Word-Wednesday for September 1, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, September 1, 2021, the 35th Wednesday of the year, the eleventh Wednesday of summer, and the 244th day of the year, with 121 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for September 1, 2021
Hydraulic Dynamos!
We’ve had some rain, now we got mushrooms.

According to Merlin Sheldrake, in Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Up Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, the fruiting stinkhorn mushroom exerts sufficient force to lift 130 kg, which is enough to crack through asphalt.


Nordhem Lunch: Closed until enough employees can be hired.


Earth/Moon Almanac for September 1, 2021
Sunrise: 6:41am; Sunset: 8:07pm; 3 minutes, 28 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 12:29am; Moonset: 5:30pm, waning crescent, 27% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for September 1, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             72                     90                     79
Low              49                     30                     62


September 1 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Burnt Ends Day
• National Acne Positivity Day
• National Chicken Boy’s Day
• National No Rhyme (Nor Reason) Day

September 1 Word Riddle
What did the zero say to the eight?*


September 1 Word Pun
coffee: /ˈkô-fē/ n., the person upon whom one coughs.


September 1 Etymology Word of the Week
enthusiasm: /enˈTH(y)o͞ozēˌazəm/ n., intense and eager enjoyment, interest, or approval; from French enthousiasme (16c.) and directly from Late Latin enthusiasmus, from Greek enthousiasmos "divine inspiration, enthusiasm (produced by certain kinds of music, etc.)," from enthousiazein "be inspired or possessed by a god, be rapt, be in ecstasy," from entheos "divinely inspired, possessed by a god," from en "in" (see en- (2)) + theos "god".


September 1 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1752 Liberty Bell arrives in Philadelphia.
• 1836 Narcissa Whitman, one of the first white women to settle west of the Rocky Mountains, arrives at Walla Walla, Washington.
• 1900 Cumann na nGaedheal (Irish Council) founded by Arthur Griffith in order to promote a buy Irish campaign.
• 1905 Alberta & Saskatchewan become eighth & ninth Canadian provinces.
• 1913 George Bernard Shaw's Androcles & the Lion premieres in London.

September 1 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1529 Taddeo Zuccari, Italian painter.
• 1653 Johann Pachelbel, German composer and organist.
• 1854 Engelbert Humperdinck, German opera composer.
• 1875 Edgar Rice Burroughs, American author.
• 1935 Seiji Ozawa, Japanese conductor.

September 1, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 44 of 52
It is time to explain myself—let us stand up.

What is known I strip away,
I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.

The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?

We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.

Births have brought us richness and variety,
And other births will bring us richness and variety.

I do not call one greater and one smaller,
That which fills its period and place is equal to any.

Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?
I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,
(What have I to do with lamentation?)

I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I an encloser of things to be.

My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount.

Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.

Long I was hugg’d close—long and long.

Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.

All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.


Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:
amative: /AM-uh-tiv/ adj., disposed to love, amorous; having or showing strong feelings of sexual attraction or love; strongly moved by love and especially sexual love.
coterie: /KOHT-uh-ree/ n., a small, exclusive group of people with shared interests or tastes; a club or clique; from French “coterie” (circle of acquaintances) from “cotier” (tenant of a cote) from French “cote” (hut, cottage) from Middle Low German “kote” (hut, cottage).
dogfooding: /‘dôɡ-fo͞o-diNG/ adj., computer technology idiom, having the team that made the product use the product themselves before releasing to the public.
eutrapely: /juː-‘træ-pə-lē/ n., wit and ease in conversation.
fewterer: /ˈfjuːt-(ə)-rə/ n., a keeper of dogs.
inkhornism: /INGK-hawrn-iz-uhm/ n., the overworking of something such as a piece of writing; a showy display of knowledge; unimaginative or unwarranted emphasis of minutiae in the presentation or use of knowledge.
oud: /ōōd/ n., a form of lute or mandolin played principally in Arab countries.
pseudosopher: /s(j)u-ˈdɒa-sə-fər/ n., a sham or spurious philosopher; a person who falsely believes himself or herself to be wise.
sauroid: /ˈsȯ-rȯid/ n., a fish of the group Sauroidei.
titivate: /TIT-ih-vayt/ v., to make small enhancing alterations to (something); to spruce up, touch up, tidy up, make decorative additions (think scurryfunge); to make oneself look attractive.


September 1, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
zero
/ˈzi-rō/ number, no quantity or number; naught; the figure 0.
Picking up on a previous exploration of nothing, today Word-Wednesday explores its numeric counterpart, 0, not to be confused with the letter O or the O mark, also known as Marujirushi (丸印) in Japan,  and as Gongpyo (공표(공標), ball mark) in Korea, which is the name of the symbol "⭕" used to represent affirmation in East Asia, similar to its Western equivalent of the checkmark, where its opposite is the X mark ("✗") or ("×"). Names for the number 0 in English include zero, nought (UK), naught (US), nil, or—in contexts where at least one adjacent digit distinguishes it from the letter "O"—oh or o (/oʊ/). Informal or slang terms for zero include zilch and zip. Other historical words include ught and aught, as well as cipher. 

