Word-Wednesday for January 22, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, January 22, 2020, the 4th Wednesday of the year,  the 22nd day of the year, with 344 days remaining, but only 70 days until April 1st.

Nordhem Lunch: Hot Ham Sandwich w/Potatoes & Gravy

Earth/Moon Almanac for January 22, 2020
Sunrise: 8:06am; Sunset: 5:04pm; 2 minutes, 33 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 6:32apm; Moonset: 2:55pm, waning crescent


Temperature Almanac for January 22, 2020
                 Average          Record           Today
High             15                    50                  27
Low             -6                   -55                  15


January 22 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Blonde Brownie Day
• Library Shelfie Day
• Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day

January 22 Word Riddle
What word of six letters contains six words, besides itself, without transposing?*


January 22 Pun

January 22 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1673 Postal service between New York & Boston inaugurated.
• 1816 George Gordon Byron completes poems Parisina and Siege of Corinth.
• 1938 Thornton Wilder's Our Town premieres.
• 1953 Arthur Miller's The Crucible premieres.

January 22 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1561 Francis Bacon.
• 1788 George Gordon Byron.
• 1849 August Strindberg.
• 1887 Helen Hoyt.

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

• ambagical: of language or writing: indirect, circumlocutory; obscure.
• flâneur: a gentleman who saunters about exploring the city streets, taking in the culture and atmosphere.
• gloam: the time of day immediately following sunset.
• lollygag: to waste time; to loaf, dilly-dally, or Stevie-Stavie.
• malagruze: to disarrange, put into disorder or disarray; to cause havoc; to harm physically.
• periclitation: a perilous situation or the state of being in such.
• prescind: to cut off beforehand, prematurely, or abruptly; to remove, cut away.
• scripophilist: a person who collects old bond and share certificates as a pursuit or hobby.
• verecund: modest, bashful, shy.
• wuzzle: to move freely around a place or at a social function, associating with others; to mingle.
• zygomancy: divination by use of suspended weights, or by weight comparison.

January 22, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Synesthesia
Synesthesia is generally defined as a medical condition in which one of the five senses simultaneously stimulates another sense. Depending on the nature of a specific neurological condition, sensory inputs become pathologically interlinked, as when a person with such a condition may not only see letters of the alphabet, but also associate them with particular scents. One wonders how Chairman Joe smells. For a synesthetic on Sesame Street, C may indeed be for cookie. On the other hand, C might smell like an entirely different kettle of fish for a synesthetic on Castleknock, with reference to James Joyce's Ulysses.

And then there's WannaskaWriter...

Synesthesia is also a longstanding technique used by writers to present ideas, characters, or places in a manner that appeals to more than one of the five senses, or more typically, in a manner that appears to transpose one sense experience for another, e.g., a sound for a smell. Common examples include the following English idioms:

• I smell trouble.
• She spoke in honeyed tones.
• Actions speak louder than words.
• You could cut the tension in the air with a knife.

Examples of synesthesia in literature include the following excerpts:

The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto I, by Dante Alighieri
Back to the region where the sun is silent.
[sight and hearing]

Othello, Act 3, Scene 3, by William Shakespeare
Iago: Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
[sight and feeling]

King Lear, Act 2, Scene 2, by William Shakespeare
Lear: Thou art a lady: if only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keep thee warm.           
[touch and sight]

The Sensitive Plant, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,
It was felt like an odour within the sense.
[hearing and smell]

Ode to a Nightingale, by John Keats
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sun burnt mirth!
[taste and hearing]

Dying by Emily Dickinson
With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
could not see to see.
[sound and sight]

Salome, by Oscar Wilde
JOKANAAN: Back! daughter of Babylon! Come not near the chosen of the Lord. Thy mother hath filled the earth with the wine of her iniquities, and the cry of her sins hath come up to the ears of God.
SALOMÉ: Speak again, Jokanaan. Thy voice is wine to me.
[taste and hearing]

A Tuft of Flowers, by Robert Frost
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground...
[sight and hearing]

Harlem, by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.    Or does it explode?
[smell, taste, touch]


From A Year with Rilke, January 22 Entry
If I Cried Out, from First Duino Elegy.

If I cried out, who
in the hierarchies of angels
would hear me?

An if one of them should suddenly
take me to his heart,
I would perish in the power of his being.
For beauty is but the beginning of terror.
We can barely endure it
and are awed
when it declines to destroy 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.

*herein.