Word-Wednesday, May 23, 2018

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, May 23, 2018, Free Tree Week, sponsored by the Wannaskan Almanac. We have 300 Jack Pine and 200 Red Pine seedlings for you to plant with your loved ones to make our world a better place. Send an email to opusprime@gmail.com to make arrangements for obtaining your trees.

May 23 is the 143rd day of the year, with 222 days remaining until the end of the year, and 313 days remaining until April Fools Day.

Earth/Moon Almanac for May 23, 2018
Sunrise: 5:33am; Sunset: 9:09pm
Moonrise: 2:34pm Moonset: 3:14am, waxing gibbous

Temperature Almanac for May 23, 2018
         Average    Record   Today
High     70             93         85
Low      44             23         65

May 23 Celebrations
National Lucky Penny Day
National Taffy Day

May 23 Riddle
I saw it on a Palmville Township spring day. It had many long teeth, and it traveled pointing downwards. It stretched out to plunder and came home again - and again, and again - roaming about right up to the walls of each Wannaskan home. It always found those least firm; it spared the healthy ones. What was it?*

May 23 Notable historic events, literary or otherwise
1785 Benjamin Franklin announces his invention of bifocals
1900 Associated Press News Service forms in New York
1911 NY Public Library building at 5th Avenue dedicated by President Taft
1966 The Beatles release "Paperback Writer"
1969 BBC orders 13 episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus
1998 The Good Friday Agreement is accepted in a referendum in Northern Ireland with 75% voting yes

Words I looked up this week: anaphora, barracoons, coffle, cosset, groover, himpathy, mythistory, neologism, ocotillo, phylactery, recension, shtetl, thalweg, tulle

Today's edition of Wannaskan Almanac Word-Wednesday explores the oxymoron, from the Greek, oxymoros, "pointedly foolish", a figure of speech generally consisting of two apparently contradictory terms, which often express a startling paradox, such as in the phrases, "jumbo shrimp" or "too much Guinness" or "peacekeeper missile" or "act naturally" or "pretty ugly". Creative writers can use the oxymoron to good effect, such as in Romeo and Juliet, Act I, when Romeo, declaring that he is out of favor with Rosalind, jests ablut the nature of love:

Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O anything of nothing first created!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

From A Year with Rilke, May 23 entry:
The Buddha in Glory, from New Poems
Center of all centers, innermost core,
almond sweetening in its self-embrace -
all of this, out to the stars,
is the fruit of your body. We greet you.

You feel how little clings to you now.
Endlessness is your shell,
and there, too, the strength.
It is summoned b the radiance

of the full and glowing suns
that wheel around you.
Yet those stars will be outlasted
by what you have begun.

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

*a rake