And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, May 6, 2020, the 19th Wednesday of the year, the 127th day of the year, with 239 days remaining.
Nordhem Lunch: Closed today.
Earth/Moon Almanac for May 6, 2020
Sunrise: 8:05am; Sunset: 5:06pm; 2 minutes, 37 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 8:35pm; Moonset: 9:50am, waxing gibbous
Temperature Almanac for May 6, 2020
Average Record Today
High 61 88 58
Low 37 20 28
May 6 Celebrations from National Day Calendar
May 6 Word Riddle
Why is so little known about the salivary gland?*
May 6 Pun
Heading upstairs, Mom shouted, “Leave the peach cobbler in the kitchen alone!”
But I can’t help myself. I sneak in and watch him—watch him make his stupid little peach shoes.
“Nobody’s going to wear those,” I taunt in a quiet, hisping whisper.
But he continues his work, as if I didn’t even exist.
The Nordly Headline:
Wannaskan Robbed at Shovel-Point by 6 Dwarves: Not Happy
May 6 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day
May 6 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day
Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:
May 6, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
New Dictionary Words
This week we explore new words recently announced as “accepted” by dictionaries on either side of the pond—namely, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition to the more than 600 new words, each dictionary adds or updates new sub-entries, new senses, and additions to unrevised entries.
Back by popular demand, Word-Wednesday features the May 5, 2020 after-work Instagram diary rant of word-maven Rusty Ballzer, which just happens to feature many of 2020’s newest words:
2020/05/05
What ANOTHER day! It’s a l-o-n-g way until the day after next tomorrow, and I feel so farkakte after a futzing microtargeted Boomers in the contactless bowels of the Target data mining catacombs!!
Me at end of rope. Me speechless. Use your words, Rusty! Me NEED cab sav, NOW!
Definitions for the Words in Rusty’s Instagram Post
awesomesauce, adj.: extremely good; excellent.
awfulize, v.: intransitive. To class as awful or terrible.
bukateria, n.: a roadside restaurant or street stall with a seating area, selling cooked food at low prices.
cab sav, n.: red wine made from the Cabernet Sauvignon grape.
chuckheaded, adj.: unintelligent, dim-witted, stupid.
contactless, adj.: not involving contact.
deepfake, n.: an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.
e-waste, n.: worthless or inferior electronic text or content.
farkakte, adj.: covered in excrement.
futzing, n.: ineffectual or trifling activity; messing about; tinkering, chiefly with around.
hench, adj.: of a person: having a powerful, muscular physique; fit, strong.
jerkweed, n.: an obnoxious, detestable, or stupid person (esp. a male). Often as a contemptuous form of address. Cf. dickweed n., jerkwad n.
mentionitis, n.: a tendency to mention something for the sake of comprehensiveness or exhaustiveness, rather than relevance.
microtarget, v.: to direct tailored advertisements, political messages, etc., at (people) based on detailed information about them (such as what they buy, watch, or respond to on a website).
next tomorrow, n. and adv.: the day after tomorrow.
onboarding, n.: in business, the action or process of integrating a new employee into an organization, team, etc.
shaliach, n.: an emissary or agent; a representative or proxy.
slow-walk, v.: to delay or prevent the progress of (something) by acting in a deliberately slow manner.
truthiness, adj.: a seemingly truthful quality not supported by facts or evidence.
From A Year with Rilke, May 6 Entry
The Departure of the Prodigal Son, from New Poems.
To go forth now
from all the entanglement
that is ours and yet not ours,
that, like the water in an old well,
reflects us in fragments, distorts what we are.
From all that clings like burrs and brambles—
to go forth
and see for once, close up, afresh,
what we had ceased to see—
so familiar it had become.
To glimpse how vast and how impersonal
is the suffering that filled your childhood.
Yes, to go forth, hand pulling away from hand.
Go forth to what? To uncertainty,
to a country with no connections to us
and indifferent to the dramas of our life.
What drives you to go forth? Impatience, instinct,
a dark need, the incapacity to understand.
To bow to all this.
To let go—
even if you have to die alone.
Is this the start of a new life?
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.
*it’s so secretive.
Earth/Moon Almanac for May 6, 2020
Sunrise: 8:05am; Sunset: 5:06pm; 2 minutes, 37 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 8:35pm; Moonset: 9:50am, waxing gibbous
Temperature Almanac for May 6, 2020
Average Record Today
High 61 88 58
Low 37 20 28
May 6 Celebrations from National Day Calendar
- National Nurses Day
- National Beverage Day
- National Crepe Suzette Day
- National Bike To School Day
- National School Nurse Day
- National Skilled Trades Day
- No Homework Day
May 6 Word Riddle
Why is so little known about the salivary gland?*
May 6 Pun
Heading upstairs, Mom shouted, “Leave the peach cobbler in the kitchen alone!”
But I can’t help myself. I sneak in and watch him—watch him make his stupid little peach shoes.
“Nobody’s going to wear those,” I taunt in a quiet, hisping whisper.
But he continues his work, as if I didn’t even exist.
The Nordly Headline:
Wannaskan Robbed at Shovel-Point by 6 Dwarves: Not Happy
May 6 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day
- 1835 James Gordon Bennett, Sr. publishes the first issue of the New York Herald.
- 1837 John Deere creates the first steel plow.
- 1840 World's first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, is first used in Great Britain.
- 1935 Pulitzer prize awarded to Audrey Wurdemann.
- 1940 Pulitzer prize awarded to John Steinbeck for The Grapes of Wrath.
May 6 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day
- 1859 Willem Kloos.
- 1868 Władysław Reymont.
