Ripped from the Headlines: December 2023: This Week in Words: Current Events Vocab for December 9–December 15, 2023

The Louvre Museum in Paris announced its price for admission will increase by 30 percent next month. The basic entry fee, currently 17 euros, will be bumped up to 22 euros on January 15, 2024. The museum said the price hike would make up for rapidly rising energy costs and help pay for a program that provides free admission for European residents under the age of 26.

By the end of 2024, only one Chuck E. Cheese location will still feature the chain's iconic rock band of animatronics. The pizza franchise has been phasing out the robotic animal characters, with their blinking eyes and mechanical movements, replacing them with screens and interactive dance floors. Animatronics is a portmanteau of animation and electronics coined by Walt Disney in 1961. Earlier, mechanized figures were usually referred to as robots.

A California teenager who was the youngest person to pass the state's bar exam has been sworn in as an attorney at the age of 18. Peter Park graduated from high school at 13, and after finishing law school at 17, he passed the California bar. Park is now a practicing law clerk with the Tulare county district attorney’s office. The Old French source of attorney is atorné, "one appointed (to represent another person's interests)."

A self-taught cartographer from New Zealand has spent three years hand-drawing an animal-centric world map. Anton Thomas worked for more than 2,600 hours researching, designing, painstakingly sketching the planet's contours (without national borders), and illustrating his map with 1,642 native animal species. Cartographer derives from the Medieval Latin carta, "paper," and the Greek graphein, "to write or draw."

Baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani signed a $700 million deal with the L.A. Dodgers, the largest contract ever in U.S. sports. The agreement breaks a previous record of $426.5 million for Ohtani's former teammate Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels. Under the details of the record-breaking contract, $680 million will be deferred until 2034, with Ohtani receiving $2 million per year until then.

Kyrgyzstan's parliament voted to change the national flag after it was criticized for a design element resembling a flower with a negative association. Critics of the 1992 flag said a sun motif looked more like a sunflower, which symbolizes being fickle in Kyrgyz culture. Not wanting their national flag to make them look temperamental and volatile, officials agreed to straighten the sun's rays and make it less flower-like. The Old English root of fickle means "deceitful."

The children of a jailed Iranian activist accepted her Nobel peace prize, saying their mother is calling for the "globalization of peace and human rights." Narges Mohammadi couldn't attend the award ceremony in Oslo, so her 17-year old twins read a speech she wrote. Mohammadi is a critic of the Islamic republic's undemocratic and oppressive rules for women and fights for the international, worldwide spread of freedom and democracy.

The UN's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, added 55 practices to its Intangible Cultural Heritage List this week. Unlike monuments, buildings, or physical artifacts, these pieces of a culture's identity include traditions and practices like Italian opera, Bangladeshi rickshaw painting, and the Peruvian dish ceviche. Six rare traditions were classified as needing urgent protection. Intangible is from Latin roots meaning "not able to be touched."

On the night of December 11, an asteroid briefly obscured a supergiant star called Betelgeuse. Astronomers call this kind of event, which is a particular variety of eclipse, an occultation. Asteroid Leona blocked the light of the bright red star for only about 15 seconds. The Latin roots of obscure are ob, "over," and -scurus, "covered."

Paleontologists discovered the fossil of a tyrannosaur with its partly-digested dinner completely intact inside its stomach. The young Gorgosaurus libratus had just eaten two small, winged dinosaurs when it was fossilized about 75 million years ago. Eight scientists co-authored a study including new details about how the diet of juvenile tyrannosaurs differed from adult dinosaurs. Paleontologist has Greek roots meaning "ancient scientist."

The FDA approved two gene therapies that target sickle cell disease. One of the new treatments is based on the DNA-modifying technology CRISPR, the first of its kind in the U.S. Experts say the development opens the door to further medical uses for the gene-editing tool. Sickle cell disease causes severe pain and reduces lifespan. Therapy is derived from the Greek therapeia, "curing, healing, or service."

Several tornadoes touched down in Tennessee on December 9, leaving widespread destruction in their wake. The city of Hendersonville and the Nashville suburb of Madison were hit particularly hard by the twisters, which had winds as high as 125 miles per hour. Thousands of people were displaced from their homes and lost power, and at least six people were killed. Tornado was borrowed from the Spanish tronada, "thunderstorm," and its Latin root, meaning "to thunder."