Word-Wednesday for April 3, 2019

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, April 3, 2019, the 14th Wednesday of the year, the 93rd day of the year, with 272 days remaining until the end of the year.


Nordhem Lunch: Hot Ham Sandwich w/Potatoes & Gravy.


Earth/Moon Almanac for April 3, 2019
Sunrise: 6:58am; Sunset: 7:56pm; 3 minutes, 38 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 6:49am; Moonset: 6:12pm, waning crescent


Temperature Almanac for April 3, 2019
                Average          Record         Today
High            44                   76                33
Low             23                   -5                18


April 3 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Film Score Day
• National Tweed Day
• National Chocolate Mousse Day
• National Find a Rainbow Day
• National Walking Day
• Childhelp National Day of Hope

April 3 Riddle
Who is the science fiction hero that time travels in a British outhouse?*


April 3 Pun
To some, marriage is a word; to others, it’s a sentence.


April 3 Punctuation Point
Braces 

Braces { }, also known as curly brackets, are used in various programing languages, certain mathematical expressions, and some musical notation. They should never be used in place of parentheses ( ) or square brackets [ ].



April 3 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1776 George Washington receives honorary Ll.D. degree from Harvard College.
• 1848 Thomas Douglas becomes the first public school teacher in San Francisco.
• 1860 Pony Express began between St Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California.
• 1913 British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst sentenced to 3 years in jail.
• 1955 The American Civil Liberties Union announces it will defend Allen Ginsberg's book Howl against obscenity charges.
• 1957 Samuel Beckett's Endgame premieres in London.
• 2019 Jackie Helms-Reynolds has a photograph featured on this day's Wiktel Home Page.

April 3 Author/Artist Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1783 Washington Irving.
• 1934 Jane Goodall.
• 1937 Petunia Pig.
• 1961 Eddie Murphy.

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

• badinage: humorous or witty conversation.
• dibber: a pointed wooden stick for making holes in the ground so that seeds, seedlings or small bulbs can be planted.
• guff: trivial, worthless, or insolent talk or ideas.
• eleventy: chiefly in combination with a number or other quantifier: amounting to a very large (but indefinite) number or quantity. Also occasionally: one hundred and ten.
• lavalliere: an item of jewelry consisting of a pendant, sometimes with one stone, suspended from a necklace.
• ludic: showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness.
• mignardise: tenderness, gentleness; affected delicacy of behavior or appearance; affectation.
• pillion: a seat for a passenger behind a motorcyclist.
• rumspringa: (in some Amish communities) a period of adolescence in which boys and girls are given greater personal freedom and allowed to form romantic relationships, usually ending with the choice of baptism into the church or leaving the community.
• twee: excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental.

April 3 Word-Wednesday Feature
Euphemisms
eu·phe·mism /ˈyo͞ofəˌmizəm/, noun, a mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing. Among the most common categories for euphemisms include death and dying (cashed in his chips), intelligence (a Guinness short of a six pack), mental illness (fruit loops), sexuality (birds and the bees, making whoopee, batting for the other side), honesty (categorically inaccurate), pregnancy (bun in the oven, or in the club), personal finances (negative cash flow), physical attributes ( big-boned, vertically challenged, differently abled).

However, the most common (and popular) category of euphemism are those in any way related to unpleasant bodily functions, particularly the scatological. I imagine many readers poo-pooing, then logging out at the mention of such euphemisms as a serious subject for a writer’s almanac. I would refer such readers to the one of the greatest of literary classics, Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. In Chapter XX. Regarding the most incomparable and singular adventure ever concluded with less danger by a famous knight, and which was concluded by the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha, on pages 162-163, Cervantes used the following extended deployment of creative euphemism with regard to Sancho’s distress:

At this moment it seems that either because of the cold of the morning, which was approaching, or because Sancho had eaten something laxative for supper, or because it was in the natural order of things—which is the most credible—he felt the urge and desire to do what no one else could do for him, but his heart was so overwhelmed by fear that he did not dare to move a nail paring away from his master. But not doing what he desired to do was not possible, either, and so what he did as a compromise was to free his right hand, which was clutching the back of the saddle, and with it, cunningly and without making a sound, he loosened the slip knot that was the only thing holding up his breeches, and when he did they came down and settled around his ankles like leg irons. After this he lifted his shirt the best he could and stuck out both buttocks, which were not very small. Having done this—which he thought was all he had to do to escape that terrible difficulty and anguish—he was overcome by an even greater distress, which was that it seemed to him he could not relieve himself without making some noise and sound, and he began to clench his teeth and hunch his shoulders, holding his breath as much as he could, but despite all his efforts, he was so unfortunate that he finally made a little noise quite different from the one that had caused him so much fear. Don Quixote heard it and said:

“What sound is that, Sancho?”

“I don’t know, Senor,” he responded. “It must be something new; adventures and misadventures never begin for no reason.”

He tried his luck again, and things went so smoothly that with no more noise or disturbance than the last time, he found himself rid of the burden that had caused him so much grief. But since Don Quixote had a sense of smell as acute as his hearing, and Sancho was joined so closely to him, and the vapors rose up almost in a straight line, some unavoidably reached his nostrils, and as soon as they did he came to the assistance of his nostrils and squeezed them closed between two fingers, and in a somewhat nasal voice,
he said:

“It seems to me, Sancho, that you are very frightened.”

“Yes, I am,” responded Sancho, “but what makes your grace see that now more than ever?”

“Because you smell now more than ever, and not of amber,” responded Don Quixote.

“That might be,” said Sancho, “but it’s not my fault, it’s your grace’s for choosing the most ungodly times to put me through the strangest paces.”

“Take three or four of them back, friend,” said Don Quixote without removing his fingers from his nose, “and from now on be more mindful of your person and of what you owe to mine; engaging in so much conversation with you has caused this lack of respect.”

“I’ll wager,” replied Sancho, “that your grace thinks I’ve done something with my person I shouldn’t have.”

“The less said the better, Sancho my friend,” responded Don Quixote.

Master and servant passed the night in these exchanges and others like them.

From A Year with Rilke, April 3 Entry
As if in response to the darkness of Don Quixote, Chapter XX, Rilke paints bright moving picture in his poem, Shining in the Distance, from Uncollected Poems.

Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunlit one.
The way to it, barely begun, lies ahead.
So we are grasped by what we have not grasped,
full of promise, shining in the distance.

It changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something we barely sense, but are;
a movement beckons, answering our movement…
But we just feel the wind against us.



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.



Doctor Poo*