Word-Wednesday for December 9, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, December 9, 2020, the 50th Wednesday of the year, the twelfth Wednesday of fall, and the 344th day of the year, with 22 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for December 9, 2020  

Monolith discovered at Bemis Hill.

 

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for December 9, 2020
Sunrise: 8:06am; Sunset: 4:27pm; 1 minutes, 4 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 1:20am; Moonset: 1:57pm, waning crescent


Temperature Almanac for December 9, 2020
                Average            Record              Today
High             21                     47                     37
Low               4                    -35                    29


December 9 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Pastry Day
• Christmas Card Day
• Weary Willie Day
  

December 9 Word Riddle
What do you get when you cross a cantaloupe with Lassie?*

December 9 Pun
Cat puns freak meowt. Seriously, I’m not kitten.

December 9 The Roseau Times-Region Headline:
Skime Chicken and Egg Settle Longrunning Dispute

December 9 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1724 Colley Cibber's play Caesar in Egypt premieres in London.
• 1793 Noah Webster establishes New York's 1st daily newspaper, the American Minerva.
• 1854 Alfred Tennyson's poem Charge of the Light Brigade is published.
• 1897 Activist Marguerite Durand founds the feminist daily newspaper, La Fronde in Paris.
• 1965 A Charlie Brown Christmas, first Peanuts animated special, premieres on CBS.

December 9 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1608 John Milton.
• 1862 Karel Kovařovic, Czech composer.
• 1898 Emmett Kelly.
• 1899 Léonie Adams, American poetess.
• 1905 Dalton Trumbo.
• 1906 Grace Hopper, American computer scientist and US Navy admiral who invented the first compiler for a universal computer programming language and is credited with coining the word "debugging".
• 1926 Jan Křesadlo, Czech-British psychologist and writer.
• 1931 Ladislav Smoljak, Czech director, actor, and screenwriter.
• 2340 Worf, Klingon character on Star Trek Next Generation.

December 9 Word Fact
There are only four English words in common use ending in "-dous": 

hazardous, horrendous, stupendous, and tremendous.

December 9, 2020 Song of Myself, Verse 6 of 52

6
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.


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

• 報復性熬夜: [bàofù xìng áoyè] a Chinese term that roughly means “revenge bedtime procrastination” — when people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201123-the-psychology-behind-revenge-bedtime-procrastination
• acheiropoieta: art created without human hand.
• cachinnation: cackle, guffaw, laugh, laughter. Informal: heehaw.
• escutcheon: a shield or emblem bearing a coat of arms; a flat piece of metal for protection and often ornamentation, around a keyhole, door handle, or light switch.
• friluftsliv: [Norwegian] open-air living.
• jettatura: the evil eye, a curse.
• kenning: a compound expression in Old English and Old Norse poetry with metaphorical meaning, e.g. oar-steed = ship.
• micromort: a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death.
• naff: lacking in style or good taste : vulgar and unfashionable I was going to get a pair of leather jeans as well, but it was too expensive and anyway, leather pants look naff, as I discovered later.
• pastinaceous: of the nature of or resembling that of a parsnip.

December 9, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Epithet
ˈɛpəˌθɛt, a literary device that describes a person, a place, or an object by accompanying or replacing it with a descriptive word or phrase, from the Greek word epitheton (neuter of epithetos), which translates to “added” or “attributed.” The epithet takes many forms depending on the author's intention.
For example, my sister's name is Ann, but my family calls her Annie, and my Mom will call her Annie-Fanny-Foo-Foo-Fum if Mom's had a nip too much of her Christmas whisky. Annie and Annie-Fanny-Foo-Foo-Fum are epithets, or special nickname, that replace the name of a person and often describe them in some specific way. Opilones spiders are often called Daddy Longlegs, a dog is often referred to as (wo)man's best friend, and Ivan Vasilyevich earned the epithet, Terrible, for the fear he inspired in his enemies. Then, of course, we have Chairman Joe, Jack Pine Savage, Mr. Hot Coco, and WannaskaWriter…

Today is John Milton's birthday. His epic poem, Paradise Lost, is replete with epithets, for God, such as “Maker” and “Father”; and for Jesus, such as “Son of God” and “Savior of Men.” Because Paradise Lost refers to God and Jesus so frequently, they are given a variety of names.

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

Hail Son of God, Saviour of Men, thy Name
Shall be the copious matter of my Song
Henceforth, and never shall my Harp thy praise
Forget, nor from thy Father’s praise disjoin.

One of the most common types of epithet in literature is kenning [see Words I Looked Up This Week for definition]. As expected, Shakespeare was a master of this literary device:

“Thou mad mustachio purple-hued maltworms*!" (Henry IV, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 1)

[*maltworm: tippler; a drinker of alcohol.]

and

“Death lies on her like an untimely frost. Upon the sweetest flower of all the field…” (Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, Scene 5).

And, for James Joyce fans, Ulysses features the following kenning epithets:

“God!" he said quietly. "Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snot-green sea. The scrotum-tightening sea! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother…”

From A Year with Rilke, December 9 

Were You Not Always Distracted, from First Duino Elegy

Were you not always distracted by yearning,
as though some lover were about to appear?

Let yourself feel it, that yearning.
It connects you with those
who have sung it through the ages,
sung especially of love unrequited.
Shouldn’t this oldest of sufferings
finally bear fruit for us?



Be better than yesterday,
learn a new word today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until Christmas,
and write when you have the time.



*A melon-collie baby.