Word-Wednesday for September 4, 2019

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, for September 4, 2019, the 36th Wednesday of the year,  the 247th day of the year, with 118 days remaining.


Nordhem Lunch: Meatloaf Dinner


Earth/Moon Almanac for September 4, 2019
Sunrise: 6:45am; Sunset:8:02pm; 3 minutes, 29 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 1:17pm; Moonset: 11:03pm, waxing crescent


Temperature Almanac for September 4, 2019
                Average           Record          Today
High             71                    94                 69
Low              48                   29                 53

September 4 Local News
Roseau Time Region
High School Student from Gatzke Grows Human Vocal Cords in Petri Dish: Results Speak for Themselves.


September 4 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Wildlife Day
• National Newspaper Carrier Day
• National Macadamia Nut Day
• National Grandparents' Day

September 4 Riddle
What is the difference between a chef starting to cook a meal and a forgotten chicken on a barbecue spit?*


September 4 Pun
A dyslexic poet writes inverse.


September 4 Punctuation Point
i before e, except when your foreign neighbor, Keith, received eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters. Weird, huh?


September 4 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1682 English astronomer Edmond Halley observes the comet named after him.
• 1893 English author Beatrix Potter first writes the story of Peter Rabbit for a 5 year old boy.
• 1950 Beetle Bailey comic strip debuts in twelve newspapers.

September 4 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1768 Francois René de Chateaubriand, French novelist.
• 1824 Anton Bruckner, Austrian composer.
• 1824 Phoebe Cary, American poet.
• 1909 Karel Horky, Czech composer.
• 1958 Shiro Koshinaka, wrestler.

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

• boobery: the action or fact of doing something foolish, especially making foolish mistakes; foolishness, stupidity. Also: an instance of this; a foolish act or thing.
• bricoleur: a person who performs a variety of manual jobs; someone who fixes things in an ingenious manner.
• cognate: (of a word) having the same linguistic derivation as another; from the same original word or root (e.g., English /is/, German /ist/, Latin /est/, from Indo-European /esti/ ).
• cowpunk: a performer of a type of popular music combining elements of country and western with those of punk rock; this type of music; (also) the culture and fashion associated with this music.
• louch: adj., not reputable or decent, from the French louche, which also means “squinting,” and that word comes from the Latin lusca, meaning “one-eyed.”
• maieutic: of or denoting the Socratic mode of inquiry, which aims to bring a person’s latent ideas into clear consciousness.
• pilgarlic: a bald head or bald-headed man.
• smoot: to do casual work as a printer; a nonstandard, humorous unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank named after: Oliver R. Smoot, SI units: 1.702 meters, Imperial/US units: 5 feet 7 inches.
• spume: froth or foam, especially that found on waves.
• testudines: an order of reptiles which comprises the turtles, terrapins, and tortoises.

September 4, 2019 Word-Wednesday Feature
Phobias

Defined as exaggerated and irrational fear and a diagnosable mental disorder, authors commonly use this mental affliction to round out an important character or as a tool to create dynamic, sustainable narratives. For example:

Miss Havisham of Great Expectations suffers from metathesiophobia (fear of changes).
Peter Pan suffers from gerascophobia (fear of growing old).
The narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground suffers from a generalized social anxiety, known simply as "social phobia".
The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's The Premature Burial suffers from unusually intense taphephobia (fear of being buried alive).
Humbert Humbert of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita suffers from both gynophobia (fear of women) and gerontophobia (fear of old people).
Damien from The Omen is smitten with hierophobia (fear of priests or sacred things).
Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter series suffers from arachnophobia (fear of spiders).
Indiana Jones and his ophidiophobia.

Some of the most common phobia include:
Claustrophobia: Fear of being in constricted, confined spaces.
Aerophobia: fear of flying.
Arachnophobia: fear of spiders.
Vehophobia: fear of driving a car.
Emetophobia: fear of vomiting.
Erythrophobia: fear of blushing.
Hypochondria: fear of becoming ill.
Zoophobia: fear of animals.
Aquaphobia: fear of water.
Acrophobia: fear of heights.
Haemophobia: fear of injuries involving blood.
Escalaphobia: fear of escalators.
Tunnel phobia: fear of tunnels.
Agoraphobia: fear of and avoidance of places or situations that might cause panic and feelings of being trapped, helpless, or embarrassed.
Nebulaphobia: fear of fog or clouds.

Authors craft their phobic characters with specific symptoms. When a person is exposed to the phobia fear trigger, common symptoms across all major phobias include: a sensation of uncontrollable anxiety; the feeling that the fear trigger must be avoided at all costs; a loss of the ability to function normally or control one's feelings.

The physical sensations that accompany a phobic trigger include: sweating, abnormal breathing, accelerated heartbeat, trembling, hot flushes or chills, choking, chest pain or tightness, dry mouth, nausea, dizziness, headache, and wet, warm drawers.


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 turns on a burner, and the other burns on a turner.