PROFEXIONS

Kerouac's "On the Road" hits screen in Cannes debut

CANNES (Reuters) - The Bible of the Beat Generation, "On the Road" premiered at Cannes on Wednesday, taking more than five decades for the frenetic tale of liberation, masculinity and post-War America to play out its journey from novel to the big screen. Furiously written on a typewriter over a three-week long creative binge in 1951, Jack Kerouac's On the Road is the seminal portrayal of "Beat" culture and its spiritual quest for expression. ...

menagerie

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for May 23, 2012 is:

menagerie • \muh-NAJ-uh-ree\  • noun
1 a : a place where animals are kept and trained especially for exhibition b : a collection of wild or foreign animals kept especially for exhibition 2: a varied mixture

Examples:
The Alpine-themed restaurant had a curious menagerie of cuckoo clocks on the wall of its dining room.

"Since 2001, thousands of schoolchildren have made the trip to get up close with the preserve menagerie of between 100 and 150 animals, from pigs and geese to tigers and lions." — Eric Staats, Naples Daily News (Florida), May 12, 2012

Did you know?
Back in the days of Middle French, "ménagerie" meant "the management of a household or farm" or "a place where animals are tended." By the 1670s, English speakers had adopted the word but dropped its housekeeping aspects, applying it specifically to the places where circuses and other exhibitions kept show animals. Later, the word was generalized to refer to any varied mixture, especially one that includes things that are strange or foreign to one's experience.