Word-Wednesday for July 17, 2019

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, for July 17, 2019, the 29th Wednesday of the year,  the 198th day of the year, with 167 days remaining.


Nordhem Lunch: Hot Turkey Plate


Earth/Moon Almanac for July 17, 2019
Sunrise: 5:38am; Sunset: 9:21pm; 2 minutes, 3 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 10:07pm; Moonset: 6:11am, waning gibbous


Temperature Almanac for July 17, 2019
                Average           Record          Today
High             79                   94                 75
Low              56                   41                 62


July 17 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Lottery Day
• National Peach Ice Cream Day
• National Tattoo Day
• Wrong Way Corrigan Day
• National Yellow Pig Day
• World Emoji Day
• National Hot Dog Day 

July 17 Riddle

He sits and [blank] over her [blank].

What two 5-letter words that share the same letters fill in the blanks in the sentence above?*

July 17 Pun

July 17 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1070 Arnulf III the Hapless becomes Earl of Flanders.
• 1473 Charles the Stout conquers Nijmegen.
• 1914 Giants outfielder Red Murray is knocked unconscious by lightning after catching a flyball, ending 21 inning game, Giants win 3-1.
• 1938 Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan leaves New York flying for Los Angeles, winds up in Ireland supposedly by mistake.
• 1967 Monkees perform at Forest Hills, New York, Jimi Hendrix is opening act.
• 1994 Hulk Hogan beats Ric Flair to win WCW wrestling championship.

July 17 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1889 Erle Stanley Gardner.
• 1937 Elmer Fudd.
• 1954 Angela Merkel.

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

• beetle: make one’s way hurriedly or with short, quick steps; (of a person’s eyebrows) project or overhang threateningly.
• chaudron: entrails.
• gamphrel: stupid or foolish person; a fool, a blockhead, an idiot.
• helot: a member of a class of serfs in ancient Sparta, intermediate in status between slaves and citizens; a serf or slave.
• hinky: nervous, jittery; suspicious.
• jacquerie: a communal uprising or revolt.
• manqué: having failed to become what one might have been; unfulfilled.
• pantoufles: slippers
• punt: a long, narrow flat-bottomed boat, square at both ends and propelled with a long pole, used on inland waters chiefly for recreation.
• satrap: a provincial governor in the ancient Persian empire; any subordinate or local ruler.

July 17 Word-Wednesday Feature
Toponyms
top·o·nym /ˈtäpəˌnim/ noun, a place name, especially one derived from a topographical feature.

Here are some common words that were coined in or inspired by specific places.

angora: named after the breeds of rabbits, cats, and goats that frequented the region around Ankara, the present day capital of Turkey.

academia: Plato taught classes to his pupils at Akademeia, which translates roughly to the “grove of Akademos”, an enclosed garden located near Athens. Akademos is named after the Trojan war hero of the same name.

attic: literally means “Athenian”, was also a decorative addition placed upon the top of many ancient Greek buildings (the top part of the parthenon).

badminton: named after the seat of the Duke of Beaufort in Gloucestershire, the game was invented at Badminton House in rural England.

bantam: often used to describe age and weight groupings in sport derives from a small town in Indonesia, Banten, which hosted a small-to-midsize chicken popular with traders at the time.

bath: comes from the name of the English city, and not the other way around.

bikini: named after the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where Americans conducted atomic bomb testing in 1946. In 1947, French engineer Louis Reard named his two-piece swimsuit invention after the place.

cantalopes: Originally from Armenia, the town of Cantalupo in Sabina grew the first cantaloupes in Europe.

chartreuse: a horrible color comes from the liqueur of the same name, which was first distilled by the monks of the Carthusian order near Grenoble, France.

clink: slang tem for prison comes from the London prison, formerly located on Clink Street.

duffel bag: produced in the small town of Duffel, Belgium, which is located near present-day Antwerp.

epsom salts: named after the Epsom Spring, a popular spa among Londoners in the seventeenth century, where the spring contained high levels of magnesium sulphate.

geyser: a natural phenomenon caused by the shooting of hot water through a vent. Popular with tourists, the word ‘geyser’ comes from Geysir, the location of a hot spring in Iceland.

jerseys: part of the United Kingdom, the Channel Island of Jersey made the majority of garments from the cattle they bred. In time, they become a fashionable sweater, and from then on, sports teams adopted them as uniforms.

laconic: describing people who are tight-lipped and generally quiet in speech, laconic comes from Laconia, the Ancient Greek district where Sparta was located.

limerick: ask Chairman Joe about this.

meander: from the river Buyuk Menderes in Turkey, a river known for taking a very lengthy, sinuous route.

rugby: named after the Rugby School in England, a high school long associated with Oxford. In the nineteenth century, two types of football were popular among schoolboys, Rugby football and Association football, when it was popular slang to called the former rugger and the latter soccer.

sardonic: describing a mocking, funny look, this word comes from the island of Sardinia, specifically, its endemic grass herbs sardonia, which when eaten, causes one to grimace.


From A Year with Rilke, July 17 Entry
The Golden Hive, from Letter to Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925

Nature, and the things we live with and use, precede us and come after us. But they are, so long as we are here, our possession and our friendship. They know with us our needs and our pleasures, as they did those of our ancestors, whose trusted companions they were.

So it follow that all that is here is not to be despised and put down, but, precisely because it did precede us, to be taken by us with the innermost understanding that these appearances and things must be seen and transformed.

Transformed? Yes. For our talks is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being. We are bees of the invisible. Passionately we plunder the honey of the visible in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible.


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.

*mopes and poems