Who Was Maya Angelou?
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson, in St Louis, Missouri, in 1928. Her brother could not pronounce her name properly and called her Maya, the name that she came to be known by.
She had a difficult childhood – after suffering abuse when she was eight years old, she stopped talking for five years. She later wrote her autobiography, describing overcoming her childhood trauma, and growing up in the segregated south of USA – when people of colour and white people were not allowed to mix. She was committed to the civil rights movement, which aimed to break the segregation and allow people to live freely.
Comic Book Characters and Diversity
We’re very pleased here at Jump. In the last few months, several of our favourite comic book characters have been changed and redesigned. This isn’t just about new costumes.
It shows that the designers and writers want to make these stories more diverse. After all, not every person in the world is white and male…so it seems silly that superheroes should be!
Read on to find out about the transformations of Batgirl, Thor and others.
Exploring Australian Alone
Sally-Anne was out and about in Australian, and took us along on a virtual trip. She shared her first impressions of the country, and then her love of the city of Melbourne.
In this report, she explains why she went to Australia alone, and what it is like to travel without companions.
If you’ve been reading some of my reports from Australia, you’d be forgiven for wondering why I haven’t mentioned any of the people I’m travelling with. That’s because there isn’t anyone, I’m on this trip all by myself. I wasn’t too worried before I came because I’m quite used to doing things alone. I live in my own flat, I went to a different high school to everyone I knew from primary school and I quite often go and visit places by myself, but I’d never travelled alone. In fact, I’d never been outside of Europe at all, even with other people, so the whole trip was a bit nerve-wracking, if exciting.
Where Does the Word Candidate Come From?
Today is election day in UK, when the citizens of the country choose their new government. You can read all about how the elections work here. You wouldn’t think that dress codes of ancient Rome would affect the elections of today, but they do! Millie Slavidou explains.
Today is a good day to think about the word ‘candidate’. I rather like the etymology of this one.
It comes from Latin candidus, which is the past participle* of candidare, which meant ‘to make white, to make bright’.
Not because of whitewashing whatever the candidates might have said or done! It was because in ancient Rome candidates who wanted to be elected either to the Senate or any other office wore white robes.
If we take it one step further back, to a root meaning ‘white, shining’, we find that ‘candle’ is a cognate.**
*Past Particle
The past particle is the past form of the verb that can also be used as an adjective, like “a fallen tree”. In the case above, the adjective is like saying ‘whitened’ in English. Other examples of past particles are:
verb: bite
past particle: bitten
example: a bitten apple
verb: choose
past particle: chosen
example: aa chosen present
verb: crash
past particle: crashed
example: a crashed bicycle
**Cognates
A cognate is a distant relative, a word ultimately from the same root. Like a third cousin. Here are some examples of cognates.
Book is related to beech. Well, actually, book means beech! Both come from Germanic word meaning beech tree, Buche.
Germanic runes were originally inscribed on tablets made of beech wood. Modern German for book is Buch!
WOOL and FLANNEL are distant cognates. Today, fashion stores often describe plaid shirts as ‘flannel’, but it is actually a soft woven fabric, originally made of wool, but now often cotton or synthetic. You might have a flannel pyjamas, which are lovely and cosy in the winter!The word wool is from a Proto Indo European root *wele meaning ‘wool’.
In Welsh, the word gwlanen, means ‘wool’ and is from the same root. The word flannel comes from the woollen vests that were made, presumably by Welsh traders from Welsh sheep – Gwlanen became fwlanen, and then flannel. So wool and flannel are distant cousins!
Today’s featured image is Marasmiellus candidus, a type of mushroom. You will often find the word ‘candidus’ used in botany or biology to describe something that is white, such as crocus candidus or the white woodpecker Melanerpes Candidus. There is even a white monkey called Propithecus candidus.