Word-Wednesday for July 7, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, July 7, 2021, the 27th Wednesday of the year, the third Wednesday of summer, and the 188th day of the year, with 177 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for July 7, 2021
Our milkweed has some annual tourists showing up.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for July 7, 2021
Sunrise: 5:29am; Sunset: 9:28pm; 1 minutes, 24 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 3:21am; Moonset: 7:54pm, waning crescent, 4% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for July 7, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             78                     97                     74
Low              56                     37                     49


July 7 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Dive Bar Day
• National Father Daughter Take a Walk Day
• National Strawberry Sundae Day
• National Macaroni Day
• Tell the Truth Day

July 7 Word Riddle
What do you call a person who’s wordplay never needs recharging?*


July 7 Pun
“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” - Groucho Marx


July 7 Etymology Word of the Week
repentance: In Biblical Hebrew , the idea of repentance is represented by two verbs: שוב shuv (to return) and נחם nacham (to feel sorrow). In the New Testament , the word translated as ‘repentance’ is the Greek word μετάνοια (metanoia), “after/behind one’s  mind“, which is a compound word of the preposition ‘meta’ (after, with), and the verb ‘noeo’ (to perceive, to think, the result of perceiving or observing). In this compound word, the preposition combines the two meanings of time and change, which may be denoted by ‘after’ and ‘different’; so that the whole compound means: ‘to think differently after’. Metanoia is therefore primarily an after-thought, different from the former thought; a change of mind and change of conduct, “change of mind and heart”, or, “change of consciousness”.


July 7 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1456 A retrial verdict acquits Joan of Arc of heresy 25 years after her death.
• 1550 Traditional date chocolate thought to have been introduced to Europe.
• 1668 Isaac Newton receives MA from Trinity College, Cambridge.
• 1768 Firm of Johann Buddenbrook founded, in Thomas Mann's novel Buddenbrooks.
• 1801 Toussaint Louverture declares Haitian independence.
• 1802 First comic book The Wasp, is published in Hudson, New York, criticizing Republican politicians.
• 1814 Walter Scott's novel Waverley published.
• 1928 Sliced bread sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company, Missouri, using a machine invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder. Described as the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.
• 1966 Obscenity ban for Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs overturned by the Massachusetts Supreme Court after testimony by Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer.

July 7 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1852 Dr. John H. Watson, partner of Sherlock Holmes.
• 1860 Gustav Mahler.
• 1906 Satchel Paige.
• 1907 Helene Johnson, American Harlem Renaissance poet.
• 1927 Doc [Carl] Severinson.

July 7, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 36 of 52
Stretch’d and still lies the midnight,
Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,
Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer’d,
The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet,
Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin,
The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers,
The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,
The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,
Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars,
Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,
Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,
A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,
Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,
The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan,
These so, these irretrievable.


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

• accipitrine: /ak-SIP-ih-trahyn/  adj., of, resembling, relating or belonging to the hawk family.
• dray: /drā/ n., 1. a truck or cart for delivering beer barrels or other heavy loads, especially a low one without sides.
• floruit: /ˈflôr(y)əwət/ n., the period during which a historical figure lived or worked.
• impasto: /imˈpastō/ n., the process or technique of laying on paint or pigment thickly so that it stands out from a surface.
• keak: /kēk/ v., to laugh shrilly; to cackle.
• lentigo: /lenˈ’tīɡgō/ n., a small, clearly defined patch of skin that is darker than the surrounding skin as a result of an increased number of pigment cells. Lentigines are generally darker than freckles, do not fade, and become more frequent with age.
• mirabiliary: n., a book in which wonderful things are noted; a treatise on miracles, portents, prodigies, omens, and the like.
• prolix: /prōˈ-liks/ adj., (of speech or writing) using or containing too many words; tediously lengthy.
• schlimazel: /SHləˈmäzəl/ n., a consistently unlucky or accident-prone person.
• wu-wei: Chinese, v., trying not to try.

July 7, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Nothing
/ˈnəTHiNG/ n., something that does not exist.

Take a moment to look at the gaps between the letters and the words in this sentence… are they something or nothing? No thing? When we can talk about nothing as a noun, we talk about a thing called nothingness rather than no thing. It is a something. There’s a thingyness to nothing, so there’s something to write about nothing after-all.

Nothingness is a concept that can mean both an absence and a presence, best observed in a contradiction. A contra-diction is both itself and not itself simultaneously. We know nothing as an absence, as what we mean when we say no thing; and we also know nothing also something that we speak about in our language as a presence — a concrete nothing such as a hole.

Is a hole a something or a nothing? As an absence of matter or an object or an entity that we can analyze and describe, a hole still has a shape; it can be described in terms of what it contains; and it has limits. If holes are nothings, then what are we describing? We don’t describe holes as absences when we talk about them to others; we give them identities.

“What about a hole as a void?” says the skeptical logician from Riverfront Station. Okay, lets talk about dat doughnut yer eatin'. Please tell us about what's around the hole's void. Doughnuts have holes, and doughnut holes are nothing without the dough around the hole. Is the hole defined by the entire doughnut or just the tiny dough layer surrounding the hole? We would all agree that a doughnut without a hole is not a doughnut, but a hole is nothing, so the identity of the doughnut depends on something that is nothing? Hmmm. And what happens to the hole when we cut the doughnut in half? Is it still a doughnut? The doughnut should probably be happy that it is not as hole-ridden as a golf course —  or heaven forbid — a sieve: a whole lot of holes with a whole lot of nothings. Are holes parasites on the surroundings that define them as nothings? And what about shadows? Clearly nothing deserves our attention. Wannaskan Almanac warning for parents: NEVER allow your child to eat the doughnut hole unsupervised — just ask Alice.

So when it comes to nothing, presence and absence clearly both matter. We all know that politicians are experts at nothing, but what about novelists, poets, philosophers, and chairmen? How do we speak or write about the non-existent when our language has no direct terms for those nothings? What if we choose to embrace contradictions? If you haven’t already read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this might be a good time. Robert M. Pirsig explores the metaphysics of quality in this delightful book where the protagonist and antagonist wrestle with mu (無), a Japanese word with legs, characterized by Pirsig as follows:

Mu means "no thing." Like "quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "no class: not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes and a no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says.

Since this is Word-Wednesday, we have a word for this: dialetheism, (from  Greek δι- /di-/ ‘twice’ and ἀλήθεια alḗtheia ‘truth’) defined as the view that there are SOME statements that are both true and false, or more precisely, that there can be SOME true statements whose negation is also true. Such statements are called "true  contradictions", dialetheia, or  nondualisms. This contradicts the standard Wannaskan logic that all propositions must be either true or false, that no proposition can be both true and false at the same time, or that no proposition can be neither true nor false at the same time.

Take the Liars Paradox: What I’m saying now is false.
What is the status of my statement? It contains truthfulness and falsity at the same time no matter what direction you take my word. Nothing could be more true.

From A Year with Rilke, July 7 Entry
The Island (I), from New Poems

The tide erases the path through the mud flats
and makes things on all sides look the same.
But the little island out there has closed its eyes.
The dike around it walls its people in.

They are as if born into a sleep
that silently blurs all destinations.
They seldom speak,
and every utterance is like an epitaph

for something cast ashore, some foreign object
that comes unexplained, and just stays.
So is everything their gaze encounters from childhood on:

not intended for them, random, unwieldy,
sent from somewhere else
to underscore their loneliness.

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.


*An energizer punny.