Word-Wednesday for April 14, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, April 14, 2021, the 15th Wednesday of the year, the fourth Wednesday of spring, and the 104th day of the year, with 261 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for April 14, 2021
Signs of spring in the snow.

RHUBARB!

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for April 14, 2021
Sunrise: 6:34am; Sunset: 8:13pm; 3 minutes, 27 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 7:51am; Moonset: 11:07pm, waxing crescent, 7% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for April 14, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             51                     73                     40
Low              28                    -11                     30


April 14 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Dolphin Day
• National Ex-Spouse Day
• National Gardening Day
• National Pan American Day
• National Pecan Day
• National Reach as High as You Can Day
• Look Up at the Sky Day

April 14 Word Riddle
What do you call ten rabbits marching backwards?*


April 14 Pun
Electricians strip to make ends meet.


April 14 The Roseau Times-Region Headline:
Grygla Youth Assaults Sibling with Bottle of Omega 3 Pills: Wounds Only Super Fish Oil


April 14 Definition of the Week
WHOM: A word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

Calvin Trillin

April 14 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1611 The word "telescope" is first used by Prince Federico Cesi.
• 1828 First American Dictionary: its author Noah Webster registers its copyright for publication.
• 1841 First modern detective story published, Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue.
• 1863 William Bullock patents continuous-roll printing press.
• 1939 John Steinbeck novel, The Grapes of Wrath, published.
• 1980 Pulitzer prize awarded to Norman Mailer for Executioner's Song.

April 14 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1126 Averroes, Spanish physician and philosopher.
• 1709 Charles Collé, French playwright and songwriter.
• 1819 Harriett Ellen Grannis Arey, American educator, author, editor, and publisher.
• 1842 Sven August Körling, Swedish composer.
• 1866 Anne Sullivan [Johanna Macy], American teacher who educated Helen Keller.
• 1881 Husain Salaahuddin, Maldivian poet and scholar.
• 1889 Arnold J. Toynbee, English historian and academic.
• 1926 Frank Daniel, Czech director, producer, and screenwriter.

April 14 Word Fact
A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.


April 14, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 24 of 52
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.

I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it,
Translucent mould of me it shall be you!
Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!
Firm masculine colter it shall be you!
Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you!
You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life!
Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you!
My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!
Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!
Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you!
Sun so generous it shall be you!
Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you!
You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you!
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!
Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you!
Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you.

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,
Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.

That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

To behold the day-break!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
The air tastes good to my palate.

Hefts of the moving world at innocent gambols silently rising freshly exuding,
Scooting obliquely high and low.

Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,
Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven.

The earth by the sky staid with, the daily close of their junction,
The heav’d challenge from the east that moment over my head,
The mocking taunt, See then whether you shall be master!


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

• armscye: ˈärmˌsī, -ˌzī  n., the armhole in clothes where sleeves are attached.
• colter: ˈkōltər n., a vertical cutting blade fixed in front of a plowshare.
• deuteragonist: dyoo-tuh-RAG-uh-nist n., the person second in importance to the protagonist in writing or theatre; a person who serves as a foil to another.
• geosmin: dʒiˈɑzmən n., an organic compound with a strong earthy scent and flavour, produced especially by various microorganisms and largely responsible for the smell of damp soil.
• mansuetude: MAN-swi-tyood n., the quality or state of being gentle; meekness, tameness, gentleness.
• nefelibata: nih-fel-ih-BAH-tah n., a cloud walker; one who lives in the cloud of their own imagination or dreams, or one who does not abide by the precepts of society, literature, or art; an unconventional, unorthodox person.
• pandiculate: pan-DIK-yuh-layt v., to stretch the torso and upper limbs, typically accompanied by yawning.
• schlimmbesserung: SHLIHM-bess-eh-rhoong n., an attempt to make an improvement that actually makes things worse; an intended improvement that has produced the opposite effect.
• tilth: tilTH n., cultivation of land; tillage.
• vagitus: və-jī′təs n., the first cry of a newborn baby.

April 14, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Definitions, Depth, and Meaning
In our ongoing exploration of the roles that our right and left hemispheres play in our writing and reading, today Word-Wednesday further explores the ways that the right hemisphere flexibly and inclusively expands word meaning beyond the definitional domains partitioned by the left hemisphere into the deeper, broadly associative meaning. By way of review, our left hemispheres partition our experiences both spatially and temporally, preferring the abstract and the mechanical perspectives; our right hemispheres experience spatial and temporal living wholenesses in terms of ongoing flow and continuity. Consequently, our left hemispheres operate in a compartmentalized world of certainty and permanence; our right hemispheres receive a world of change.

Left hemispheres rest comfortably with solid, concise, authoritative word definitions, but right hemispheres embrace all possible meanings, connotations, and associations between words and the world those words re-present. Iain McGilchrist tells us that humans communicated by song for centuries before using spoken or written words, and that poets write down words as representations of the living world rather than as citations from the OED.

As W. H. Auden once said, "A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us." A non-stop smoker, the page edges of Auden's OED were stained brown with nicotine from his finger tips, where Auden's chief interest was looking up word etymologies rather than definitions. Just as the right hemisphere perceives musical instruments the same way that it perceives other living beings, the right hemisphere perceives words as living beings with peculiar ancestries or genealogies. As times and cultures change more rapidly, word meaning can change in a single writer's/reader's lifetime. In this spirit, Oliver Wendell Holmes noted, "A word is not a crystal — transparent and unchanged — it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."

Another word-lover, poet David Whyte, wrote a meditation on the deeper meaning or fifty-two basic words in CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, “dedicated to WORDS and their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty.” Just like a deck of playing cards, each card has two sides: one side always the same as all the other cards; one side always unique. Some of the words Whyte explores include: alone, beginning, confession, disappointment, forgiveness, ground, hiding, joy, loneliness, memory, naming, pilgrim, rest, shadow, touch, unrequited, vulnerability, and work. Here's what Whyte wrote about the word "close", an example of what you can find for his other word meditations.

CLOSE
is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done, close to saying something, or close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up....

Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there, we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity: an intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation.

To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy, a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.

To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. We are in effect, always, close; always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach: the step between not understanding that and understanding that, is as close as we get to happiness.


From A Year with Rilke, April 14 Entry
Spanish Trilogy (III), from Uncollected Poems

When I re-enter, alone, the city’s crush
and its chaos of noise
and the fury of traffic surrounds me,
may I, above that hammering confusion,
remember sky and the mountain slopes
where the herds are still descending homeward.

May my courage be like those rocks
and the shepherd’s daylong work seem possible to me—
the way he drifts and darkens, and with a well-aimed stone
hems in his flock where it unravels.
With slow and steady strides, his posture is pensive
and, as he stands there, noble. Even now a god might
secretly slip into this form and not be diminished.

In turn, he lingers and moves on like the day itself,
and cloud shadows pass through him, as though all of space
were thinking slow thoughts for him.

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.


*A receding hareline.