- 1868 Gaston Leroux.
- 1879 Bedřich Hrozný.
- 1883 José Ortega y Gasset.
- 1895 Júlio César de Mello e Souza.
- 1904 Harry Martinson.
- 1906 Enrique Laguerre.
- 1915 Orson Welles.
- 1915 Theodore H. White.
- 1922 Alan Ross.
- 1932 Günther Hauk.
- 1940 Henry Habibe.
- 1945 Bob Seger.
- 1947 Martha Nussbaum.
Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:
- aleatoric: characterized by chance or indeterminate elements.
- bomphiologia: exaggeration done in a self-aggrandizing manner, as a braggart.
- codocil: an addition or supplement that explains, modifies, or revokes a will or part of one.
- daddock: rotten or decayed wood; a piece of rotten wood; a rotten tree or log.
- gank: to take or steal.
- mateaology: a useless or pointless discourse.
- panchymagogue: a medicine used to expel all unhealthy humors from the body.
- réschauffé: a dish of warmed up food left over from the previous meal.
- shindy: a noisy disturbance or quarrel.
- tyromancy: a form of fortune-telling by way of observation of the fermentation and coagulation of cheese.
May 6, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
New Dictionary Words
This week we explore new words recently announced as “accepted” by dictionaries on either side of the pond—namely, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. In addition to the more than 600 new words, each dictionary adds or updates new sub-entries, new senses, and additions to unrevised entries.
Back by popular demand, Word-Wednesday features the May 5, 2020 after-work Instagram diary rant of word-maven Rusty Ballzer, which just happens to feature many of 2020’s newest words:
2020/05/05
What ANOTHER day! It’s a l-o-n-g way until the day after next tomorrow, and I feel so farkakte after a futzing microtargeted Boomers in the contactless bowels of the Target data mining catacombs!!
As per usual, lame-boss Himbo continues to deepfake his managers in the truthiness that his “work” is awesomesauce, when the rest of our IT staff
watch his daily, relentless awfulizing of our multi-million
dollar information management system into a roadkill bukateria. Himbo lives to slow-walk our entire system into Neverworld.
And to
make matters worse, Himbo just onboarded a new chuckheaded assistant,
Shebah—a girl-hench with a self-important case of mentionitis—to act as his
delivery shaliach for the endless e-waste populating Himbo’s mind.
Me at end of rope. Me speechless. Use your words, Rusty! Me NEED cab sav, NOW!
Definitions for the Words in Rusty’s Instagram Post
awesomesauce, adj.: extremely good; excellent.
awfulize, v.: intransitive. To class as awful or terrible.
bukateria, n.: a roadside restaurant or street stall with a seating area, selling cooked food at low prices.
cab sav, n.: red wine made from the Cabernet Sauvignon grape.
chuckheaded, adj.: unintelligent, dim-witted, stupid.
contactless, adj.: not involving contact.
deepfake, n.: an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.
e-waste, n.: worthless or inferior electronic text or content.
farkakte, adj.: covered in excrement.
futzing, n.: ineffectual or trifling activity; messing about; tinkering, chiefly with around.
hench, adj.: of a person: having a powerful, muscular physique; fit, strong.
jerkweed, n.: an obnoxious, detestable, or stupid person (esp. a male). Often as a contemptuous form of address. Cf. dickweed n., jerkwad n.
mentionitis, n.: a tendency to mention something for the sake of comprehensiveness or exhaustiveness, rather than relevance.
microtarget, v.: to direct tailored advertisements, political messages, etc., at (people) based on detailed information about them (such as what they buy, watch, or respond to on a website).
next tomorrow, n. and adv.: the day after tomorrow.
onboarding, n.: in business, the action or process of integrating a new employee into an organization, team, etc.
shaliach, n.: an emissary or agent; a representative or proxy.
slow-walk, v.: to delay or prevent the progress of (something) by acting in a deliberately slow manner.
truthiness, adj.: a seemingly truthful quality not supported by facts or evidence.
From A Year with Rilke, May 6 Entry
The Departure of the Prodigal Son, from New Poems.
To go forth now
from all the entanglement
that is ours and yet not ours,
that, like the water in an old well,
reflects us in fragments, distorts what we are.
From all that clings like burrs and brambles—
to go forth
and see for once, close up, afresh,
what we had ceased to see—
so familiar it had become.
To glimpse how vast and how impersonal
is the suffering that filled your childhood.
Yes, to go forth, hand pulling away from hand.
Go forth to what? To uncertainty,
to a country with no connections to us
and indifferent to the dramas of our life.
What drives you to go forth? Impatience, instinct,
a dark need, the incapacity to understand.
To bow to all this.
To let go—
even if you have to die alone.
Is this the start of a new life?
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.
*it’s so secretive.
ReplyDeleteI ganked from the sea a flopping fresh haddock.
But rèschaufféd next night, it tasted like daddock.
Still starving I asked if this shop had some cheese.
Should have used tyromancy as would have John Cleese.
Then there arose such a shindy off in the night.
The Left and the Right were engaged in a fight.
Someone had found in James Madison’s will,
An additional Right, tucked into a codicil.
“If the country is plagued by a bomphiological demagogue,
“You can’t cast him out with a simple panchymagogue.
“So skip the mateaolgy, your best aleatoric,
“Is to get out and vote! Let’s make it historic.”
Gank: steal or take
Rèschauffé: reheated, esp. food
Daddock: rotten log
Tyromancy: tell future with cheese (really)
Shindy: fight
Codicil: addition to a will
Bomphiologia: bombast
Panchymagogue: body cleansing medicine
Mateaology: useless discourse
Aleatoric: chance