Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born on this date in 1896. Trained as a journalist, Rawlings spent much of her life in rural Florida, and she earned lasting fame (and a Pulitzer) for her 1938 classic The Yearling, the fictional tale of a young boy who adopts a fawn. The publication of Rawlings' 1942 nonfiction work, Cross Creek, led to a years-long trial on the author's alleged invasion of privacy and libel of a neighbor. (来源：www.EnglishCN.com)

Having trouble remembering which is slander and which is libel? Slander (which shares, with scandal, a linguistic ancestor meaning "stumbling block; offense") names "a false and defamatory oral statement about a person." Libel (which has an ancestor in a Latinism meaning "little book") is used for "a false public statement that injures an individual's reputation or otherwise exposes him or her to public contempt." In both instances, any statement (spoken or written) must be false.

But that wasn't always the case. One early, now archaic, application of libel referred to "a handbill defaming or attacking someone." Shakespeare used slander in a sense now obsolete: "disgrace, shame, or reproach that falls on one usually by reason of personal acts or character."

Tell the truth when you drop us a line.