Word-Wednesday, February 21, 2018

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, February 21, 2018, brought to you by Jablonsky Lodge and Bakery - home of Václav's Halva - located in uptown Poplar Township, Boleslav Jablonsky, poet, priest, Czech nationalist, and proprietor. [https://www.minnpost.com/mnopedia/2014/05/preserving-czech-culture-northern-minnesota-lodge-boleslav-jablonsky-no-219]

February 21 is the 52nd day of the year, with 313 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday or Thursday, and slightly less likely to occur on a Monday or Word-Wednesday, so this may be your lucky day.

Today should be mostly sunny in Palmville Township, with a high of 12 degrees and a low of -4 tonight, where sunrise is at 7:21am and sunset at 5:54pm - giving us 11 hours and 36 minutes of visible light, and where we can look forward to tomorrow having 3 minutes and 29 seconds more visible light.

Events of note involving published works on this day include:

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish "The Communist Manifesto" in London, 1848
• World's first telephone directory is issued, 50 subscribers, none named Hruba, McDonnell, nor Reynolds, 1878
• First issue of New Yorker magazine published, 1925
• 10 words from the 15th C Voynich manuscript decoded, 2014

Authors born on this day include:

• John Henry Newman, England, cardinal/author (Dream of Gerontius), 1801
• Karel Matěj Čapek-Chod, Czech journalist, 1860
• Anaïs Nin, 1903
• Wystan Hugh Auden, 1907
• Erma Bombeck, 1927
• David Foster Wallace, 1962

Today's riddle is by Lewis Carroll:

Why is a raven like a writing desk?*

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
            Quoth the Raven “Voldemort.”

This edition of Wannaskan Almanac Word-Wednesday explores word choice, starting with a simple exercise. Fill in your word choice for the missing word in the brackets below.

Much I marvelled this ungainly [  1  ] to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
            With such name as “Nevermore.” [from The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe]

HAMLET: To be, or not to be--that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have [  2  ] off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.  [from Hamlet, William Shakespeare]

He lay flat on the brown, [  3  ] floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight. [from For whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway, opening sentences]

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the [  4  ]. [from the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson]

1. fowl
2. shuffled
3. pine-needled
4. separation

When Tolstoy said, "The two most powerful warriors are patience and time," he may have been talking about word choice. Whether writing poetry, prose, or polemic, the right word matters.

While patiently waiting for the choicest word, beware the usual suspect word choice pitfalls:

More words are not better, but we can all become wordy when forcing a thought or feeling on to an open white space.

Pushing the envelope leaves most authors falling dead as a doornail, so beware the cliché - think passé.

Jargon or other highly technical terms make the reader work harder than necessary, and they often leave the author sounding like a nerd or a smarty pants.

Grammar rules are the writer's best friend, helping to prevent unclear, vague, awkward, or simply incorrect word choices (see amphiboly and anaphora from the February 7, 2018 Word-Wednesday). Repetition can be good; redundancy is not not not good.

Humility is another face of patience, where only a fool fails to make daily consultations with the dictionary and the thesaurus. Auden's personal Oxford English Dictionary bore heavy coffee and nicotine stains on the edges of every page, A-Z.

Editors work to spot these word choice pitfalls and blue-pencil them to the author's attention. Authors work differently. Authors shape that blank pagescape of whiteness one paragraph - one sentence - one word -  at a time. The most reliable way out of the word choice white zone is a patient application of the Michelangelo Phenomenon: where Michelangelo removed all the unnecessary stone to reveal the statue, the author and the best word patiently work in unison to find one another, such that only the best representation finds its way to the page.

Does the author choose the word?
Does the word choose the author?
Or is there a middle way in the space of imagination where the two find one another?

If the eye is the window to the soul, the word is surely the window into the writer's imagination:

What is now proved was once only imagined. 

William Blake

The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination. 

Emily Dickinson

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young. 

W. Somerset Maugham

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will. 

George Bernard Shaw

This world is but canvas to our imaginations. 

Henry David Thoreau

An idea is salvation by imagination. 

Frank Lloyd Wright

Whatever we build in the imagination will accomplish itself in the circumstances of our lives.

William Butler Yeats

Be more patient than yesterday, change the world by one choice word at a time today, and try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow.

*Lewis Carroll's riddle answer:
Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front.