Word-Wednesday for October 20, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, October 20, 2021, the 42nd Wednesday of the year, the fifth Wednesday of fall, and the 293rd day of the year, with 72 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for October 20, 2021
2021 Mosquito Season Over

The recent frost should pretty much end this miserable summer infestation.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for October 20, 2021
Sunrise: 7:52; Sunset: 6:25pm; 3 minutes, 25 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 6:43pm; Moonset: 7:46am, full moon, 99% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for October 20, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             49                     78                     50
Low              31                       2                      27


October 20 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Chicken and Waffles Day
• National Youth Confidence Day
• National Brandied Fruit Day
• BRA Day USA
• Hagfish Day
• Support Your Local Chamber of Commerce
• Medical Assistants Recognition Day

October 20 Word Riddle
Where do bad rainbows go?*


October 20 Word Pun
Sven got sick at a small hotel on his vacation to Madrid. He called the front desk, and the concierge told Sven they had a doctor on staff. After the doctor helped Sven feel better, Sven said, “I’m amazed that such a small place has its own doctor!”
The doctor nodded and replied, “No one expects the Spanish Inn Physician!”


October 20 The Roseau Times-Region Headline:
Weight Loss Pills Stolen from Warroad Pharmacy: Police Say Suspects Still at Large


October 20 Etymology Word of the Week
vote: /vōt/ n., a formal indication of a choice between two or more candidates or courses of action, expressed typically through a ballot or a show of hands or by voice; from mid-15c., "formal expression of one's wish or choice with regard to a proposal, candidate, etc.," from Latin votum "a vow, wish, promise to a god, solemn pledge, dedication," noun use of neuter of votus, past participle of vovere "to promise, dedicate" (see vow (n.)).

 

October 20 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1822 First edition of London Sunday Times.
• 1917 US suffragette Alice Paul begins a seven month jail sentence for protesting women's rights in Washington.
• 1955 Publication of The Return of the King, the 3rd and final volume of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
• 1964 Mad Dog Vachon beats Verne Gagne in Minneapolis, to become NWA champ.

October 20 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1475 Giovanni Rucellai, Italian poet.
• 1819 Karol Mikuli, Polish composer and pianist.
• 1854 Arthur Rimbaud, French poet.
• 1859 John Dewey, American philosopher, educational theorist and writer.
• 1874 Charles Ives, American composer.
• 1882 Bela Lugosi [Blaskó].
• 1890 Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton [LeMothe], American jazz pioneer pianist and composer.
• 1909 Sugiyama Yasushi, Japanese Nihonga style painter.
• 1911 Will Rogers Jr.
• 1923 Otfried Preußler, Czech children's book author.
• 1925 Art Buchwald.
• 1937 Emma Tennant, English writer.
• 1940 Robert Pinsky, American poet and Poet Laureate of the United States.
• 1958 Ivo Pogorelić, Croatian pianist.

October 20, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 51 of 52
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?


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

• agon: /ˈä-gän/ n., conflict, especially, the dramatic conflict between the chief characters in a literary work.
• cakeage: /ˈkeɪ-kɪdʒ/ n., in a restaurant: the cutting and serving of a cake that has been brought in by a customer from off the premises; (hence) a charge levied for this service.
• fescennine: /ˈfe-sə-ˌnīn/ adj., scurrilous, obscene.
• gabion: /ˈɡā-bē-ən/ n., a wirework container filled with rock, broken concrete, or other material, used in the construction of dams, retaining walls, etc. 

 

• imbrication: /ˌim-brə-ˈkā-shən/ n., an overlapping of edges (as of tiles or scales).
• naïf: /nīˈēf, näˈēf/ adj., naive or ingenuous; n., a naive or ingenuous person.
• pacable: /ˈpeɪ-kə-b(ə)l/ adj., capable of being pacified or appeased; placable.
• revenant: /REH-veh-nent/ n., a person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead; one that returns after death or a long absence; from French, literally ‘coming back,’ present participle of “revenir”.
• schmutzwortsuche: /shmootz-VOHRT-zoo-che/ v., looking up naughty words in the dictionary; from German “schmutz” (smudge or dirty) + “wort” (word) + “suche” (search).
• yarborough: /YAHR-bur-uh/ n., a hand in Bridge or Whist containing no ace and no card higher than a nine.

October 20, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
metonym
/ˈmed-ə-ˌnim/ n., a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated; from the Greek μετωνυμία, metōnymía, "a change of name", from μετά, metá, "after, post, beyond", and -ωνυμία, -ōnymía, a suffix that names figures of speech, from ὄνυμα, ónyma or ὄνομα, ónoma, "name".

