Word-Wednesday for June 26, 2019

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, for June 26, 2019, the 26th Wednesday of the year,  the 177th day of the year, with 188 days remaining.


Nordhem Lunch: Hot Ham Sandwich w/Potatoes & Gravy


Earth/Moon Almanac for June 26, 2019
Sunrise: 5:22am; Sunset: 9:31pm; 27 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 2:05am; Moonset: 2:43pm, waning crescent


Temperature Almanac for June 26, 2019
                Average        Record         Today
High            76                   95              81
Low             55                   31              56


June 26 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Coconut Day
• National Beautician’s Day
• National Chocolate Pudding Day
• National Parchment Day
• International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking
• International Fairy Day

June 26 Riddle
What kind of face does a Wannaskan auctioneer like best?*

June 26 Pun

Dawn of a Gnu Day

June 26 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1284 According to the Lüneburg manuscript, a piper leads 130 children of Hamelin away.
• 1870 Richard Wagner's opera Valkyrie, second in his Ring Cycle premieres in Munich, featuring Ride of the Valkyries.
• 1925 The Gold Rush, directed, starring, and written by Charlie Chaplin, is released.
• 1936 Everett Marshall beats Ali Baba in Columbus, to become wrestling champ.
• 1997 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, is published; 1st book in J. K. Rowling's best-selling series.

June 26 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1747 Leopold Koželuch, Czech composer.
• 1817 Branwell Brontë [Patrick Branwell Brontë], English painter and writer and brother of the writers Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.
• 1974 Matt Striker, American professional wrestler, born in Queens, New York.
• 1977 Mark Jindrak, American Professional Wrestler (Marco Corleone).
• 1951 WannaskaWriter [birthday eve]

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

• besom: a broom made of twigs tied around a stick.
• clary: an aromatic herbaceous plant of the mint family, some kinds of which are used as culinary and medicinal herbs.
• dunnage: loose wood, matting, or similar material used to keep a cargo in position in a ship’s hold.
• endling: the last individual of its species or subspecies, which therefore becomes extinct upon its death.  [and so we live in a time that requires such a word]
• hashery: a cheap restaurant, a hash house.
• lucubration: laborious work, study, thought, etc., especially at night; meditation.
• pappus: the tuft of hairs on each seed of thistles, dandelions, and similar plants, which assists dispersal by the wind.
• pilliwinks: an old instrument of torture for the thumbs and fingers.
• rachis: BOTONY a stem of a plant, especially a grass, bearing flower stalks at short intervals; ANATOMY the vertebral column or the cord from which it develops.
• suzerain: a sovereign or state having some control over another state that is internally autonomous. HISTORICAL a feudal overlord.

June 26 Word-Wednesday Feature
Serendipity
ser·en·dip·i·ty: noun, the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

Some words are fun on so many levels, and serendipity is one such word. Horace Walpole coined the word in 1754 after reading The Three Princes of Serendip, the English translation of the title Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo, published by Michele Tramezzino in Venice in 1557, where Tramezzino claimed to have heard the story from one Cristoforo Armeno, who had translated the Persian fairy tale into Italian, and where Serendip is the Classical Persian name for Sri Lanka (Ceylon). Fun etymology; fun to say.

The story begins:
In ancient times there existed in the country of Serendip, in the Far East, a great and powerful king by the name of Giaffer. He had three sons who were very dear to him. And being a good father and very concerned about their education, he decided that he had to leave them endowed not only with great power, but also with all kinds of virtues of which princes are particularly in need. After a long tutorship, the Three Young Princes of Serendip decided to go forth into the world in search of glory and Treasures to honour their father and gain his favour. They decided to not travel as High born princes but like everyman, so that no one would seek to curry favour with them or to give them any special privileges. They found that by travelling in this manner they found much hardship and human suffering along the way. But they also discovered, quite unexpectedly, great and wonderful good in the most unlikely of situations, places, and people. Upon their return home after a number of years of travelling, and telling their father and his court of all they saw and experienced, they decided to commemorate the experience of finding valuable and agreeable things not specifically sought by creating a word. The word the Three Princes of Serendip created is a word called "serendipity." 

The fairy tale unfolds as the heroes princes tell their stories about "always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of". The Three Princes of Serendip has been adapted or used to develop characters by the likes of Voltaire, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle. One can only imagine what forms of serendipity befall the writers of squibs, Iclic, Elevator Girl, and The One.


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.

*One that’s for bidding.