Word-Wednesday for March 31, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, March 31, 2021, the 13th Wednesday of the year, the second Wednesday of spring, and the 90th day of the year, with 275 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for March 31, 2021
Ninety percent of all wildfires are started by humans.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for March 31, 2021
Sunrise: 7:03am; Sunset: 7:53pm; 3 minutes, 34 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 10:41pm; Moonset: 8:42am, waning gibbous, 90% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for March 31, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             42                     71                     31
Low              22                   -18                     19


March 31 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Clams on the Half Shell Day
• National Crayon Day
• Eiffel Tower Day
• National Prom Day
• National Tater Day
• National Little Red Wagon Day
• Manatee Appreciation Day
• National Bunsen Burner Day

March 31 Word Riddle
What’s the opposite of ladyfingers?*


March 31 Pun
Ice bank mice elf wen eye yam gnaw tee.


March 31 Definition of the Week
COMPROMISE: An agreement between two men to do what both agree is wrong. Lord Edward Cecil


March 31 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1736 Bellevue Hospital founded in a New York City almshouse, the first public hospital in the US.
• 1770 Immanuel Kant is appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg.
• 1870 Thomas Mundy Peterson of Perth Amboy, New Jersey is the first African American to vote in the US.
• 1889 Eiffel Tower officially opens in Paris.
• 1918 First daylight savings time in US goes into effect.
• 1943 Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! premieres.
• 1945 Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie premieres.
• 1972 Final day of the rum ration in the Royal Canadian Navy, known as Black Tot Day.
• 1988 Pulitzer prize awarded to Toni Morrison for her novel Beloved.

March 31 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1596 René Descartes.
• 1621 Andrew Marvell, English poet.
• 1685 Johann Sebastian Bach.
• 1732 Franz Joseph Haydn.
• 1809 Edward FitzGerald.
• 1809 Nikolai Gogol.
• 1914 Octavio Paz.
• 1927 Cesar Chavez.
• 1943 Christopher [Ronald] Walken.

March 31 Word Fact
dreamt is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.


March 31, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 22 of 52
You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,
Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation,
Extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.

I am he attesting sympathy,
(Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)

I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.

What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?

I find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,
Soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,
Thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.

This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
There is no better than it and now.

What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder,
The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.



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

• aquabib: someone who chooses to drink water rather than alcohol.
• cacospectomania: the compulsive desire to look at something that you know will horrify you.
• ecdysiast: ekˈdēzēəst, n., a striptease performer.
• fluckadrift: FLUHK-uh-drift n., excessive speed or urgency of movement or action; hurry or haste.
• gradatim: step by step.
• implicature: ˈimplikəCHər n., the action of implying a meaning beyond the literal sense of what is explicitly stated, e.g., saying /the frame is nice/ and implying /I don’t like the picture in it/.
• minnick: [MIN-ik] v., to be or to act over dainty whilst eating; to behave in a fussy way, especially with regards to the foods one chooses to eat.
• nemesism: frustration, anger, or aggression directed inward, toward oneself and one’s way of living.
• perdurable: pərˈd(y)o͝orəb(ə)l adj., enduring continuously; imperishable.
• subrosa: adv., in secret.

March 31, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Pragmatics
praɡˈmadiks, the branch of linguistics dealing with language in use and the contexts in which it is used, including such matters as deixis, the taking of turns in conversation, text organization, presupposition, and implicature, as defined by the OED.

How is this important to writing and writers? Iain McGilchrist talks about the ways that context versus abstraction characterize different forms of writing:

This difference is particularly important when it comes to what the two hemispheres contribute to language. The right hemisphere takes whatever is said within its entire context.134 It is specialised in pragmatics, the art of contextual understanding of meaning, and in using metaphor. It is the right hemisphere which processes the non-literal aspects of language. This is why the left hemisphere is not good at understanding the higher level meaning of utterances such as ‘it’s a bit hot in here today’ (while the right hemisphere understands ‘please open a window’, the left hemisphere assumes this is just helpful supply of meteorological data). It is also why the right hemisphere underpins the appreciation of humour, since humour depends vitally on being able to understand the context of what is said and done, and how context changes it. Subjects with right brain damage, like subjects with schizophrenia, who in many respects resemble them, cannot understand implied meaning, and tend to take conversational remarks literally.

The left hemisphere, because its thinking is decontextualised, tends towards a slavish following of the internal logic of the situation, even if this is in contravention of everything experience tells us. This can be a strength, for example in philosophy, when it gets us beyond intuition, although it could also be seen as the disease for which philosophy itself must be the cure; but it is a weakness when it permits too ready a capitulation to theory. The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of abstraction, which, as the word itself tells us, is the process of wresting things from their context. This, and its related capacity to categorise things once they have been abstracted, are the
foundations of its intellectual power.