Common in everyday speech, metonymy and related figures of speech - such as synecdoche (a part refers to a whole) and metalepsis (using a word in a new context) - are different from  polysemy, the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word (or phrase). Like metaphor, metonymy involves the substitution of one term for another, where this substitution is based on some specific analogy between two things in metaphor, and where the substitution is based on some understood association or contiguity in metomym.

In his book, A Grammar of Motives, American literary theorist Kenneth Burke lists metonym as one of four "master tropes": metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Does an author creatively use a word to: (a) refer to something by mentioning another? (b) substitute something for a close associate? (c) use a part of something to refer to its whole? or (d) use a something that signifies its opposite? The answer depends on the context and the skill of the author.

John Ashbery's poetry offers a case in point for context. Ashbery described is childhood as in terms of boredom and loneliness in far upstate Sodus, New York, where his parents ran a farm with never-ending chores, repairs, social isolation, and worry during lean years. He visited his  grandmother in the summer and took music and art lessons, becoming the kind of reader that children aren’t allowed to be anymore. Reading concentrated his imagination and expanded his literary repertoire until his death in 2017 at age 90 years.

Ashbery was both a poet and a visual artist, where his work in each media favored collage - art made by using different materials. In “Conjuries that Endure,” Marianne Moore's 1937 review of Wallace Stevens’s Owl’s Clover and Ideas of Order, she describes Stevens as “a linguist creating several languages within a single language.” This is the same effect that Ashbery achieves in many of his prams and poems. Consider these lines from Ashbery's “19. Tense Positions with a ‘Peaceful’ Wrist,” a section of his unfinished The Art of Finger Dexterity:

If New England resembled Bulgaria, both would
look like this bookcase that stands so moderately,
like a birthday, “things seen from right to left.”
And in that case, possession (nine points of the)
would inject its other meaning. Is this, in fact, Brazil,
which all foreign countries resemble, even
the United States? If not, let us hide our toes,
fall backward into stagnant ether that is what
rises at the end of all days, of all voyages
in and from the parlor. We must translate what is tense
into peaceful outcomes that will ripple back
to foreign origins, not wishing to know the name
for what happened or why we connived at it,
only that all points are equidistant and pleased,
and part of summer, the part of you that got on with it.

Stéphan Mallarmé, one of Ashbery's major influences, put it this way:

It’s all there. I make Music, and I name by this not only that music that one can draw from the euphonious bringing together of words,—that is an initial condition that goes without saying: but also that music which goes beyond and is magically produced by certain dispositions of speech parole, where this remains only in the state of a means of material communication with the reader like the keys of a piano. Truly, between the lines and above the gaze this takes place, in all its purity, without the intervention of gut strings or of pistons as in the orchestra, which is already industrial; but it’s the same thing as the orchestra, only literary and silent. Poets in all ages have never done anything else, and it’s amusing today, that is all, to become aware of it…. I only quibble with you over obscurity: no, my dear poet, except by clumsiness or awkwardness, I am not obscure the moment one reads me in order to seek what I have set forth above, or the manifestation of an art which makes use—let us say incidentally, I know the profound cause—of language: and I become obscure, of course! if one makes a mistake and thinks one is opening a newspaper.

Ashbery would agree with Mallarmé. Ashbery's poetry sentence collages communicate more than just a newspaper's dictionary meaning in the shortest amount of time. We read and write differently as we get older, and sometimes there is no message - only contrasts - only metonyms: of geography (New England, Bulgaria, Brazil), of time (birthday, points on a timeline), of language (bookcase, translate, tense, name). Ashbery uses his language to collapse the imaginative distance between "voyages" and his "parlor" on imbricated waves of metonym, which create both abrupt connections and languid, pleasant openings.


From A Year with Rilke, October 20 Entry 
The Machine, from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 10

The Machine endangers all we have made.
We allow it to rule instead of obey.
To build the house, cut the stone sharp and fast:
the carver’s hand takes too long to feel its way.

The Machine never hesitates, or we might escape
and its factories subside into silence.
It thinks it’s alive and does everything better.
With equal resolve it creates and destroys.

But life holds mystery for us yet. In a hundred places
we can still sense the source: a play of pure powers
that—when you feel it—brings you to your knees.

There are yet words that come near to the unsayable,
and, from crumbling stones, a new music
to make a sacred dwelling in a place we cannot own.



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.



*prism, for a light sentence