Word-Wednesday for February 19, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, February 19, 2020, the 8th Wednesday of the year,  the 50th day of the year, with 316 days remaining, but only 42 days until April 1st.


Nordhem Lunch: Hot Turkey Plate

Earth/Moon Almanac for February 19, 2020
Sunrise: 7:26am; Sunset: 5:50pm; 3 minutes, 27 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 5:24am; Moonset: 1:44pm, waning crescent


Temperature Almanac for February 19, 2020
                Average           Record          Today
High             23                   50                  4
Low                1                  -45                -13


February 19 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Chocolate Mint Day
• National Lash Day
• National Vet Girls RISE Day

February 19 Word Riddle
Another way to say,
“Tripudiate, as though gongoozlers have absquatulated.”*


February 19 Pun
In an act of kindness, WannaskaWriter spotted an albino Dalmatian on one of his Mikinaak Crick walks.


February 19 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1932 William Faulkner completes his novel Light in August.
• 1949 1st Bollingen Prize for poetry awarded to Ezra Pound.
• 1953 William Inge's Picnic premieres in New York.
• 1963 Robert Frost wins Bollingen Prize.
• 1963 The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan.

February 19 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1473 Nicolaus Copernicus.
• 1917 Carson McCullers.
• 1922 Josef Matej, Czech composer.
• 1952 Amy Tan.

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:
aspectabund: having a very expressive face.
deek: a look; a peep.
dowsabel: the comely maiden who monopolizes your every waking thought and fills your dreams with longing.
frobly-mobly: neither well nor unwell.
frumicate: to put on airs; to act as though one is superior to others.
kirkify: to make like a Presbyterian church in appearance.
oeillade: an ogling stare or amorous gaze.
oinomancy: a form of divination involving observation of the colors and other features of wine; not to be confused with guinnessomancy: a form of inebriation after the consumption of too much Guinness marked by delusional puffery about one’s own abilities.
sitzfleisch: the ability to sit through something that is tedious or dull; one’s buttocks.
twire: to peep or glance obliquely.


February 19, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Omens

An event regarded as a portent of good or bad, writers use omens to create foreshadowing, suspense, or pivots in plot or character development. And why not? Life is filled with omens, the bad: celestial (comets and eclipses), animal (black cats and owls); the banal (falling pictures, breaking a mirror, walking under a ladder); the good: finding a four leaf clover, sneezing three times, seeing a shooting star; and those that mark a turn in your fortunes: putting on your clothing inside-out, simultaneous appearance of sun and rain, and bird poop landing on your head.

Imaginative writers then weave in subsequent symbols of bad or good luck to support the omen.

In Oedipus the King, Sophocles uses one of the oldest tricks in the omen-book, the oracle, to outline how Creon must correct plague-stricken Thebes by finding out who murdered King Laius. Then the blind prophet Tiresias lets slip in an argument with Oedipus that the murder will marry his own mother.

In Macbeth, William Shakespeare becomes more theatrical with three rhyming witches who speak in unison about Macbeth's future. A man of action, Macbeth thinks he can take matters into is own hands, using their witchy words as justification for murdering the King of Scotland. Not wasting an excellent omen, Shakespeare has the Weird Sisters revisit Mac with a cryptic message about the purported safety of Dunsinane Castle. Blind to the actual meaning of Birnam Wood, Macduff (a c-section baby), slays Macbeth.

Oscar Wilde uses the omenry of wabbits and weaponry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, when Dorian begs his hunting companions not to shoot a beautiful rabbit they encounter. His companions disregard his warning and shoot, but the cry of a man follows the shot, and the man dies instantly. Narcissistic Dorian becomes concerned that the event might be a bad omen.

In her feminist and anti-colonial response to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys uses a rotting horse covered with flies under a hot Jamaican  sun early in Wide Sargasso Sea as a jarring image to foreshadow the the sequence of Antoinette's family.

In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the sailors grow impatient with the albatross - an omen of good luck and the bird supposedly responsible for breezes - and kill the bird after it leads them to a fog. Eventually stranded, the sailors chant the now familiar refrain, "Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink." There's nothing like irony to cap off a good omen.

Then there's poor old Joe Christmas in Light in August, by William Faulkner. Being born on Christmas Day confers no luck on Mr. Christmas. His life as a mulatto - accepted by neither the white or black communities - ends as one might expect based on the life of another famous person born on December 25, where Joe Christmas is martyred at the age of 33.

John Steinbeck continues the twentieth century tradition of linking character names and omens in Of Mice and Men, where the lovable giant - Lennie Small - can't help but touch any creature he sees. Lennie is particularly fond of touching newborn puppies and flirtatious women. As one might guess, petting a puppy to death is not a good omen. Predictably, it does not end well when the farmer's wife starts getting touchy-feely with Lennie.

And for the younger Wannaskan Almanac readers, you might remember that Professor Trelawney reveals a tea-leaf Grim in Harry's cup during a Divination session. As a reminder for older readers, Grims are huge, scraggly dogs to be feared in the world of wizardry, because Grims are omens of death.


From A Year with Rilke, February 19 Entry
There Is No Image, from The Book of Hours 1, 60.

I want to utter to you. I want to portray you
not with the lapis or gold, but with colors made of apple bark.
There is no image I could invent
that your presence would not eclipse.


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.


*Dance, like no one is watching.