Word-Wednesday for March 10, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, March 10, 2021, the 10th Wednesday of the year, the 12th Wednesday of winter, and the 69th day of the year, with 296 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for March 10, 2021
The DNR reports that the ice is melting ahead of average this year. Plan B always involves salvage.

 

 
Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for March 10, 2021
Sunrise: 6:47am; Sunset: 6:21pm; 3 minutes, 36 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 6:08am; Moonset: 3:12pm, waning crescent, 8% illuminated


Temperature Almanac for March 10, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             31                     55                     38
Low              11                    -32                     27


March 10 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Blueberry Popover Day
• National Mario Day
• National Pack Your Lunch Day
• National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
• National Registered Dietitian Nutritionist Day
• International Bagpipe Day
• Organize Your Home Office Day

March 10 Word Riddle
What did the drummer name his twin daughters?*


March 10 Pun
Let’s all hope that Elon Musk never gets involved in a political scandal. Just imagine how drawn out Elongate would be!


March 10 Definition of the Week
HYPERBOLE: without question or doubt the single most magnificent thing that has ever happened in the world ever.


March 10 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1849 Abraham Lincoln applies for a patent (only US President to do so) for a device to lift a boat over shoals and obstructions.
• 1914 Suffragettes in London damage Rokeby's painting Venus of Velasquez.
• 1959 Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth premieres.
• 1975 Dog spectacles patented in England.

March 10 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1772 Friedrich von Schlegel, German romantic writer.
• 1810 Samuel Ferguson, Irish poet.
• 1842 Ina Donna Coolbrith, American poet laureate of California.
• 1847 Kate Sheppard, New Zealand suffragette.
• 1960 Remus Lupin from Harry Potter.

March 10 Word Fact
The head of an asparagus is called the squib.


March 10, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 19 of 52
This is the meal equally set, this the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept-woman, sponger, thief, are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipp’d slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,
This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,
This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,
This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.

Do you take it I would astonish?
Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?
Do I astonish more than they?

This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.


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

• aphthong: a silent letter, e.g., the letter k in know.
• collywobbles: the feeling of butterflies in one’s stomach.
• excursus: a detailed discussion of a particular point in a book, usually in an appendix; a digression in a written text.
• gelid: adj., icy; extremely cold.
• lunule: the white, crescent-shaped mark at the base of the fingernail.
• minikin: [MIN-ih-kin] n., a small, delicate, or dainty creature; adj., small; tiny or insignificant.
• nibling: the non-gender-specific term for a niece or a nephew; see: sibling.
• philter: a drink supposed to arouse love and desire for a particular person in the drinker; a love potion.
• subnivean: located or happening beneath the snow.
• zarf: the cardboard sleeve on a coffee cup.

March 10, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Words from Literature
The muse whispers constantly and never repeats herself. All available evidence points to the right hemisphere as the muse for creativity:

This difference is not predicated on any of the old distinctions such as verbal versus visuospatial. It operates equally in the realm of attention to verbal information. In keeping with what we know of its priorities, the left hemisphere actively narrows its attentional focus to highly related words while the right hemisphere activates a broader range of words. The left hemisphere operates focally, suppressing meanings that are not currently relevant. By contrast, the right hemisphere ‘processes information in a non-focal manner with widespread activation of related meanings’. Whereas close lexical semantic relationships rely more on the left hemisphere, looser semantic associations rely on the right. Because the right hemisphere makes infrequent or distantly related word meanings available, there is increased right-hemisphere involvement when generating unusual or distantly related words or novel uses for objects. This may be one of many aspects that tend to associate the right hemisphere with a freer, more ‘creative’ style. 

[The Master and His Emissary, Iain Mcgilchrist, page 90.]

The most creative writers incorporate new words into their new stories or poems. Here are a few gems dating back to Homer. Please let us know if we’ve left out your personal favorite.

