Word-Wednesday for February 27, 2019

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, February 27, 2019, brought to you today in gratitude for all Roseau County teachers.

February 27 is the 58th day of the year, with 307 days remaining until the end of the year, 33 days remaining until April Fools Day, and 1,091 days until Twosday, February 22, 2022.


Nordhem Lunch: Mushroom & Swiss Chicken


Earth/Moon Almanac for February 27, 2019
Sunrise: 7:10am; Sunset: 6:03pm; 3 minutes, 32 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 2:46am; Moonset: 11:44am, waxing gibbous


Temperature Almanac for February 27, 2019
           Average      Record     Today
High       24               45             8
Low         4              -42             1


February 27 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Kahlua Day
• National Strawberry Day
• National Polar Bear Day
• National Retro Day

February 27 Riddle
A doctor and a plumber waiting in line for the movies. One of them was the father of the other one's son. How could this be?*


February 27 Punctuation Point
Use a colon to introduce a list only when the introductory text is a complete sentence. Not all lists should be introduced with a colon. The general rule is that if the introductory text can stand as a grammatically complete sentence, use a colon; otherwise, do not.


February 27 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 837 15th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.
• 1678 Earl of Shaftesbury unshafted, freed from the Tower of London.
• 1814 Ludwig van Beethoven's 8th Symphony in F premieres.
• 1827 First Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans.
• 1872 Charlotte Ray, first African American woman lawyer in USA, graduates from Howard University.

February 27 Author/Artist Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1622 Rembrandt Carel Fabritius.
• 1807 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
• 1902 John Steinbeck.
• 1923 Viktor Kalabis, Czech composer.

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

• apocrustic: having a repelling power; astringent.
• bodge: to make or adjust in a false or clumsy way.
• chowter: to grumble or mutter sulkily.
• cowin: not very good, opposite of crackin.
• heterodyne: relating to the production of a lower frequency from the combination of two almost equal high frequencies, as used in radio transmission.
• solicitor: a person who tries to obtain business orders, advertising; the chief law officer of a city, town, or government department.
• solicitous: characterized by or showing interest or concern.
• whitesmith: a person who makes articles out of metal, especially tin; a polisher or finisher of metals.

February 27 Word-Wednesday Feature
Editors
There are many important but thankless jobs - social workers, IRS agents, garbage collectors, farmers - jobs one must actually do to know how thankless the work can be. In the World of Writing, the two most thankless jobs might be the typesetter and the editor. By way of definition, the writer's problems with editors is not so much with the editor (noun) as it is with the edit (verb):

• editor: a person having managerial and sometimes policy-making responsibility related to the writing, compilation, and revision of content for a publishing firm or for a newspaper, magazine, or other publication (boring).
• edit: prepare written material for publication by correcting, condensing, or otherwise modifying it (ouch).

In short, editors change what we write - sometimes in small ways, sometimes...

Every writer needs an editor. Consider Scribners editor Max Perkins who worked with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe; or New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers who edited, among others, Hannah Arendt, W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, John Berryman, Truman Capote, Paul Goodman, Lillian Hellman, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Philip Rahv, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson. These editors were not persons known for their proofreader marks. Good editors see three needs: the readers'; the writer's; the publication's. In each case, the prioritization of these three needs will vary.

Robert Silvers was renowned for using a simple statement with his authors to begin discussions after they submitted a piece for publication: "I hope something might be done." A good editor can see the tone she wants. A good editor can help the writer get there with concrete instructions for moving from the wrong tone to the right tone. Good editors ask questions of the author and learn the subject matter to provide detailed, expert suggestions for expanding the writer's perspective in ways that the writer will not take as a personal criticism. Forcing an editor to tip toe around your ego will make for lousy writing.

Does the editor always have the last word? No. In Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the unnamed narrator, then still a teenager, is walking through the countryside near his grandmother's home. While passing a building at the edge of the village, he sees Mademoiselle Vinteuil through a bedroom window with a female friend performing compromising acts of a nature that cannot be discussed in a family blog such as Wannaskan Almanac, but which can be read by interested readers here, near the end of the chapter. Proust's editor wanted to cut the scene, but the novelist insisted on retaining it, asking his editor to understand the scene's importance within the story's overarching philosophy of love. Many early readers were puzzled by and highly critical of this scene of erotic defilement, but Proust understood his artistic vision and was able to convincingly share this vision with his editor.

An editor can make a writer's life happy or dreary, but you get to choose your editor. So, who's your editor?


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.

*They were wife and husband.