Word-Wednesday for March 17, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, March 17, 2021, the 11th Wednesday of the year, the 13th and last Wednesday of winter, and the 76th day of the year, with 289 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for March 17, 2021
The late winter weather has changed too quickly for the rabbits.

Our forecast for the next week shows high temperatures up to 20 degrees above normal for this time of year.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed



Earth/Moon Almanac for March 17, 2021
Sunrise: 7:32am; Sunset: 7:32pm; 3 minutes, 32 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 9:27am; Moonset: 11:24pm, waxing crescent, 11% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for March 17, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             34                     66                     46
Low              15                    -38                     25


March 17 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Corned Beef and Cabbage Day
• St. Patrick’s Day
• National SBDC Day

March 17 Word Riddle
Who built King Arthur’s Round Table?*


March 17 Pun
No matter how kind you are, German children are kinder.


March 17 Definition of the Week
TUBA: The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments—the very lower bowel of music.

Peter de Vries

March 17 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 432 Saint Patrick, aged about 16 is captured by Irish pirates from his home in Great Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland.
• 1756 St. Patrick's Day is first celebrated in New York City at the Crown & Thistle Tavern.
• 1762 First St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City.
• 1845 Rubber band patented by Stephen Perry of London.
• 1901 At a show in Paris, 71 Vincent van Gogh paintings cause a sensation, 11 years after his death.
• 1924 Eugene O'Neill's Welded premieres.
• 1957 Dutch ban on Sunday driving lifted.
• 1989 Dorothy Cudahy is the first female grand marshal of St. Patrick Day Parade.
• 1991 Irish Lesbians & Gays march in St. Patrick's Day parade.

March 17 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1578 Francesco Albana, Italian painter of Mary's Ascension.
• 1655 Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, French harpsichordist, organist, singer, and composer.
• 1685 Jean-Marc Nattier, French portrait painter.
• 1781 Ebenezer Elliott, British Poet known as the Corn Law Rhymer.
• 1820 Jean Ingelow, English poet.
• 1919 Nat King Cole.

March 17 Word Fact
A string of typographical symbols (such as %@$&*!) used in place of an obscenity is called a grawlix.


March 17, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 20 of 52
Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
Else it were time lost listening to me.

I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.

Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids, conformity goes to the fourth-remov’d,
I wear my hat as I please indoors or out.

Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.


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

• autotonsorialist: [AW-toh-tohn-SOHR-ee-uhl-ist] n., a person who cuts and styles his or her own hair (despite everyone’s advice to the contrary).
• cornicione: the outer margin of the crust on a pizza.
• deleatur: v., let it be deleted: used as an instruction to indicate that a word, sentence, etc., should be deleted from a page or text.
• forelsket: n., Norwegian, the indescribable euphoria experienced as one begins to fall in love.
• gobemouche: a person who believes everything he or she is told; a gullible or credulous person.
• kettling: confinement by police of a group of demonstrators or protesters in a small area, as a method of crowd control.
• meontology: the philosophical study of non-being.
• nullifidian: ˌnələˈfidēən n., a person having no faith or religious belief.
• smeerkin: [SMEER-kin] n., the sweetest of all kisses, the kiss one lover gives another.
• truckle: submit or behave obsequiously.

March 17, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
phonotactics
ˌfōnōˈtaktiks, n., the study of the rules governing the possible phoneme sequences in a language, restricting the types of sounds that are allowed to occur next to each other or in particular positions in a word for the purpose of pronunciation. For example, if a word begins with a stopped p, b, t, d, g, or k, the only sounds that are allowed between that and the next vowel are r, l, and w.

Nasals — m, n, and ng — have even stricter limits, where these phonics cannot be put in clusters at all, except after the letter s, and where ng can never be placed at the beginning of English syllables.

English has two rules for dealing with the pronunciation of clusters that do not follow these rules: epenthesis — inserting a vowel in between or before that sound — and deletion.

Epenthesis happens over time in the history of such English words, as with the word thimble, which etymologically began in English as thȳmel “fingerstall”, moving to thumble [thumb, -le], then adding the b sound for our current pronunciation: ˈTHimbəl. The same process changed thunor to thunder, and we’ve all heard friends or family talk about sketches as drawrings, an inexact or unspecified object or event as somepthing, a pet rodent as a hampster, and of course, Yogi Bear’s pic-a-nic basket. Please note that the first word in the phrase “nucular bomb” is not an example of epenthesis - it’s a BooBoo, but the second word in that phrase in an example of deletion.

In the more common Latin, Greek, Greek, and Germanic word roots from which English borrowed, English often uses deletion to circumvent phonotactic conflicts. Since the combination ps cannot coexist in an English syllable, the p sound is deleted in the pronunciation of words like psithurism [ˈsɪθjʊəˌɹɪzəm]. Deletion also applies to words beginning with kn, such as knight, from the Old English cniht, for boy, youth, related to Dutch and German Knecht, as well as later medieval derivations that include forms spoken by the Knights Who Say Ni.

As Asian names and African words beginning with the letters ng enter the English vocabulary, epenthesis is generally used for African, e.g., pronouncing ngwee as əNGˈɡwē, and deletion is used for Asian names, e.g., pronouncing Nguyen as ŋʷĩəŋ.

Now you know, but the gnus always knew.



From A Year with Rilke, March 17 Entry
My Pieces of Shame, from Book of Hours II, 2

In alleyways I sweep myself up
out of garbage and broken glass.
With my half-mouth I stammer you,
who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to you my half-hands
in wordless beseeching, that I may find again
the eyes with which I once beheld you.

I am a city by the sea
sinking into a toxic tide.
I am stranger to myself, as though someone unknown
had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

It’s here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.



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


*Sir Cumference.