Word-Wednesday for October 21, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, October 21, 2020, the 43rd Wednesday of the year, the fifth Wednesday of fall, and the 295th day of the year, with 71 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for October 21, 2020
The deer did not enjoy last week’s youth hunt.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.

Earth/Moon Almanac for October 21, 2020
Sunrise: 7:54am; Sunset: 6:22pm; 3 minutes, 24 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 1:59pm; Moonset: 10:02pm, waxing crescent


Temperature Almanac for October 21, 2020
                Average            Record              Today
High             49                     77                     34
Low              31                      4                      22


October 21 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day
• National Reptile Awareness Day
• BRA Day USA
• Hagfish Day
• Support Your Local Chamber of Commerce Day
• Medical Assistants Recognition Day

October 21 Word Riddle
What English word retains the same pronunciation, even when you take away four of its five letters?*


October 21 Pun
How did Voltaire like his apples?**


October 21 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1512 Martin Luther joins the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg.
• 1918 Margaret Owen sets world typing speed record of 170 wpm for 1 minute.
• 1949 Brave New World author Aldous Huxley writes to congratulate George Orwell on his new novel 1984.
• 1959 Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opens in New York.
• 1971 Nobel prize for literature awarded to Pablo Neruda.
• 1976 Nobel prize for literature awarded to American Saul Bellow.

October 21 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day
1772 Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
1904 Patrick Kavanagh, Irish poet.
1921 Malcolm Arnold.
1929 Ursula K. Le Guin.

October 21 Word Fact
stewardesses is one of the longest words typeable on a normal keyboard with left hand.


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

• bosthoon: boor, dolt.
• chandler: a dealer in supplies and equipment for ships and boats.
• eccedentesiast: an insincere person who fakes a smile.
• mither: make a fuss; moan.
• nyctinasty: n., the tendency of leaves or other parts of a plant to take up different positions at different times, usually in response to regular (esp. nightly) changes in light intensity or temperature.
• procrustean: (especially of a framework or system) enforcing uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality.
• quanked: exhausted or reduced in strength, as by labor or exertion; fatigued; sleepy.
• shtum: silent, speechless, dumb.
• torus: geometry, a surface or solid formed by rotating a closed curve, especially a circle, around a line that lies in the same plane but does not intersect it.
• zetetic: proceeding by inquiry or investigation.

October 21, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. First published in 1959, her writing spanned nearly sixty years of more than twenty novels, over a hundred short stories, poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books, which earned her eight Hugos, six Nebulas, and twenty-two Locus Awards. In 2003 she became the second woman honored as a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
 
This being Word-Wednesday, we prefer to present writers with their own words whenever possible. Le Guin has much to offer writers and readers alike.

On Writing
As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. (from The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1979.)

A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. The story—from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. (“Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing,” in The Living Light, Fall, 1970, 7:3.)

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions. (from Dancing at the Edge of the World, 1989.)

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. (ibid.)

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself. (ibid.)

There are no right answers to wrong questions. (from Introduction to Planet of Exile, 1966.)

Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way. (spoken by the character Ged in The Farthest Shore, 1972.)

The poet Carolyn Kizer said to me recently, “Poets are interested mostly in death and commas,” and I agreed. Now I add: Prose writers are interested mostly in life and commas. (from Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew, 1998.)

On Art and Sex
Art and entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. (from Language of the Night, 1979.)

Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst. (from “A Citizen of Mondath,” in Language of the Night, 1979.)

It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist. (spoken by the character Shevek in The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, 1974.)

On Literacy
The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life. (from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on The Reader, the Writer, and the Imagination, 2004.)

A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community, and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. It’s everybody’s place. I remember certain libraries, vividly and joyfully, as my libraries—elements of the best of my life. (from “My Libraries,” a 1997 talk at Multnomak County Library, Portland, Maine.)

On Listening, Speaking, and Power
There are times when you have to speak because silence is betrayal. (from BookWomen, 2004.)

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well. (from Steering the Craft, 1998.)

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. (spoken by the character Faxe in The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969.)

Evil government relies on deliberate misuse of language. Because literary skill is the rigorous use of language in the pursuit of truth, the habit of literature, of serious reading, is the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues. You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities. Nobody else in the world can do it, or ever could do it, or ever will be able to do it again. (from her acceptance speech for the Maxine Cushing Gray Award, Seattle, Washington, October 18, 2006.)

To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more. (voice of the narrator from The Lathe of Heaven, 1971.)

What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. (spoken by the character Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969.)

On Life and Love
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. (from Language of the Night, 1979.)

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. (from The Lathe of Heaven, 1971.)


From A Year with Rilke, October 21 Entry
The Depths of His Own Being, Borgeby gärd, Sweden August 12, 1904, Letters to a Young Poet.

Only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another as something alive and will sound the depths of his own being.

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.

*queue.
**Candide.