Word-Wednesday for August 5, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, August 5, 2020, the 32nd Wednesday of the year, the seventh Wednesday of summer, and the 218th day of the year, with 148 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for August 5, 2020
The bees are intruding on the hummingbird feeders.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.

Word-Wednesday Summer Recipe of the Week
Jansson's Temptation for Anchovy Lovers

125 g anchovy fillets
500 g potatoes, julienned
1 small yellow onion, finely chopped
250 ml heavy cream
1/2 cup dill

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 200°C.
2. Fry the onions until soft, and mix with julienned potatoes.
3. Chop anchovy fillets finely, and keep the anchovy juices.
4. In a shallow oven dish, put in a thin layer of potato onion mixture, followed by some anchovies. Repeat until you have used everything, ending up with a potato layer on top.
5. Mix the cream with the anchovy juices and pour on the dish.
6. Bake in the oven for about an hour.
7. Before serving, top with fresh dill.

Earth/Moon Almanac for August 5, 2020
Sunrise: 6:02am; Sunset: 8:54pm; 2 minutes, 58 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 10:20pm; Moonset: 7:54am, waning gibbous


Temperature Almanac for August 5, 2020
                Average            Record               Today
High             79                     95                     79
Low              56                     33                     56


August 5 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Oyster Day
• National Psychic Day
• National Underwear Day
• National Work Like A Dog Day

August 5 Word Riddle
You may travel abroad in a carriage whose name read backward or forward is always the same.*


August 5 Pun
Bury me with my old LP records; it’ll be my vinyl resting place.


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

• 1860 Carl IV of Sweden-Norway is crowned King of Norway in Trondheim.
• 1861 US Army abolishes flogging.
• 1884 Cornerstone for Statue of Liberty laid on Bedloe's Island .
• 1901 Peter O'Connor of Ireland, sets the first officially recognized world long jump record at 24' 11 3/4" in Dublin, Ireland.
• 1924 Little Orphan Annie comic strip by Harold Gray is first published in the New York Daily News.
• 1925 Plaid Cymru yn cael ei ffurfio gyda'r nod o ledaenu gwybodaeth o'r Gymraeg, sydd mewn perygl o farw allan.[is formed with the aim of disseminating knowledge of the Welsh language, which is in danger of dying out.]
• 1957 Comic strip Andy Capp makes its debut.

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

• 1397 Guillaume Dufay, Franco-Flemish composer.
• 1607 Philipp Friedrich Boddecker, composer.
• 1813 Ivar A. Aasen, Norwegian linguistic/poet.
• 1822 Johann Georg Herzog, German composer.
• 1850 Guy de Maupassant, French author.
• 1866 Alfred Holy, Czech composer.
• 1886 Óscar Esplá, Spanish composer.
• 1889 Conrad P Aiken, American Pulitzer Prize winning poet/writer.
• 1930 Neil Armstrong.
• 1934 Wendell Berry, American poet.

The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry visits Mikinaak Crick

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

August 5 Word Fact
schoolmaster is an anagram of the classroom


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

• ambit: the scope, extent, or bounds of something.
• blatheroon: senseless babbler or boaster; an idle-headed fellow.
• claque: a group of people hired to applaud (or heckle) a performer or speaker; a group of sycophantic followers.
• firth: a narrow inlet of the sea; an estuary.
• hodiernal: of or related to the present day.
• kexy: hollow, brittle, dry; withered and sapless.
• monody: a lyric ode sung by a single voice; an ode sung by one of the actors in a Greek tragedy (as distinct from the chorus); a mournful song or dirge.
• pauciloquent: using few words in conversation, laconic, taciturn.
• rumgumption: good judgment; common sense.
• sonsy: healthy, strong, and attractive; buxom or plump; comely.

August 5, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Mondegreen
mondegreen /mändəɡrēn/ noun, a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song. Persons most prone to mondegreens are the young and the elderly, where in each instance, the person lacks necessary context to accurately interpret the sound of words — where in the child’s case, it’s a shortage of life experience; where in the elderly person’s case its a shortage of decibels.

One of the most common causes of mondegreens is the oronym: word strings with sounds that can be divided multiple ways. For example, many children wonder why Olive, the other reindeer, was so mean to Rudolph; and many elderly Wannaskan Almanac readers know that Eugene O’Neill won for Pullet Surprises.

The McGurk effect when the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound. The problem is the perception of the sound itself. Some letters and letter combinations sound so much alike that we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. When listening to the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, many younger persons hear, "There’s a bathroom on the right."

Then there's Zipf's Law, where the frequency of a word's use affect how we process that word. Depending on our familiarity with a subject, we hear songs and poems in a zone somewhere between conversational speech and a foreign language, where we are more likely to select a word or phrase with which we are familiar. Many people hear the Jimi Hendrix lyrics as "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" rather than "Excuse me while I kiss the sky". If your from the Ukraine, you'll hear "Crimean River" rather than "Cry Me a River".

Maybe you've also heard of these mondegreens:

"I led the pigeons to the flag" (for "I pledge allegiance to the flag")
"The ants are my friends" (for "The answer, my friend" in Blowing in the Wind by Bob Dylan)
"The girl with colitis goes by" (for "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by the Beatles)
"the bright blessed day and the dog said goodnight" (for "the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night" in What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong)
"The girl from Emphysema goes walking" (for "The girl from Ipanema goes walking" in The Girl from Ipanema, as performed by Astrud Gilberto)
"America! America! God is Chef Boyardee" (for "God shed His grace on thee" in America, the Beautiful)

And the origin of the word mondegreen? Sylvia Wright published an article in the November 1954 edition of Harper's, where she talked about mishearing a poem that her mother read to her from Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Her favorite verse began with the lines,
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

Except they hadn’t. They left the poor Earl and “laid him on the green.”


From A Year with Rilke, August 5 Entry
May What I Do Flow from Me, from The Book of Hours, I, 12.

May what I do flow from me like a river,
not forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming trough widening channels
into the open sea.

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.

*gig.