For example, catering to the needs and capacities of the left hemisphere, the OED defines the word love, in its noun form, as: an intense feeling of deep affection; and in its verb form, as: feel deep affection for (someone).

Alternatively, for examples of the many ways that the right hemisphere understands the word love, consider the following examples from the Word-Wednesday Author Archives below, and please submit your own example in the comment section if we've omitted any of your favorites.

LOVE
Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. Leo Tolstoy

Fearlessness is what love seeks. Hanna Arendt

Fear has a smell, as love does. Margaret Atwood

In love, assurances are practically an announcement of their opposite. Elias Canetti

The first duty of love is to listen. Richard McCord

Love is the wild card of existence. Rita Mae Brown

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37-40 KJV

If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work. Kahlil Gibran

We have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. Dorothy Day

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.
and
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. Martin Luther King Jr.

Love is man's natural endowment, but he doesn't know how to use it. He refuses to recognize the power of love because of his love of power. Dick Gregory

Material power that is not counterbalanced by adequate spiritual power, that is, by love and wisdom, is a curse. Arnold J. Toynbee

The one thing that has power completely is love, because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power. Alan Paton

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. Carl Jung

Truth, like love and sleep, resents
Approaches that are too intense. W. H. Auden

Infantile love follows the principle: 'I love because I am loved.'
Mature love follows the principle: 'I am loved because I love.'
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.'
Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'
Erotic love begins with separateness, and ends in oneness.
Motherly love begins with oneness, and leads to separateness.
Erich Fromm

There lives within the very flame of love a kind of wick or snuff that will abate it. Hamlet

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved. Kurt Vonnegut

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. André Gide

Forgiveness is the final form of love. Reinhold Niebuhr

Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle. Sam Levenson

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one. Joseph Campbell

Marriage is three parts love and seven parts forgiveness of sins. Langdon Mitchell

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. Mark Twain

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. Adrienne Rich

Memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.
and
When you love someone, all your saved-up wishes start coming out. Elizabeth Bowen

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. Theodore Hesburgh

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Tom Robbins

Women in general want to be loved for what they are and men for what they accomplish. Theodor Reik

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing. Anaïs Nin

The things that we love tell us what we are. Thomas Aquinas

Love is being stupid together. Paul Valery

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. Ursula K. Le Guin

Love dies only when growth stops. Pearl S. Buck

The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong.” Sydney J. Harris

The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them. Simone De Beauvoir

Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.
and
There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love as between an unlighted lamp and one that is burning. The lamp was there and was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light, too, and that is its real function.  Vincent Van Gogh

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace. Karl Kraus

The love of pleasure is one of the great elementary instincts of human nature. Aristotle

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them. Agatha Christie

The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them. Molière

To love someone means to see them as God intended them. Fyodor Dostoevsky

To love an idea is to love it a little more than one should. Jean Rostand

There is time for work. And there is time for love. That leaves no other time. Coco Chanel

Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness. Auguste Rodin

Teaching: one of the few professions that permit love. Teaching is an act of love, a spiritual cohabitation, one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world. Theodore Roethke

Love may be sanctified and ennobled by its commitment to the unconditional horizon of perfection, but what makes love real in the human world seems to be our moving, struggling conversation with that wanted horizon rather than any possibility of arrival. David Whyte

I certainly don't think hatred is the mere absence of love or humanity, a mere vacuum in the human spirit. On the contrary, it has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact, the delegation of a piece of one's own identity to them. Just as a lover longs for the loved one and cannot get along without him, the hater longs for the object of his hatred. And like love, hatred is ultimately an expression of longing for the absolute, albeit an expression that has become tragically inverted. Vaclav Havel

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this – which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never – the Negro problem will no longer be needed. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. James Baldwin

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that needs our love. Rainer Maria Rilke


From A Year with Rilke, March 31 Entry
The Olive Grove, from New Poems

He went out under the grey leaves,
all grey and indistinct, this olive grove,
and buried his dusty face
in the dust of his hot hands.

It has come to this. Is this how it ends?
Must I continue when I’m going blind?
Why do you want me to say you exist
when I no longer find you myself?

I cannot find you any more. Not within me.
Not in others. Not in these stones.
I find you no longer. I am alone.

I am alone with everyone’s sorrow,
the sorrow I tried to relieve through you,
you who do not exist. O unspeakable shame.
Later they would say an angel came.



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.




*Mentos.