Word-Wednesday for April 29, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, April 29, 2020, the 18th Wednesday of the year, the 120th day of the year, with 246 days remaining.

Nordhem Lunch: Meatball Dinner


Earth/Moon Almanac for April 29, 2020
Sunrise: 6:06am; Sunset: 8:36pm; 3 minutes, 11 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 10:42am; Moonset: 2:20am, waxing crescent


Temperature Almanac for April 29, 2020
                Average           Record           Today
High             58                   88                  63
Low              34                   15                   37


April 29 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Peace Rose Day
• National Shrimp Scampi Day
• National Zipper Day
• Denim Day

April 29 Word Riddle
What homonyms describe the difference between sixteen ounces and a small boy at the piano?*


April 29 Pun
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.


The Nordly Headline:
2020 State Fair to Be Held Over Zoom


April 29 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1553 Flemish woman introduces practice of starching linen into England.
• 1852 First edition of Peter Roget's Thesaurus published.
• 1967 Respect released by Aretha Franklin.

April 29 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1857 František Ondříček.
• 1885 Egon Kisch.
• 1899 Duke Ellington.
• 1912 Terence de Vere White.
• 1933 Rodney McKuen.

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

• ambisinister: incompetent when using either hand.
• ben-feaker: a counterfeiter, a forger.
• cornichon: a small pickled cucumber.
• dandiprat: a person of small or childish mind; a silly, finicky, or puerile person.
• erinacious: of, like, resembling, or related to hedgehogs.
• garçonnière: a bachelor’s apartment.
• lebenswelt: life-world; the world of lived experience.
• ombrogenous: of peat, a bog, dependent on precipitation for its formation and maintenance.
• remise: to give, grant, or release a claim to.
• sinceratron: a media figure, especially a talk show host, paid for their ability to exude an aura of authoritative advice and sincerity.

April 29, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
New Words
As previously noted, the  Urban Dictionary is an excellent crowdsourced online dictionary for words and phrases—old and new—not often found in standard dictionaries. If you fancy your self a writer, and if you’re Gen X or older, this resource will keep you abreast of the new words and phrases attributed to Boomers (1944-1964, Gen-Xers (1965-1979); Millennials Gen-Yers (1980-1994); and Gen-Zers (1995 to the present).

For a taste of the many words that await you in the Urban Dictionary, Word-Wednesday brings you the actual April 28, 2020 Instagram diary entry of one Rusty Ballzer, a 28-year-old single male who is suffering deeply from the  COVID-19 closing of social venues in and around his suburban New Brighton studio apartment.

2020/04/28:
I totally can NOT believe the apologies of that unbarrassed MetroTransit driver who just juggersnotted my Ray-Bans as I got off the bus from work! What a day! Data mining for Target is no “Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho” kind of gig. Embedded in my fluorescent, concrete cubi-tomb just miles from the Earth’s molten core, I slave away in my onlineliness collecting subconsciously entered data from the legion of adultescent, irrightional Boomers.

And to make my living hell even warmer, my boss is a Boomer. Think offspring of Montgomery Burn’s daughter and Michael Scott, now living in his office with a picture of Dilbert’s boss on his computer desktop—known unaffectionately by his underlings as Himbo. Socially, Himbo was a chronically nonversational masterdater long before COVID-19. Professionally, Himbo is a typerventilating, unkeyboardinated, texpectator, who has trouble setting a microwave oven—hence the analogue toaster oven in his office. Yet Himbo’s continuously columbusing IT staff with his pathetic “Tech Talk” email newsletters full of drivelling epiphanots that would be old-news to a second-grader with an Apple II.

Not good day. Me tired. Me fling clothes on chairdrobe; some on floordrobe. Me get online sushi delivery from Rosedale—chicken nomonym 4 shur. Looking 4ward to bedgasm…


Definitions for the Words in Rusty’s Instagram Post
adultescent: An adult who has retained the interests, behavior, or lifestyle of adolescence.

bedgasm: (n) a feeling of euphoria experienced when climbing into bed at the end of a very long day.

chairdrobe: (n) piling clothes on a chair in place of a closet or dresser; see also floordrobe.

columbusing: (n) when white people claim to have discovered something that has been around for years, decades, or centuries.

cubi-tomb: (n) secure underground work cubicle occupied by one employee.

dudevorce: (n) when two Wannaska bros officially end their friendship.

epiphanot: (n) an idea that seems like an amazing insight to the conceiver but is in fact pointless, mundane, or incorrect.

irrightional: (a) one who believes that one is always correct.

juggersnot: (n) an impending, unpreventable sneeze when one has a sinus infection.

masterdating (n) going out alone to a movie or a restaurant.

nomonym: (n) a food that tastes like another food.

nonversation: (n) a completely worthless conversation; small talk.

onlineliness: (n) the feeling that results from extended online activity involving no interactions with other human beings.

textpectation: (n) the anticipation felt when waiting for a response to a text message.

typerventilating: (v) two or more persons responding to text messages or emails where one or more persons sends more than one reply to the same message before the other person has responded to the first reply.

unbarrassed: (v) acting as if one is embarrassed when one is actually not embarrassed.

unkeyboardinated: (adj) the inability to type without repeatedly making mistakes, especially when concentrating on error-free typing.

From A Year with Rilke, April 29 Entry
Impermanence, from Letter to Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925.

Impermanence plunges us into the depth of all Being. And so all forms of the present are not to be taken and bound in time, but held in a larger context of meaning in which we participate. I don’t mean this in a Christian sense (from which I ever more passionately distance myself) but in a sheer earthly, deep earthly, sacred earthly consciousness: that what we see here and now is to bring us into a wider—indeed, the very widest—dimension. Not in an afterlife whose shadow darkens the earth, but in a whole that is the whole.



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 weighs a pound; the other pounds away.