Word-Wednesday for September 11, 2019

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, for September 11, 2019, the 37th Wednesday of the year, the 254th day of the year, with 111 days remaining.


Nordhem Lunch: Hot Pork Sandwich


Earth/Moon Almanac for September 11, 2019
Sunrise: 6:55am; Sunset: 7:47pm; 3 minutes, 31 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 7:13pm; Moonset: 3:58am, waxing gibbous, 91% illuminated


Temperature Almanac for September 11, 2019
                Average           Record           Today
High             68                   88                  57
Low              46                   22                  44


September 11 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Make Your Bed Day
• National Hot Cross Bun Day
• Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance
• American Business Women's Day

September 11 Riddle
What is the difference between a poison-pen letter and a colored candle?*


September 11 Pun
Deja poo: the feeling that you’ve heard this crap before.


September 11 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1773 Benjamin Franklin writes "There never was a good war or bad peace."
• 1906 Mahatma Gandhi coins the term "Satyagraha" to characterize the Non-Violence movement in South Africa.

September 11 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1862 O. Henry [William Sydney Porter].
• 1885 D. H. Lawrence.
• 1892 Pinto Colvig, American animation voice actor (Goofy, Pluto).
• 1917 Herbert Lom, Czech-born British actor.

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

• adulting: the practice of behaving in a way characteristic of a responsible adult, especially the accomplishment of mundane but necessary tasks.
• anechoic: free from echo.
• apophatic: (of knowledge of God) obtained through negation, as opposed to cataphatic, (of knowledge of God) obtained through affirmation.
• brister: a female sibling that has more masculine qualities than feminine; a male sibling that has more female qualities than male.
• equerry: an officer of the British royal household who attends or assists members of the royal family.
• inhere: exist essentially or permanently in; be vested in a person or group or attached to the ownership of a property.
• perpend: to reflect on carefully, ponder; to be attentive, reflect.
• presbyopia: farsightedness caused by loss of elasticity of the lens of the eye, occurring typically in middle and old age.
• rebarbative: unattractive and objectionable.
• sotare: a chimney sweep.

September 11, 2019 Word-Wednesday Feature
Civility: A Study in Words

civility /səˈvilədē/ noun, formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech, root being the word civil: formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech, from the Latin civis, meaning citizen. I’ve recently reviewed two informative works on civility: Civility and Its Discontents by Jenny Unglow, and Mere Civility by Teresa Bejan. Jenny Uglow is a British biographer and historian who approaches civility from a distinctly British cultural lens, and Teresa Bejan is a philosopher who breaks down civility in terms of its essential elements from the perspective of achieving effective, bare-bones discourse. Both authors ground their insights in how we use and understand words related to civility.

In Britain, civility and class became almost inseparably intertwined, where courtesy towards another differs based on that other person's standing in the hierarchical British system of subtle but strict dictates of class and decorum, i.e., know our place.

From the beginning, civil government protected the status of the citizen in the moneyed class and their private property, where trustworthiness was an essential principle of civility in the increasingly credit-based economy of the industrial revolution, and where landed gentry found themselves uncomfortably rubbing elbows with the newly rich.

Beneath the upper classes, the middle and lower classes had an entirely different language and set of rules shaping how persons in those classes should behave with civility towards peers, and how those persons must extend civil courtesies to member of higher classes. Think Downtown Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs and so much of Charles Dickens. Before long, civil courtesies become equated with civilization, which became equated by a civilizing mission directed at barbarians, whether that mission encompassed persons of different classes in Britain or abroad. It's not difficult to see how the oppressive, often violent ways that the British extended civility toward other poorer British citizens could become the driving force for global colonialism justified as a civilizing project or civilizing conquest. Words like quietness, concord, agreement, fellowship, and friendship were so comforting and assuring, but quite constraining. Jenny Uglow summarizes the historical trajectory like this:
"The religious definition—the barbarian as pagan—lingered on, combined with a more general sense of barbarism as 'rude,' 'wild,' 'uncultured' behavior. But in every case, across the ages, 'civility' is where the speaker stands: the barbarians are those who are not 'us.'" [be they Irish or Indian or American].

Teresa Bejan characterizes civility in the words of philosophy, where she defines civility first and foremost as a conversational virtue, and where one's manner and substance become particularly important during discussions of disagreement. Citizenship is also central in Bejan's philosophical world of words, where one cannot unbecome a citizen based on a disagreement with another citizen, no matter how bitter the disagreement. As such, the conversation must continue, where for Bejan, the quality of a civil conversation are those merest, most essential virtues that make ongoing conversations possible. For example, a speaker and a listener must possess the resolve to remain in the room together. Supporting this resolve to remain and continue civil discourse, a speaker and listener must possess tolerance (it's not about your emotions), prudence (know what must be gained and what can be lost), patience (there will be just the right time to drop your boulder of truth), and honesty (the currency of civil discourse) to persevere during disagreement, resisting the urge to simply retreat into the comfort of agreeable, like-minded, tribal companionship.

What to do? Think of little Boris, little Vladimir, little Donald, little Victor, little Gurbanguly, each sitting around the breakfast table as little tots. C.S. Lewis takes us the rest of the way in this excerpt from The Four Loves:
We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be
expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have terminated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on matters which the children understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously sometimes of their religion insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question "Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?" Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?

From A Year with Rilke, September 11 Entry
Dear Darkening Ground, from The Book of Hours I, 61.

Dear darkening ground,
you’ve endured so patiently the walls we’ve built,
perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour

and grant the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor - let their work
grip them another five hours, or seven,

before you become forest again, and water, and widening wilderness
in that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.

Just give me a little more time!
I want to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they’re worthy of you and real.


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 is a tainted paper, and the other is a painted taper.