Word-Wednesday February 14, 2018

And here is the Writers Almanac for Word-Wednesday, February 14, 2018, brought to you by Cantinagram.com - "Wee nips for adults of all ages over 21." Catch our Valentine's Day specials: matching sets of wines, champagnes, cream liquors, and other romantic intoxicants, sized to your preference and the body mass indices of you of your special Valentine.

With a Palmville Township forecast of partly sunny skies with a high of 33 degrees Fahrenheit, conditions are favorable for spotting Palmville Township's Unofficial Insect, the snow flea. Nominations are now open for Palmville Township Bird and Motto.

Otherwise...

My funny Valentine, sweet comic Valentine

You make me smile with my heart

Your looks are laughable

Unphotographable

Yet you're my favorite work of art

Is your figure less than Greek?

Is your mouth a little weak?

When you open it to speak

Are you…             [lyrics by Chet Baker]

Today's holiday-word for this Word-Wednesday edition of the Wannaskan Almanac:

fun·ny /ˈfənē/ adjective; 1. causing laughter or amusement; 2. difficult to explain or understand - strange.

Notable funny-strange events on February 14 include:

Pope Gregory VII excommunicates Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV (for the first time), 1076; 

Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest opens in London, 1895; 

USSR adopts the Gregorian calendar, 1918;

Little Review faces obscenity charges for publishing Ulysses in New York, 1921;

Seven killed in St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, 1929.

Regarding this holiday's namesake, papists almost universally agree that little is know about the history of Saint Valentine. Should readers of this almanac be interested in the history of this Catholic martyr, the open source text from Butler's Lives of the Saints, Complete Edition, here: https://archive.org/stream/ButlersLivesOfTheSaintsCompleteEdition/ButlersLivesOfTheSaintsCompleteEdition_djvu.txt [see page 332].

Today's Valentine Riddle: What did the boy light bulb say to the girl light bulb?*

Notable authors born on this date include:

Frederick Douglass, 1818;

George Jean Nathan, 1882, who after graduating from Cornell University in 1904, was hired as a cub reporter for the New York Herald. In 1908, he became the drama critic for H. L. Mencken's The Smart Set literary magazine, and in 1924 he and Mencken co-founded The American Mercury, a monthly magazine influential in American culture [The American Mercury helped launch the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, William Saroyan, among others]. George Nathan was a quotable writer, who in keeping with one of the more common outcomes of the celebration of today's funny holiday noted:

"Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a particular brand of beer
exactly to his taste
he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery."

Valentine's Day: A Day of Romance. Originally celebrated as Lupercalia, the pagan holiday survived the initial rise of Christianity and but was deemed “un-Christian” and outlawed at the end of the 5th century when Pope Gelasius sanctified the popular profane holiday declaring February 14 to be henceforth be known as St. Valentine's Day. As the first major holiday since the founding of Wannaskan Almanac, today's Word Wednesday examines words related to the many manifestations of the word, love.

A very splendored thing, love certainly has a panoply of often paradoxical definitions, which as it's roots in Lupercalia suggest, return authors once again to considerations of the sacred and profane.  The etymology of the word comes from a marriage of the Old English lufu, of Germanic origin; from an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit lubhyati [desires]; and from the Latin libet [it is pleasing] and Latin libido [desire].

Whether as noun or verb, love has come to mean an intense feeling of deep affection - characterized variously in sacred terms such as devotion, worship, adoration, compassion, charity, goodwill, caring, regard, solicitude, concern, friendliness, friendship, kindness, charity, sympathy, kindness, altruism, unselfishness, philanthropy, or benevolence. In more secular terms, love is characterized idolization, passion, ardor, desire, lust, yearning, infatuation, captivation, enthrallment, entrancement, where one can be smitten, crazy, mad, wild, nuts about, or besotted.

Contemporary authors must avoid heteronormativity and other patterns of heterosexism by maintaining familiarity with the rapidly changing word-world of gender identity, if only with respect to the proper use of personal pronouns: http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2013/01/a-comprehensive-list-of-lgbtq-term-definitions/ [bookmark this resource in your browser].

Whether writing for a sacred or secular readership, there's always the qualia of love - the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by whatever phenomena gives rise to a character's affections. And as Rumi advises us all to remember:

Love is the whole thing.
We are only pieces.
Love is the sea of no end.
We are a drop of it.
The Word brings forth hundreds of proofs.
We can find our way only through them.

The sky turns only with Love.
Without Love, even the stars
Are eclipsed, extinguished.
With Love, hunched back dal become elif.
Once elif loses Love, it turns into dal.

The word is the Fountain of Life,
Because it originates
From the Love of the knowledge
Of the real truth of things.

Don't keep Love away from your Soul,
So that your good deeds may bear fruit
And keep growing.

Be better than yesterday, learn a new word today, and try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow.

*I love you a whole watt!