 as the day when a new year begins. The Soviet Union adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, and Greece adopted it in 1923 for civil purposes, but many countries affiliated with the Greek church retain the Julian, or Old Style, calendar for the celebration of church feasts.
The Gregorian calendar is also called the Christian calendar because it uses the birth of Jesus Christ as a starting date. Dates of the Christian era (see Chronology) are often designated AD (Latin anno domini, “in the year of our Lord”) and BC (before Christ).#
In the UK, the shoes we call "sneakers" or jogging shoes are called "trainers." When we lived in England, it appeared that trainers were maybe even more popular than in the U.S.
From Fact Monster:
Sneakers go back a long way. In the late 18th century, people wore rubber soled shoes called plimsolls, but they were pretty crude—for one thing, there was no right foot or left foot. Around 1892, the U.S. Rubber Company came up with more comfortable rubber sneakers with canvas tops, called Keds. By 1917, these sneakers began to be mass produced. (They got the nickname sneakers because they were so quiet, a person wearing them could sneak up on someone.)
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