The 25th March is a day for controversy on contributions to language.
On the 25th March 1811, Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.
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| Hogg |
The Necessity of Atheism is a treatise on atheism by Shelly, printed in 1811 by C. and W. Phillips in Worthing, while he was a student at University College, Oxford. A copy of the first version was sent as a short tract signed enigmatically to all heads of Oxford colleges at the University. At that time the content was so shocking to the authorities that he was rusticated for refusing to deny authorship, together with his friend and fellow student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg.
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| Shelley |
"As a love of truth is the only motive which actuates the Author of this little tract, he earnestly entreats that those of his readers who may discover any deficiency in his reasoning, or may be in possession of proofs which his mind could never obtain, would offer them, together with their objections to the Public, as briefly, as methodically, as plainly as he has taken the liberty of doing."
On the 25th March 1957 the United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsburg’s poem "Howl" on the grounds of obscenity.
"Howl" contains many references to illicit drugs and sexual practices, both heterosexual and homosexual. On the basis of one line in particular "who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy" customs officials seized 520 copies of the poem on 25th March, 1957, being imported from the printer in London.
And more recently, but less controversially:
WikiWikiWeb is a term that has been used to refer to four things: the first wiki, or user-editable website, launched on 25th March 1995 by Ward Cunningham as part of the Portland Pattern Repository (the website was also later known as "WardsWiki"); the Perl-based application that was used to run it, also developed by Cunningham, which was the first wiki software (it was later renamed "WikiBase"); the original general term for wiki websites; and the original term for wiki software.
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| Cunningham |
The software and website were developed in 1994 by Cunningham in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier. The concept was based on the ideas developed in HyperCar stacks that Cunningham built in the late 1980s. He installed the software on his company's (Cunningham & Cunningham) website, c2.com, on 25th March, 1995. Cunningham came up with the name WikiWikiWeb because he remembered a Honolulu Internationl Airport counter employee who told him to take the Wiki Wiki Shuttle, a shuttle bus line that runs between the airport's terminals. "Wiki Wiki" is a reduplication of "wiki", a Hawaiian language word for fast. Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, so he initially thought about calling it "QuickWeb", but later changed his mind and dubbed it "WikiWikiWeb".
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