Word-Wednesday for September 2, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, September 2, 2020, the 36th Wednesday of the year, the eleventh Wednesday of summer, and the 246th day of the year, with 120 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for September 2, 2020
Gardens are coming in well. We're happy about our peppers.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.

 

Word-Wednesday September, 2020 Summer Recipe
Queen’s Winner Hotdish from Maud Greenhoe
1 box Famous Dave’s Corn bread mix-bake according to mix.
Cook 2lbs hamburger with 1 package taco seasoning.
Drain 1 can Mexican corn plus a can of Rotel, add to hamburger.
Layer on baked corn bread.
Mix 1 container of sour cream and 1 cup Mexican cheese.
Layer over hamburger, sprinkle cheese on top.
Bake 25 minutes at 375 degrees.
Garnish with salsa (lightly) lettuce, a sprinkle of black olives and fresh tomatoes.


Earth/Moon Almanac for September 2, 2020
Sunrise: 6:42am; Sunset: 8:01pm; 2 minutes, 28 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 8:45pm; Moonset: 6:49am, full moon - Corn Moon.


Temperature Almanac for September 2, 2020
                Average             Record              Today
High             72                     94                      72
Low              49                     25                      50


September 2 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Blueberry Popsicle Day
• National V-J Day
• Bring Your Manners to Work Day

September 2 Word Riddle
The ***** was waiting on the *****.
What two 5-letter words fill the blanks and share the same letters?*


September 2 Pun
Karma Café opens in Pencer!
(Serving just deserts.)


September 2 Featured Artist
Pigcasso

September 2 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 44 BC Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt declares her son co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion.
• 44 BC The first of Cicero's Philippics (oratorical attacks) on Mark Antony. He will make 14 of them over the next several months.
• 1666 Great Fire of London begins at 2:00am in Pudding Lane; 80% of London is destroyed.
• 1752 Last Julian calendar day in Great Britain and British colonies including America. To synchronize with the Gregorian calendar, 11 days are skipped and the next date is September 14.
• 1894 Forest fires destroy Hinckley, Minnesota.
• 1902 A Trip To The Moon, the first science-fiction film, released.
• 1920 W Somerset Maugham's East of Suez premieres in London.
• 1944 Holocaust diarist Anne Frank sent to Auschwitz concentration camp.

September 2 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1915 Meinhardt Raabe, portrayed the Munchkin coroner who certified the death of the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz.
• 1918 Allen Drury, Advise & Consent author.

September 2 Word Fact
The longest words without any vowels are "crwth" and "cwtch."
[Welsh word for a cuddle or hug]

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

• amarulence: bitterness, anger, disappointment, or resentment resulting from being unfairly treated.
• brevirostrate: having a short, curved bill or beak.
• conjubilant: pertaining to simultaneous celebratory outbursts; shouting together in joy.
• delibation: a brief or slight knowledge or experience of something; a taste of something.
• fancymonger: a lovemonger; a whimsical lover; one who deals in tricks of imagination; a deceiver who tricks people into giving money.
• grimgribber: learned gibberish; formal or technical jargon; legalese.
• orrery: a mechanical model of the solar system, or of just the sun, earth, and moon, used to represent their relative positions and motions.
• parvenue: a person of obscure origin who has gained wealth, influence, or celebrity.
• querimonious: prone to complaint; complaining, querulous.
• schumtzwortsuche: looking up naughty words in the dictionary.

September 2, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
The Irony Family
What do you mean? Can your reader tell what you mean? When does a writer want to be ambiguous, and how best can a writer mischieve her reader? Today Word-Wednesday looks at Irony, her siblings, and her cousins. 'īrənē, noun, from Ancient Greek εἰρωνεία eirōneía, meaning dissimulation, feigned ignorance, a word we all intuitively know, often have difficulty defining. The OED defines irony as the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect. Let's start with a cousin - coincidence.

Coincidence kōˈinsədəns, is defined as the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident, where the contrast is based on the fact that the events are incongruent. Coincidence succeeds to the degree that the two events are improbably and do not involve pretense, i.e., no attempt at dissimulation. Coincidence differs from irony because coincidence is so subjective. When does coincidence involve irony? George Carlin gives a good example in his book, Brain Droppings: “A diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck. He is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, Ah! Then he is the victim of an irony.”

Paradox, ˈperəˌdäks, another of Irony's cousins, is a noun with a long history in Western philosophy, defined an argument with seemingly true premises, seemingly good reasoning, and an obviously false or contradictory conclusion. The incongruent juxtapositions of paradox are generally more jarring or deviant from normal expectations, where self-contradiction is an essential element. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Thinking of Wannaska and Roseau, consider the Will Rogers Paradox, which occurs when moving something from one group to another raises the average of both groups, even though no values actually increase. Will Rogers noted that “when the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, they raised the average intelligence in both states.”

Satire ˈsaˌtī(ə)r, one of Irony's siblings, is defined as the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. Satire succeeds to the degree that the writing allows the reader to simultaneously maintain two distinct mental representations: an awareness of the literal meaning of the words on the page, and an awareness of a discrepancy between the literal message and the author's intention. The sibling relationship derives from the ways that Satire and Irony share the pretense gene as a primary purpose behind their rhetorical success. Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels succeeds because of the consistently humorous ways that each author pokes a good-natured, fun-loving finger at his target - Lewis Carrol at upper-class intellectualism, and Jonathan Swift at human nature and popular traveler's tales. Animal Farm and The Colbert Report are other examples of the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule with unbroken consistency of character and pretense.

Parody ˈperədē, is another of Irony's siblings - probably elder, defined as an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect. In Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov makes the following distinction: “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Once again, pretense is the genetic basis of both parody and irony, where the intentional imitation of something else in parody varies across a range. In its most gentle forms, parody gently pokes fun at the original work or its creator. At the other extreme, parody condemns the original, where more aggressive forms of parody use large doses of exaggeration, satire, and sarcasm to ridicule the authentic work and/or the author that produced the original.

Don Quixote, a parody of the medieval romance genre stands as one of the most famous parodies of all time. More recently, Seth Grahame-Smith published a parody of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, where the parody begins with the novels' first lines:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."

The Word-Wednesday research team recommends that authors avoid use of the words ironic, ironical, ironically, and ironism. Readers are likely to think that you're an oxymoron.


From A Year with Rilke, September 2 Entry
Cities, from The Book of Hours, III, 4/5.

Lord, the great cities are lost and rotting.
Their time is running out…
The people there live harsh and heavy,
crowded together, weary of their own routines.

Beyond them waits and breathes your earth,
but where they are it cannot reach them.

They don’t know that somewhere
wind is blowing through a field of flowers.



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.

*horse/shore.