Word-Wednesday for August 12, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, August 12, 2020, the 33rd Wednesday of the year, the eighth Wednesday of summer, and the 225th day of the year, with 141 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for August 12, 2020
Moth Alert

Moth, large and small, are now breeding; they leave eggs on screens. 

Drive after dark at your own risk.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.
This is why Minnesotan’s travel.

Earth/Moon Almanac for August 12, 2020
Sunrise: 86:12am; Sunset: 8:42pm; 3 minutes, 9 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 12:16am; Moonset: 3:34pm, waning crescent

Temperature Almanac for August 12, 2020
                Average            Record               Today
High             78                     91                      85
Low              55                     31                      63


August 12 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Julienne Fries Day
• National Vinyl Record Day
• National Middle Child Day

August 12 Word Riddle
From a five-letter word, take two, and leave one.*


August 12 Pun
My grandson just found an origami porn channel. Thank goodness it is paper view only.


August 12 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1813 Robert Southey is appointed British Poet Laureate by King George III.
• 1833 The town of Chicago is incorporated, population 350. [shoulders quite narrow]
• 1851 American inventor Isaac Singer patents the sewing machine.
• 1865 Joseph Lister performs first antiseptic surgery.
• 1877 Thomas Edison completes first model for the phonograph, a device that recorded sound onto tinfoil cylinders. [aluminum foil not yet on the market]
  
• 1915 Of Human Bondage by William Somerset Maugham, published.

Chicago

By Carl Sandburg

Hog Butcher for the World,

   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

   Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

   Stormy, husky, brawling,

   City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

   Bareheaded,

   Shoveling,

   Wrecking,

   Planning,

   Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,

                   Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

August 12 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1644 Georg Christoph Leuttner, composer.
• 1644 Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, composer.
• 1647 Johann Heinrich Acker, German writer.
• 1753 Thomas Bewick, English artist.
• 1774 Robert Southey, English writer (The Story of the Three Bears).
• 1848 Macellus Emants, Dutch writer/poet.
• 1848 Macellus Emants, Dutch writer/poet (America the Beautiful).
• 1866 Jacinto Benavente y Martínez, Spanish playwright and Nobel Prize laureate.
• 1867 Edith Hamilton, American writer (Mythology).
• 1876 Mary Roberts Rinehart, American mystery writer (The Circular Staircase).
• 1881 Václav Vačkář, Czech composer and conductor.
• 1887 Erwin Schrodinger, Austrian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate, and loser of cats.
• 1889 Zerna Sharp, American writer and educator (Dick and Jane).
• 1929 Joji Yuasa, Japanese composer.
• 1930 Jacques Tits, Belgian mathematician.

August 12 Word Fact
An infinity sign - ∞ - is called a "lemniscate."


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

• aphantasia: the inability to form mental images of objects that are not present; inability to imagine.
• brique: a quarrel, an argument; strife, contention.
• coorie: to crouch, stoop, or keep low, especially for protection.
• flitch: a salted and cured side of bacon; a longitudinal cut from a tree.
• labascate: to begin to fall, slip, or tumble.
• Melsh-dick: a sylvan goblin, the protector of hazel nuts.
• oniochalasia: the purchasing of objects as a form of relaxation.
• piste: a trail or track beaten by a horse, mule, or wild animal; a regulation-sized strip upon which fencers complete.
• scroggins: an interjection used to express absolute astonishment.
• zythology: the study of beer and beer making, from the Ancient Greek /zûthos./

 

August 12, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Romanticism
Words with the root “roman” have a complicated etymological history, particularly in Eighteenth Century German, French, Russian, and English, when roman- became synonymous with "novel" or "popular narrative" in these languages. Romance languages were still referred to as vernacular, where Latin was the formal language of thinkers. By the late 1700s, as a reaction to the hyper-rationality of the Age of Enlightenment and to the cultural consequences industrial revolution, romanticist artists — painting, sculpture, music, literature — portrayed the emotional individualist as their champions, set most commonly in a past, pre-aristocratic era when humanity lived in a state of nature — the noble savage — the age of the Wannaskan.

Some of the most famous American romanticists include William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Golfball Emerson, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. On the other side of the pond, notable English romanticists included William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and their much older contemporary, William Blake. Like Emily Dickinson, Blake's work was little known during his lifetime because he was such an oldtimer.

An English poet, painter, and printmaker, Blake died on this date. His contemporaries variously considered him mad, cuckoo, a nutcase, an oddball, a bedlamite, a raver, a crazyman, insane, a screwball, or at the very least, idiosyncratic. Blake began creating romanticist art well before the more notable names had hit their stride. Now considered one of the seminal figures in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age, Blake is best known for what he called prophetic works.

Blake was an abolitionist believed in racial and sexual equality. Several of his poems and paintings express a notion of universal humanity. In one poem, narrated by a black child, white and black bodies alike are described as shaded groves or clouds, which exist only until one learns "to bear the beams of love":

    When I from black and he from white cloud free,
    And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:
    Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear,
    To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.
    And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
    And be like him and he will then love me.

Blake also claimed to have seen visions since he was young. 

 Here's one of Blake's most famous poems, courtesy Poetry Foundation:

The Tyger
By William Blake
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

From A Year with Rilke, August 12 Entry
You Said “Live”, from The Book of Hours, I, 9.

You said live out loud, and die you said lightly,
and over and over again you said be.

But before the first death came murder.
A fracture broke across the rings you’d ripened.
A screaming shattered the voices

that had just com together to speak you,
to make of you a bridge
over the chasm of everything.

And what they have stammered ever since
are fragments
of your ancient name.



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.

*clone, drone prone, or stone.