 Zero, as a classic left hemisphere abstract concept derived from the observed laws of nature, is named and given symbolic form, which allows both hemispheres to consider (and manipulate) the world across unimaginably larger and smaller areas time and space. Interested readers can explore the history of zero in greater detail with The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, by mathematician Robert Kaplan, who sums zero up this way:

If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world. For zero brings into focus the great, organic sprawl of mathematics, and mathematics in turn the complex nature of things. From counting to calculating, from estimating the odds to knowing exactly when the tides in our affairs will crest, the shining tools of mathematics let us follow the tacking course everything takes through everything else – and all of their parts swing on the smallest of pivots, zero.

With these mental devices we make visible the hidden laws controlling the objects around us in their cycles and swerves. Even the mind itself is mirrored in mathematics, its endless reflections now confusing, now clarifying insight. As we follow the meanderings of zero’s symbols and meanings we’ll see along with it the making and doing of mathematics — by humans, for humans. No god gave it to us. Its muse speaks only to those who ardently pursue her.

Much ado about nothing?

No. Without the invention of zero, we would have no medicine, no astronomy, nor mathematics, as we know and use those studies today, and we have the ancient middle eastern world to thank (or blame). Humanity's quest to grasp the nature of the universe and make sense of our own existence (as currently understood) depends directly on our use of zero - an understanding which began in Mesopotamia (pre-Arab Sumer, modern-day Iraq). This form of nothing spurred one of the most significant paradigm shifts in human consciousness — a concept first discovered and later given symbolic form (invented) in ancient India. This twining of meaning and symbol first shaped mathematics, which underlies our models of reality, but became woven into the very fabric of human life - including the works of Shakespeare, who's King Lear famously winked at zero by calling it “an O without a figure.”

Like all transformative inventions, zero began with necessity: how to count increasingly large numbers of sheep and taxes and soldiers without getting jumbled in the ugliness of repeating very small numerals that add up to the large amounts. 5000 years ago, Sumerians counted on clay tablets by 1s, 10s, and 60s, where the tens and sixties had no zeros. Reconciling the decimal and sexagesimal counting systems was a source of growing confusion for the Sumerians as they became more wealthy, because they wrote by pressing the tip of a hollow reed to create circles and semi-circles onto wet clay tablets, later baked into "permanency". Their hollow reed eventually became a three-sided stylus, which made triangular cuneiform marks at varying angles to designate different numbers, amounts, and concepts.

Eventually, in the third century BCE, the Sumerians developed a way to wedge accounting columns apart from one another, which meant "nothing in this column". Without a concrete symbol, the understanding of zero was born. Enter the Greek mathematician, Archimedes, 287 – 212 BC, who needed to invent a way of dealing with really big numbers - like 10,000 - and developed the notion of "orders" of larger numbers. Poor Archimedes...he could think big, but not big enough to symbolize nothing. The Greeks did not even have a word for zero.

As Ursula K. Le Guin captured in her Earthsea Trilogy, to name a thing is to bring a thing into being - at least for the left hemisphere. Various cultures used version of the Sumerian space holders - including hooks, wedges, spaces, and lettered abbreviations - until the eleventh century, when the Hindu-Arabic numeral system was imported to Europe via the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, or Leonardo of Pisa, who wrote a math primer with the following entry:

I have striven to compose this book in its entirety as understandably as I could, dividing it into fifteen chapters. Almost everything which I have introduced I have displayed with exact proof, in order that those further seeking this knowledge, with its pre-eminent method, might be instructed, and further, in order that the Latin people might not be discovered to be without it, as they have been up to now. If I have perchance omitted anything more or less proper or necessary, I beg indulgence, since there is no one who is blameless and utterly provident in all things. The nine Indian figures are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0  ... any number may be written.

Before long, we have double-entry accounting and ways to measure everything large and small…except, perhaps, silence. 

The right hemisphere knows zero in terms of what it can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear, where the zero of sound is silence. The modern day champion of writing silence is certainly Samuel Beckett, for whom less is always more, living in the neighborhood of nul, just next door to zero, writing not wordlessness, but word lessness. Here are but a few ways he talks about words and silence:

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.

To restore the silence is the role of objects.

Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.

Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one.

Zero in, and choose your words in silently.


From A Year with Rilke
Playmates, from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 8

There were a few of us, playmates
in the scattered gardens of the city.
Remember how we found each other
and hesitantly liked each other,

and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,
spoke in silences. The good times we had belonged to no one.
Whose could they be? They disappeared amid all the hurrying people
and the worries to come with the long years.

Wagons and trucks rolled by. We didn’t care.
Houses rose around us, solid but unreal, and no one knew us.
What, after all, was real?

Nothing. Only the ball, the beautiful arcs it made.
Not even the children were real, except for the moment
of reaching up and ah! catching the ball.

 

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




*That belt looks good on you.