Word-Wednesday for September 15, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, September 15, 2021, the 37th Wednesday of the year, the thirteenth and last Wednesday of summer, and the 258th day of the year, with 107 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for September 15, 2021
Bluebells Are Out!

Hyacinthoides non-scripta (formerly Endymion non-scriptus or Scilla non-scripta) is a bulbous perennial plant, associated with ancient woodland where it may dominate the understorey to produce carpets of violet–blue flowers in "bluebell woods", but also occurs in more open habitats in western regions.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for September 15, 2021
Sunrise: 7:01am; Sunset: 7:37pm; 3 minutes, 32 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 5:26pm; Moonset: 12:14am, waxing gibbous, 62% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for September 15, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             66                     85                    72
Low              44                     24                    54


September 15 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Cheese Toast Day
• National Linguine Day
• National Felt Hat Day
• National Double Cheeseburger Day
• National Creme de Menthe Day
• National Tackle Kids Cancer Day
• National Neonatal Nurses Day
• National Online Learning Day
• Greenpeace Day

September 15 Word Riddle
What’s the proper instrument for measuring pun quality?*


September 15 Word Pun
Flatulence: /ˈflaCH-ə-ləns/ n., emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.


September 15 Etymology Word of the Week
imagine: /i-ˈmaj-ən/ v., to form a mental image of, from Old French imaginer, "sculpt, carve, paint; decorate, embellish" (13c.), from Latin imaginari,”to form a mental picture, picture to oneself, imagine" (also, in Late Latin imaginare "to form an image of, represent"), from imago "an image, a likeness," from stem of imitari "to copy, imitate.


September 15 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1795 Lyrical Ballads published by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
• 1857 Timothy Alder of New York patents a typesetting machine.
• 1960 Maurice Richard announces his retirement.

September 15 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1254 Marco Polo.
• 1789 James Fenimore Cooper.
• 1811 Jan Nepomuk Škroup, Czech composer.
• 1890 Agatha Christie.
• 1892 Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.
• 1907 Fay Wray.
• 1921 Jan Frank Fischer, Czech composer.
• 1925 Gösta Jonsson, Swedish saxophonist, accordion player and band leader.

September 15, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 46 of 52
I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured.

I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth,
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip,
And in due time you shall repay the same service to me,
For after we start we never lie by again.

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven,
And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?
And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.

You are also asking me questions and I hear you,
I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.

Sit a while dear son,
Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink,
But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence.

Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.


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

• apsara: /ˈap-sə-rɑa/ n., Sanskrit, celestial dancer.
• chuff: /CHəf/ n., a person’s buttocks or anus.
• daedal: /ˈdiːdəl/ adj., skillful or intricate.
• ecmnesia: /ĕk-'nē-zhə/ n., loss of memory for recent events.
• finifugal: /fan-'ee-fyoo-gal/ adj., hating endings; of someone who tries to avoid or prolong the final moment of a story, relationship, or some other journey.
• idoneous: /ido·'ne· ous/ adj., fit, appropriate, suitable, proper.
• loggia: /ˈlôj-(ē)-ə/ n., a gallery or room with one or more open sides, especially one that forms part of a house and has one side open to the garden; an open-sided extension to a house.
• mambo: /ˈmäm-bō/ n. a Latin American dance similar to the rumba; a voodoo priestess.
• oblectation: /ob-lek-TAY-shun/ n., pleasure, satisfaction, delight; a pleasant state of feeling very satisfied and happy.
• tregetour: /TREH-juh-tuhr/ n., a juggler or magician; a conjuror; a person who performs tricks; a trickster.

September 15, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Poetry by the Pound
Ezra Pound distinguished three kinds of poetry: melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia, where the Latin -poeia comes from the Ancient Greek /ποιέω/ (poieō, “I make”).

melopoeia: /ˌmel-ə-ˈpē(y)ə/ n., melody; the art or theory of inventing melody, from ancient Greek μελοποιΐα (melopoiḯa), from μελοποιός (melopoiós, “song-maker, lyric poet”), from μελο- (melo-, “melo-”) + ποιεῖν (poieîn, “to make”). For Pound, melopoetic words are charged beyond their normal meaning with some musical property which further directs its meaning, inducing emotional correlations by sound and rhythm of the speech. Examples include:
William Carlos Williams: “Attaboy, attaboy”
William Shakespeare: “With hey!/ with hey!/ the trush and the jay”

phanopoeia: /ˌfan-ə(ʊ)-ˈpē (y)ə/ n., use of words in poetry to suggest visual images, or as Alan Ginsburg characterizes phanopoeia, “casting images on the mind’s eye”, from ancient Greek ϕανός light, bright, contracted from ϕαεινός (from ϕάος light + an extended form of the Indo-European base of -νος, suffix forming nouns) + -poeia. Examples include:
“a crimson curtain blown in the window” representing a breeze,
or more extensively, in Linda Hogan’s poem, Bear Fat:

When the old man rubbed my back
with bear fat
I dreamed the winter horses
had eaten the bark off trees
and the tails of one another.
 
I slept a hole into my own hunger
that once ate lard and bread
from a skillet seasoned with salt.
 
Fat was the light
I saw through
the eyes of the bear
three bony dogs leading men
into the grass-lined caves of sleep
to kill hunger
as it slept itself thin.
 
They grew fat
with the swallowed grease.
They ate even the woodashes
after the fire died
and when they slept,
did they remember back
to when they were wolves?
 
I am afraid of the future
as if I am the bear
turned in the stomach
of needy men
or the wolf become a dog
that will turn against itself
remembering what wilderness was
before the crack of a gun,
before the men tried to kill it
or tame it
or tried to make it love them.

logopoeia: lō-ɡō-ˈpē-ə/ n., defined by Pound as poetry that uses words for more than just their direct meaning, stimulating the visual imagination with phanopoeia and inducing emotional correlations with melopoeia, coined by Ezra Pound from Ancient Greek λόγος (lógos, “speech, discourse, story, study, word, reason”) and ancient Greek ποίησις (poíēsis, “poetry”), or “the dance of intellect among words”. Examples include:
Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Section 15: “The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways”.

See if you can spot the all three devices in William Shakespeare, in his poem,  

Winter
WHEN icicles hang by the wall     
  And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,     
And Tom bears logs into the hall,     
  And milk comes frozen home in pail;     
When blood is nipt, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl     
                Tu-whoo!     
Tu-whit! tu-whoo! A merry note!     
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.     
 
When all around the wind doth blow,
  And coughing drowns the parson's saw,     
And birds sit brooding in the snow,     
  And Marian's nose looks red and raw;     
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl—     
Then nightly sings the staring owl
                Tu-whoo!     
Tu-whit! tu-whoo! A merry note!     
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.


From A Year with Rilke, September 15 Entry
To Use Sorrow, from Letter to Madame M-R, January 4, 1923

What you say of your life—that its most painful event was also its greatest—that is, so to speak, the secret theme of these pages, indeed the inner belief that gave rise to them. It is the conviction that what is greatest in our existence, what makes it precious beyond words, has the modesty to use sorrow in order to penetrate our soul.

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 sighsmograph