Word-Wednesday for January 30, 2019

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, January 30, 2019, brought to you by the Lake Bronson Improvement Committee Super Bowl Taco Bar, February 3, 2019; serving starts at noon; proceeds to benefit community events.

January 30 is the 30th day of the year, with 335 days remaining until the end of the year, 61 days remaining until April Fools Day, and 1,119 days until Twosday, February 22, 2022.

Nordhem Lunch: Hot Pork Sandwich

Earth/Moon Almanac for January 30, 2019
Sunrise: 7:56am; Sunset: 5:17pm; 2 minutes, 56 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 3:51am; Moonset: 1:06pm, waning crescent


Temperature Almanac for January 30, 2019
            Average      Record     Today
High        14               40           -20
Low         -7              -43           -35

January 30 Local News Headline
Roseau Time-Region: County Population Unchanged Since 1890: Commissioners Baffled, Blame Mosquitoes

January 30 Celebrations from National Day Calendar
National Croissant Day


January 30 Riddle
We are very little creatures; all of us have different features.
One of us in glass is set; one of us you’ll find in jet.
Another you may see in tin, and a fourth is boxed within.
If the fifth you should pursue, it can never fly from you.
What are we?*


January 30 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1815 Burned US Library of Congress re-established with Thomas Jefferson's 6,500 volumes.
• 1818 John Keats composes his sonnet "When I Have Fears".
• 1873 Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne is published, Nellie Bly, aka, Elizabeth Cochran, is 9 years old.
• 1928 Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude premieres in New York.
• 1958 UK House of Lords passes bill allowing women to take seats.

January 30 Author/Artist Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1760 František Xaver Partsch, Czech composer.
• 1882 Franklin Roosevelt, 32nd US President.
• 1912 Barbara Tuchman, American historian/author

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:

• gorse: a yellow-flowered shrub of the pea family, the leaves of which are modified to form spines, native to western Europe and North Africa.
• hybristophilia: a paraphilia in which sexual arousal, facilitation, and attainment of orgasm are responsive to and contingent upon being with a partner known to have committed an outrage, cheating, lying, known infidelities, or crime — such as rape, murder, or armed robbery
• noisome: having an extremely offensive smell.
• ondful: Malicious; spiteful, envious.
• opitulate: to help, assist, aid.
• puckeroo: useless, broken, out of order; destroyed, finished.
• rhotic: relating to or denoting a dialect or variety of English (e.g. in most of the US and southwestern England) in which r is pronounced before a consonant (as in hard ) and at the ends of words (as in far). Boston is non-rhotic, where if a native son talks about losing his car key's, one can't assume that he hasn't also lost his pants of a dull brownish-yellow color, made of a strong cotton fabric used in military clothing.
• vexillology: the study of flags.

January 30 Word-Wednesday Feature
Vowels
I've recently read two fascinating articles on the development of the alphabet with respect to the 5 late-comers to all written words, the vowels: "From Memory to Innovation: The Vowel Revolution in the Making of the Modern Mind" by Colin Wells in the Fall 2018 edition of The Hedgehog Review, and "Greek to Me" by Mary Norris in the January 14, 2019 edition of The New Yorker. The Greek invention of the alphabet with vowels enabled humankind to shift away from oral communications and unleash the rational, poetic, and literary capacities of human intellect through the spread of new ideas with the first clearly articulated system for sharing abstract thought. Other previous writing systems —Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese among them — were difficult to learn or to read.

This is not about the superiority of Greek civilization, intelligence, rationality, or anything like that. Some smart Greek just happened to be the first person to develop the technology. The Greek alphabet was based on the earlier writing of the Phoenicians, which contained only 22 constants. Yes, the Phoenician lphbt was a big advance on previous syllabic systems, which were hard to either read and to write. New users had to memorize hundreds of signs, and of course, no one could record how the signs should be pronounced, much less transcribed. Reading syllabic system required lots of guesswork.

The vowel alphabet only had to be invented once. One way or another, every true alphabet in the world since that invention is based on the original Greek model. Vowels supplanted the old way of reading by removing the guesswork, and the vowel alphabet offered something unprecedented: an innovation technology. The vowel alphabet allowed people to write down and share experiences across great distances of time and space without the human voice.
 

Homer and his friends recorded their oral epics, maybe to scribe boys. Hesiod uses the same epic language and meter to jot down his poems. But in no time Archilochus, and then Sappho, write down their intensely personal poems about jealousy, desire, and other subjects to risqué for mention in Wannaskan Almanac. The philosophers and the scientists were heartbeats behind.

Vowels, a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Oliver Bernard

A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue : vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
Which buzz around cruel smells,

Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
In anger or in the raptures of penitence;

U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
The peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows
Which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads;

O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,
Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels:
O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes!


Be better than yesterday, learn a new word today, try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow, and write when you have the time.

*vowels