Word-Wednesday for November 4, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, November 4, 2020, the 45th Wednesday of the year, the seventh Wednesday of fall, and the 309th day of the year, with 57 days remaining in 2020, and 1,462 days until the next presidential election.


Wannaska Nature Update for November 4, 2020
Fall bird migration continues.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for November 4, 2020
Sunrise: 7:16am; Sunset: 4:59pm; 3 minutes, 7 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 7:28pm; Moonset: 11:18am, waning gibbous


Temperature Almanac for November 4, 2020
                Average            Record              Today
High             40                     73                     61
Low              24                     -4                     32


November 4 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Chicken Lady Day
• National Candy Day
• National Stress Awareness Day
• King Tut Day

November 4 Word Riddle
What word contains all of the twenty-six letters?*


November 4 Pun
How can a room full of married people be empty?**


November 4 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1783 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Symphony No. 36 premieres in Linz, Austria.
• 1876 Johannes Brahms' First Symphony in C premieres in Karlsruhe, Grand Duchy of Baden.
• 1879 James Ritty patents first cash register, to combat stealing by bartenders in his saloon in Dayton, Ohio.
• 1948 American-born British poet T. S. Eliot wins Nobel Prize for literature.

November 4 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1823 Karel Komzák I, Bohemian composer and musician, born in Netěchovice, Czech Republic.
• 1879 Will Rogers.
• 1887 Knut Algot Håkanson, Swedish composer.
• 1891 Miroslav Krejčí, Czech composer.
• 1918 Art Carney.
• 1946 Robert Mapplethorpe.

November 4 Word Fact
It is not clear which came first.

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

• anthropodermic: made of human skin.
• bibliopegy: the art of binding books.
• chyle: a milky fluid consisting of fat droplets and lymph. It drains from the lacteals of the small intestine into the lymphatic system during digestion.
• delenda: words, sentences, etc., which are to be deleted from a text; (also) such deletions in the form of a list printed with a text.
• eleemosynary: relating to or dependent on charity; charitable.
• fidge: the habit of fidgeting.
• nequient: lacking the skill, means or opportunity to do something; unable; incapable.
• perhorresce: to tremble or shudder convulsively.
• scaife: awry, difficult.
• wallydraigle: a pejorative meaning a feeble or slovenly animal or person; the youngest member of a family.

November 4, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Walt Whitman’s Words
Often described as America's national poet, Walt Whitman used his poetry and essays to establish an image of the United States for itself. As Harold Bloom noted in his Introduction for the 150th anniversary publication of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 

"If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson's two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even Emerson's, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.”

Living through one of America's most divisive periods before, during, and after the American Civil War, Whitman also worked as a hospital volunteer during the American Civil War, and lamented Abraham Lincoln's assassination in "O Captain! My, Captain!" These  personal experiences of loss, and the pain and hardship of soldiers wounded and dying before penicillin, inspired Whitman's writing about democracy. Many of his thoughts and conclusions are available in Whitman: Poetry and Prose, from which the following quotes were obtained, and where Whitman specifically notes the cultural moment of his times:

Though I think I fully comprehend the absence of moral tone in our current politics and business, and the almost entire futility of absolute and simple honor as a counterpoise against the enormous greed for worldly wealth, with the trickeries of gaining it, all through society in our day, I still do not share the depression and despair on the subject which I find possessing many good people.

I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election. America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brain’d nominees, the many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers. It is the dilettantes, and all who shirk their duty, who are not doing well. America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without.

Whitman then expanded his focus beyond the shores of America when he noted:

The advent of America, the history of the past century, has been the first general aperture and opening-up to the average human commonalty, on the broadest scale, of the eligibilities to wealth and worldly success and eminence, and has been fully taken advantage of; and the example has spread hence, in ripples, to all nations. To these eligibilities — to this limitless aperture, the race has tended, en-masse, roaring and rushing and crude, and fiercely, turbidly hastening — and we have seen the first stages, and are now in the midst of the result of it all, so far. But there will certainly ensue other stages, and entirely different ones. In nothing is there more evolution than the American mind. Soon, it will be fully realized that ostensible wealth and money-making, show, luxury, &c., imperatively necessitate something beyond — namely, the sane, eternal moral and spiritual-esthetic attributes, elements… Soon, it will be understood clearly, that the State cannot flourish, (nay, cannot exist,) without those elements. They will gradually enter into the chyle of sociology and literature. They will finally make the blood and brawn of the best American individualities of both sexes.

No doubt thinking of Wannaska, under the heading Nature and Democracy - Morality, Whitman concluded:

American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices — through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life — must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will morbidly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose of America,) on any less terms. I conceive of no flourishing and heroic elements of Democracy in the United States, or of Democracy maintaining itself at all, without the Nature-element forming a main part — to be its health-element and beauty-element — to really underlie the whole politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World.

Yes, it is long, but if you haven't recently (or ever) read Whitman's Song of Myself, our own times make it a valuable use of one's personal time. As a convenient new Word-Wednesday feature in the coming year, look for each of this poem’s 52 verses. Here’s number one:

1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

From A Year with Rilke, November 4 Entry
Offering What We Are, from Uncollected Poems.

Oh, the places we would pour ourselves over,
pushing into the meager surfaces
all the impulses of our heart, our desire, our need.
To whom in the end do we offer ourselves?

To the stranger, who misunderstands us,
to the other, whom we never found,
to the servant, who could not free us,
to the winds of spring, which we could not hold,
and to silence, so easy to lose.

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.

*alphabet.
** Because there’s not a single person there.