Word-Wednesday, March 21, 2018

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, March 21, 2018, brought to you by Roseau Parents Forever and the following keen observations:

Marriage is a great institution – but I'm not ready for an institution. 

Mae West

All family life is organized around the most troubled person in it. 

Sigmund Freud

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets. 

Nora Ephron

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. 

Leo Tolstoy

Some things are best mended by a break.    

Edith Wharton

God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly. 

Paul Valery

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. 

James Baldwin

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one. 

Joseph Campbell

March 21 is the 80th day of the year, with 285 days remaining until the end of the year. In astrology, the day of the equinox (yesterday) is the first full day of the sign of Aries, and it is also the traditional first day of the astrological year. In the twenty-first century, the equinox usually occurs on March 19 or 20, being on March 21 only in 2003 and 2007. The next year in which the equinox occurs on March 21 is 2102.

Sunrise: 7:24am; Sunset: 7:37pm

Today we celebrate:
     National Common Courtesy Day
     National Single Parent Day
     {a hopeful, optimistic coincidence]

The first Earth Day proclamation is issued by Joseph Alioto, Mayor of San Francisco, 1970.

Literary vital statistics for March 21 include:

Johann Paul Richter, 1763, in the village of Wunsiedel - then in the Holy Roman Empire, now Bavaria, Germany. Richter originally planned to enter the clergy, but he developed a passion for literature when attending the University of Leipzig. After graduation, Richter worked several years as a tutor to children of the wealthy people as he began a literary career (first writing under the pen name "Jean Paul," in honor of his hero Jean-Jacques Rousseau).

Richter eventually became one of Germany's most popular writers - today best remembered for the bestselling novels Hesperus (1795) and the 4-volume Titan (1800-1803). Richter also offered influential ideas on education in Levana [Pedagogy] (1807), a work that at the time was favorably compared to Rousseau's Emile.

Never achieving the fame of Goethe or Schiller, Richter lived comfortably from the proceeds of his writing. Today, Richter occupies a footnote in history as the man who introduced the concept of "doppelganger," first using the term in his 1796 novel, Siebenkas.

Also born today:

Phyllis McGinley, 1905, American poet, Love Letters

Peter Bull, 1912, British actor and author, The African Queen, Tom Jones, Dr. Strangelove

Today's Riddle: What is the pink goo between an elephant's toes?

This edition of Wannaskan Almanac Word-Wednesday examines words for colors and available tools for finding the right color-word. There's always Wikipedia, providing an exhausting list of alphabetically ordered color names next to the color with numerical forms of identifications should you wish to either find or mix your own. Examples include 8 varieties of Barbie Pink, Fuzzy Wuzzy, Mulburry (standard and Crayola variations), Phlox, Razzmatazz, Sesame Street Green, Utah Crimson, but no colors named for Palmville Township or Roseau County. Unfortunately, the colors are organized alphabetically, not according to the rainbow spectrum.

Modern painters are of little help because they use numbered variations of yellow, orange, red, violet, blue, green, brown, black, and white, where the greatest number of variations is within reds, followed by yellows, which you can review here.

Artists and naturalists working before the era of photography created an excellent, comprehensive, index of colors and color names, categorized according to the rainbow spectrum, to match exemplars in the animal, vegetable, and mineral natural world, seen here, so that you can find the perfect match for the neck ruff of that golden pheasant or the underbelly of that warty newt (Orpiment Orange).

For the OCD writer, Robert Ridgway was the Curator of the Division of Birds, United States National Museum. Ridgway's 1912 classic, Color Standard and Color Nomenclature, remains the standard for the color obsessed, and is available as an electronic book.

If time is not on your side because you have too little or rapidly approaching deadline, Ingrid Sundberg a color-word thesaurus chart just for you.  

Yes, the color-word world can be overwhelming, let's close with some pleasant simplicity.

PINK, small, and punctual.
Aromatic, low,
Covert in April,
Candid in May,

Dear to the moss,
Known by the knoll,
Next to the robin
In every human soul.

Bold little beauty,
Bedecked with thee,
Nature forswears
Antiquity.
Emily Dickinson

A Prairie Sunset
Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver,
     emerald, fawn,
The earth's whole amplitude and nature's mul-
     tiform power consigned for once to colors;
The light, the genial air possessed by them—
     colors till now unknown,
No limit, confine—not the Western sky alone—
     the high meridian—North, South, all,
Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows
     to the last.
Walt Whitman

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

*A slow clown