"My friends think I am being unfair for not being willing to 'pay my share' of the babysitting. What share? I have no kids to babysit!"View Entire Post › ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 11/8/2024 11:29 AM
A large ball python found slithering in the parking lot of a Chili's restaurant in North Carolina turned out to have been an escaped pet missing for two months. ... Read full Story
England cricket legend Sir Ian Botham was rescued by a former Australian rival after he fell off a boat into water "infested" with sharks and crocodiles. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 11/7/2024 3:38 PM
The 2024 Egg Fair in Mexico broke a Guinness World Record when more than 2,000 young people participated in a race while balancing eggs on spoons. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 11/7/2024 3:26 PM
A North Carolina man's age turned out to be a lucky number when it inspired him to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket worth $200,000. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 11/7/2024 2:05 PM
Animal rescuers in Texas came to the assistance of a fox that apparently attempted to scale a wooden fence and ended up dangling by its caught leg. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 11/7/2024 1:53 PM
A black bear with a sweet tooth visited the front porch of a Connecticut home to raid a bowl of Halloween candy and steal a pumpkin. ... Read full Story
Some of the victims buried in Pompeii following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius have been wrongly identified, new evidence suggests. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 11/7/2024 1:06 PM
Police in a small South Carolina town are warning residents to keep their doors and windows locked after 43 monkeys escaped from a research facility. ... Read full Story
HS2 is spending more than £100m on a "shed" to protect bats on a section of the line, even though there is "no evidence that high-speed trains interfere with bats", the project company's chairman has said. ... Read full Story
Vampire bats have been put on a treadmill as a study showed the special way they use blood for energy - as well as how quickly they can run. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 11/6/2024 4:19 PM
A South Carolina woman ended up calling the police for help after she walked into her apartment's bathroom and found a large ball python behind her toilet. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 11/6/2024 3:04 PM
A zoo on England's Isle of Wight announced the saga of its escaped raccoons came to a happy ending with the final animal safely recaptured. ... Read full Story
By United Press International, Inc. | | 11/6/2024 1:04 PM
A message in a bottle tossed into an Ontario lake as part of a school project was found by a student at the same school 26 years later. ... Read full Story
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 20, 2024 is:
snivel \SNIV-ul\ verb
To snivel is to speak or act in a whining, sniffling, tearful, or weakly emotional manner. The word snivel may also be used to mean "to run at the nose," "to snuffle," or "to cry or whine with snuffling."
// She was unmoved by the millionaires sniveling about their financial problems.
// My partner sniveled into the phone, describing the frustrations of the day.
"At first, he ran a highway stop with video gambling. 'To sit and do nothing for 10 to 12 hours drove me nuts,' he [Frank Nicolette] said. That's when he found art. 'I started making little faces, and they were selling so fast, I'll put pants and shirts on these guys,' he said, referring to his hand-carved sculptures. 'Then (people) whined and sniveled and wanted bears, and so I started carving some bears.'" — Benjamin Simon, The Post & Courier (Charleston, South Carolina), 5 Oct. 2024
Did you know?
There's never been anything pretty about sniveling. Snivel, which originally meant simply "to have a runny nose," has an Old English ancestor whose probable form was snyflan. Its lineage includes some other charming words of yore: an Old English word for mucus, snofl; the Middle Dutch word for a head cold, snof; the Old Norse word for snout, which is snoppa; and nan, a Greek verb meaning "to flow." Nowadays, we mostly use snivel as we have since the 1600s: when self-pitying whining is afoot, whether or not such sniveling is accompanied by unchecked nasal flow.