• airy-fairy: adj., impractical and foolishly idealistic, Lilian, Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1862.
• blatant, adj., originally referred to a thousand-tongued beast, glaringly obvious, The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spencer, 1591.
• catch-22: n., a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions, Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1961.
• chortle: v., laughing while using one's nose, blend of chuckle and snort, Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll, 1871.
• cojones: n., testicles in the allegorical sense, or representing courage, Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway 1932.
• cyberspace: n., the space in which communication between computers occurs, from Neromancer, William Gibson, 1984.
• debunk: v., expose false claims, Bunk, William E. Woodward, 1923.
• eyesore, n., something offensive to see, The Taming of the Shrew, Act III, Scene 2, William Shakespeare, 1591.
• factoid: n., an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact, Marilyn, Norman Mailer, 1973.
• freelance: n., a mercenary knight with no allegiance, who instead offered his services in exchange for money, Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott, 1820.
• galumph: v., move in a clumsy, ponderous, or noisy manner, a combination of the words gallop and triumph, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, 1871.
• gargantuan: adj., very large, from The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, Rabelais, 1532.
• honey trap: n., a ploy in which an attractive person lures another into revealing information, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré, 1974.
• malapropism: n., the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with unintentionally amusing effect, as in, for example, “dance a flamingo ” (instead of flamenco), The Rivals, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1775.
• mentor: n., advisor, from the character, Mentor, in The Odyssey, Homer, 751 B.C.
• namby-pamby: adj., lacking energy, strength, or courage; feeble or effeminate in behavior or expression, Amby, Ambrose Phillips, 1725.
• nerd: n., a foolish or contemptible person who is boringly studious, from If I Ran the Zoo, Dr. Seuss, 1950.
• odyssey: n., adventure, The Odyssey, Homer, 751 B.C.
• pamphlet: n., a small booklet or leaflet containing information or arguments about a single subject, from Pamphilus; or, Concerning Love, Daniel Defoe, 1387, from the character Pamphilus, in the Greek meaning “friend of everyone” or “lover of all.”
• pandemonium: n., wild and noisy disorder or confusion; uproar, originally "all demons", from Paradise Lost, John Milton, 1667.
• pie-hole: n., slang name for the mouth, Christine, Stephen King, 1983.
• portmanteau: n., two existing words blended together to form a new word, see galumph, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, 1871.
• robot: n., based on the Czech word "robotnik", meaning slave or worker, Rossum's Universal Robots, Karel Čapek Rossum, 1920.
• scaredy-cat: n., a coward, The Waltz, Dorothy Parker, 1933.
• serendipity: n., the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way, from the Three Princes of Serendip, Horace Walpole, 1754.
• syphilis: n., a chronic bacterial disease that is contracted chiefly by infection during sexual intercourse, but also congenitally by infection of a developing fetus, from Syphilis or The French Disease, a poem about a shepherd boy named Syphilus who insulted the Greek god Apollo and was punished by that god with a horrible disease, Girolamo Fracastoro, 1530.
• thoughtcrime: n., an instance of unorthodox or controversial thinking, considered as a criminal offense or as socially unacceptable, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949.
• tween: n., a Hobbit between the ages of 20 and 33, from The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937.
• unfriend: n., one who is not a friend, Brut, Laȝamonn, English poet, 1231.
• utopia: n., an ideal place, originally a fictional island by the same name, Utopia, Sir Thomas More, 1516.
• yahoo: n., a rude, noisy, or violent person, from the name of an imaginary race of brutish creatures, in Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1726.

From A Year with Rilke, March 10 Entry
The Prisoner, from New Poems

Just imagine: what for you now is sky and wind,
air to breathe and light to see,
becomes stone right up to the little space
made by my heart and hands.

And what you now call tomorrow and
soon and next year and after that—
becomes an open wound, full of pus.
It festers and never drains.

And what has been
becomes a madness.
It rages and mocks within you,
twisting your mouth with crazed laughter.

And what had been God
becomes your jailer
and blocks with his filthy eye
your last escape.

And still you live.



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



*Anna1, Anna2.