Word-Wednesday for February 5, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, February 5, 2020, the 6th Wednesday of the year,  the 36th day of the year, with 330 days remaining, but only 56 days until April 1st; brought to you by WACKO (Wannaskan Almanac Contributors Kakistocratic Organization).  Like NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) and POEM (Professional Organization of English Majors), WACKO is a representational organization seeking to promote the literary arts of Wannaska, Palmville Township, and greater Roseau County.


Nordhem Lunch: Hot Pork Sandwich
WannaskaWriter has a photograph featured on today's Wiktel home page.

Earth/Moon Almanac for February 5, 2020
Sunrise: 7:49am; Sunset: 5:27pm; 3 minutes, 8 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 8:35pm; Moonset: 9:50am, waxing gibbous


Temperature Almanac for February 5, 2020
                Average           Record          Today
High             18                    46                 25
Low              -4                  -46                 15


February 5 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Shower with a Friend Day
• National Weatherperson’s Day
• World Nutella Day
• Working Naked Day

February 5 Health Alert
German officials take precautions against epidemic.

February 5 Word Riddle
Another way of saying, 

“Those who tarry too long in the arms of Morpheus are subject to forfeiture.”*


February 5 Biblical Pun
By legalizing Cannabis and same-sex marriage, we finally understand the correct interpretation of Leviticus 20:10: “A man who lays with another man should be stoned.”


February 5 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1846 Oregon Spectator becomes the first newspaper to be published on the West Coast.
• 1897 Marcel Proust meets Jean Lorrain in a pistol duel.
• 1916 Enrico Caruso records O Solo Mio for the Victor Talking Machine Company.
• 1967 Bollingen Prize for poetry awarded to Robert Penn Warren.

February 5 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1914 William S. Burroughs.
• 1978 Yortuk and Georg Festrunk, Czech-born wild and crazy guys.

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

• abligurition: spending lavish amounts of money on fine foods.
• groke: to look at somebody while they're eating in the hope that they'll give you some of their food.
• interobang: a punctuation mark ‽ designed for use especially at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question.
• kakistocracy: government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.
• lanspresado: someone who arrives somewhere, having conveniently forgotten their wallet, or having some other convoluted story to explain why they have no money on their person.
• perendinate: to defer till the day after to-morrow; put off for a day.
• pudibund: modest, bashful; prudish.
• shivviness: the uncomfortable feeling of wearing new underwear.
• snollygoster: a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician.
• ultracrepidarian: expressing opinions on matters outside the scope of one's knowledge or expertise.

February 5, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Disambiguation‽
In face-to-face communications, people share information using tone of voice, body language, and words. Writers can only communicate meaning with the written word. Each of these forms of communication represent 55%, 38%, and 7% of the information imparted from one person to another. In case you haven't guessed, words are the 7%, and body language - including facial expressions - is the 55%.

WannaskaWriter recently brought up the issue of disambiguation, defined as the removal of ambiguity by making something clear. Disambiguants are those persons who argue that narrowing the meaning of word combinations is good writing practice.

For example, if Mary had a little lamb, did Mary own the lamb, eat some mutton, con a mild-mannered person, or give birth to a small sheep?

Understandably, disambiguants tend to be tidy rule-makers who seldom write humor, but just imagine the dryness of a disambiguated Sven, Ula, or Mr. Hot CoCo. Disambiguants also may become disquieted by great authors who are intentionally ambiguous:

Thou still unravished bride of quiteness...
Ode On a Grecian Urn, John Keats

I ran all the way to the main gate, and then I waited a second till I got my breath. I have no wind, if you want to know the truth. I'm quite a heavy smoker, for one thing-that is, I used to be. They made me cut it out. Another thing, I grew six and a half inches last year. That's also how I practically got t.b. and came out here for all these goddam checkups and stuff. I'm pretty healthy though.
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

O Rose thou art sick
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
in the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
The Sick Rose, William Blake

All the same, there is a place for disambiguity in writing, where the disambiguant's most important tool is the punctuation mark. And now, a bit of Word-Wednesday history. There were no punctuation marks in classical times, where scribes did not even put spaces between the word they wrote. After all, scribes are only scribes, and scriptio continua gave their masters a clean text, usually for the purposes of practicing and making a speech. Any marks that might eventually be recognized as modern punctuation, inserted by the orator, did not have grammatical functions but only served to remind the speaker of different forms of pauses upon delivery.

Threatened during the chaos of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, when fewer and fewer people could even read (much less understand classical texts) scribes and other disambiguants came to the rescue. Scribes and scholars began to introduce and standardize a system of marking pauses - commas, colons, periods - to clarify how a reader (or speaker) should pause and otherwise understand the clearest possible relationship between the written words when reading manuscripts.

Disambiguants live on a path of never ending efforts to clarify, so the toothpaste had left the tube. Over the ensuing centuries, a new legion of word disambiguants developed novel marks and rules to establish order and prevent confusion. The question mark was born in the fifteenth century, along with the semicolon, brackets, parentheses, and the exclamation mark.

The printing press permitted standardization and rapid dissemination of punctuation usage and appearance, where punctuation became a sign of good education and breeding. Eighteenth century English punctuation expanded to embrace other early modern inventions such as the dash and ellipses to communicate more refined ways of interruption, hesitation, and other changes of thought. By the twentieth century, punctuation again regained its original connection to speech through the ways that it imitated how the voice might look on the page.

Modern writers eventually took to exploring the human mind and the different ways that consciousness moves in one character versus another. Where Ernest Hemingway regularly used full stops to chop up his prose into objective observations, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce used the lack of punctuation to represent the vagaries of a character's thought or emotional state. For those of you that might currently be reading Ulysses, and don't mind jumping to the end, have a look at Molly Bloom’s consciousness pouring punctuation-free upon the page at the end of the book.

The latest major punctuation invention dates back to the 1960s, when journalist-turned-advertisement agent Martin Speckter developed a way to express the force of his rhetorical questions, and the interobang was born: a punctuation mark made by superimposing an exclamation mark and a question mark. Wow or not‽

From A Year with Rilke, February 5 Entry
Through All that Happens, from Letters to a Young Poet.

As you unfold as an artist, just keep on, quietly and earnestly, growing through all that happens to you. You cannot disrupt this process more violently than by looking outside yourself for answers that may only be found by attending to your innermost feeling.


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.


* If you snooze, you lose.