Word-Wednesday for May 5, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, May 5, 2021, the 18th Wednesday of the year, the seventh Wednesday of spring, and the 125th day of the year, with 240 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for May 5, 2021
Spring Peepers
Often singing along side the Northern Leopard Frog and the Boreal Forest Frog, the Spring Peepers have finally emerged from the chaotic temperature swings to begin their nightly songs.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for May 5, 2021
Sunrise: 5:56am; Sunset: 8:45pm; 3 minutes, 1 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 4:11am; Moonset: 2:16pm, waning crescent, 32% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for May 5, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             61                     86                     55
Low              37                     21                      31


May 5 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Astronaut Day
• National Cartoonists Day
• National Silence the Shame Day
• National Totally Chipotle Day
• National Hoagie Day
• National Bike To School Day
• National Skilled Trades Day
• National Interpreter Appreciation Day
• Cinco de Mayo

May 5 Word Riddle
Where did the Terminator find the toilet paper during the COVID-19 pandemic?*


May 5 Pun
A boy walks into a zoo. The only animal in the entire zoo is a dog.
It’s a Shih Tzu.


May 5 Etymology Word of the Week
quarantine
/ˈkwôrənˌtēn/ originally a noun from Venetian City law for a policy first enforced in 1377, where ships arriving from plague-stricken countries must wait off the Venetian port for 40 days to assure that no travelers carried latent symptoms; from the Italian quaranta and Latin quadraginta words for 40. The word first appearing in English as quarentyne in the 1520s, as the period of 40 days in which a widow has the right to remain in her dead husband’s house, and later in the 1660s as the period a ship or person suspected of carrying a contagious disease must be kept in isolation.


May 5 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1862 French army intervenes in Puebla, Mexico: Cinco de Mayo.
• 1891 Music Hall (later, Carnegie Hall) opens in New York, with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as guest conductor.
• 1925 Dayton teacher John T. Scopes arrested for teaching evolution in Tennessee.
• 1926 Sinclair Lewis refuses his Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith.
• 1944 Mahatma Gandhi freed from prison.
• 1947 Pulitzer prize awarded to Robert Penn Warren for All the King's Men.
• 1952 Pulitzer prize awarded to Herman Wouk for The Caine Mutiny.
• 1958 Pulitzer prize awarded to James Agee for Death in the Family.
• 1969 Pulitzer prize awarded to Norman Mailer for Armies of the Night.
• 1979 Masterpiece Radio Theater begins broadcasting.

May 5 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1813 Søren Kierkegaard.
• 1813 Søren Kierkegaard.
• 1830 John Batterson Stetson, American hat manufacturer.
• 1865 Nellie Bly [Elizabeth Cochran Seaman], American journalist and writer.
• 1882 Sylvia Pankhurst, English feminist and suffragette.
• 1943 Michael Palin.
• 1945 Jiří Svoboda, Czech director.
• 1955 Robert Feld, 1990 National Scrabble Champion.

May 5, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 27 of 52
To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.

Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.



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

• aletheia: al-uh-thee-uh n., truth or disclosure in philosophy, used in Ancient Greek philosophy and revived in the 20th century by Martin Heidegger; variously translated as “unclosedness”, “unconcealedness”, “disclosure” or “truth”.
• catio: /ˈ’kadēˌō/ n., portmanteau of cat and patio, a domestic cat enclosure or cat cage, as either a permanent or a temporary structure intended to confine a cat or multiple cats to a designated space.
• devilshine: ˈdɛv(ə)lˌʃaɪn, n., illusion or delusion caused by or attributed to the Devil; the power or influence of a devil; diabolical works; devilish behavior.
• ergophile: /ER-goh-fahyl/ n., one who truly loves their job or who loves to work.
• flitterwochen: /FLIT-er-voh-khen/ n., a vacation spent together by a newly married couple; a honeymoon.
• liggle: /LIG-uhl/ v., to carry something that is too heavy for easy transport; to shlep; n., the act of carrying a heavy object awkwardly.
• parosmia: abnormality in the sense of smell.
• quahaug: ˈkwôhôɡ n., a large, rounded edible clam of the Atlantic coast of North America.
• sabrage: səˈbrɑʒ n., the action or an act of opening a bottle of champagne by sliding the dull edge of a sabre blade quickly down the neck of the bottle and then slicing off the top; the skill or technique of doing this.
• tickaesthesia: /tIk-uhs-thEE-zhuh/ n., in areas where Ixodes scapularis is endemic, a human sensory psychosis concurrent with the emergence of the adult stage of the insect life cycle, characterized by seasonal variation in the sensitivity of human androgenic and vellus hair, with symptoms: (a) developing immediately upon removal of the first "tick" of the season, (b) defined by hallucinatory sensations of "tick presence" and resultant "tick searching behaviors" in absence of actual Ixodes scapularis on afflicted human, (c) persisting for several weeks to months after adult Ixodes scapularis ends its seasonal life cycle each year, (d) that vary in severity from person to person; (e) for which there is no know cure.

 

May 5, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Graphomania
ˌɡræ-fəʊ-ˈmeɪn-ɪ-ə n., an obsession with writing. Several Wannaskan Almanac contributors recently  discussed their own experiences of this dis-ease — some have to write, some cannot not write, some are bothered when they go without writing. If you live with such an ergophile, you know it isn’t always pretty. For those readers who do not live with such a person, imagine a slightly different version of Goethe’s story, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: the protagonist enters an isolated one-room house with a head full of thoughts she cannot contain. Therein she finds one wall stacked with empty notebooks, and a table and chair placed against the opposite wall next to the only window. Upon the table sits long, black pen next to a clean, shiny notebook opened to the first blank page. She sits and begins to jot down a few thoughts. Before long, she finds herself unable to disengage from the black pen, as if the pen is gripping her hand; the moment she feels her mind emptied and her pen slowing its movement across the paper, her mind fills once again with myriad thoughts, feelings, and images that inexorably demand an inky exodus. One by one, page by page, line by line, the pen fills the wall of notebooks.

While graphomania is an actual diagnosis, writers should be clear to differentiate between the functional and dysfunctional expressions of this condition. If you think Joyce Carol Oates has published prolifically, check out her Twitter account. If you like Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, character, you might also check out his non-fiction, autobiographical work — The Graphomaniac’s Primer: A Semi-Surrealist Memoir.  These authors exemplify the functional graphomaniac.

Interestingly, and on the spectrum between the functional and dysfunctional, is the person burdened with hypergraphia: a behavioral condition characterized by the intense desire to write or draw. Forms of hypergraphia can vary in writing style and content. Hypergraphia can be a symptom associated with temporal lobe changes in epilepsy and in Geschwind syndrome. Fyodor Dostoyevski and Vincent Van Gogh are historical artists thought to have been hypergraphomaniacs.

Psychologists have used the term graphomania since the early nineteenth century to describe dysfunctional persons with pathological inabilities to stop writing. Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Eugen Bleuler first used graphomania as a diagnosis, and he was the psychiatrist who also coined the term schizophrenia. Almost all persons with pathological graphomania are diagnosed in childhood and often end up institutionalized.

If you like to write, and if you have a day job, and if you enjoy a full life, count your blessings, and maybe talk to others like your self once in a while. If your graphomania issues run deeper, see a doctor and read more Rilke.


From A Year with Rilke, May 5 Entry
A Circle, from Letter to Marianne von Goldschmidt-Rothschild, December 5, 1914

Surely our heart travels not only from the ghostly to the holy, but it makes a circle. And we know only half of it.



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.

*Aisle B, back.