Word-Wednesday for January 26, 2022

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday, January 26, 2022, the fourth Wednesday of the year, the sixth Wednesday of winter, and the 26 day of the year, with 339 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for January 26, 2022
Our recent super-sparkly, fluffy snowfall in Wannaska was a classic example of meteorological conditions promoting "snowflake", a term used when single ice crystals in a snowfall achieve sufficient size to amalgamated with others.

As Wannaskans know all too well, not all snow is fluffy. The main constituent shapes for  precipitating ice crystals, are needle, column, plate, and rime. Word-Wednesday provides this handy snow guide so that readers can identify future snow fall flakes.

January 26 Nordhem Lunch:
Oven Fried Chicken Dinner with Mashed Potatoes & Peas
Warm Meatloaf Sandwich with Baked Beans
French Onion Soup with Egg Salad & Choice of Sandwich


Earth/Moon Almanac for January 26, 2021
Sunrise: 8:05am; Sunset: 5:06pm; 2 minutes, 37 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 8:35pm; Moonset: 9:50am, waning crescent, 39% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for January 26, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             15                     44                     30
Low             -6                    -46                     -4


January 26 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Green Juice Day
• National Peanut Brittle Day
• National Spouses Day
• Library Shelfie Day

January 26 Word Riddle
How do Wannaskan Almanac contributors refer to a body shop?*


January 26 Word Pun
A backwards poet writes inverse.


January 26 Roseau Times-Region Headline:
Cattle Truck Collides with Pharmaceutical Truck: State Trooper Reports Cow Adderall Damage


January 26 Etymology Word of the Week
sleazy: /ˈslē-zē/ adj., as there is the increasing use of the word with reference to Great Britain’s Prime Minister.
1640s, "downy, fuzzy," later "flimsy, unsubstantial" (1660s), of unknown origin; one theory is that it is a corruption of Silesia, the German region, where thin linen or cotton fabric was made for export. Silesia in reference to cloth is attested in English from 1670s; and sleazy as an abbreviated form is attested from 1670), but OED is against this. Sense of "sordid" is from 1941.
“A day is a more magnificent cloth than any muslin, the mechanism that makes it is infinitely cunninger, and you shall not conceal the sleazy, fraudulent, rotten hours you have slipped into the piece, nor fear that any honest thread, or straighter steel, or more inflexible shaft, will not testify in the web.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 1860.


January 26 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 66 Fifth recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.
• 1689 Jean Racine's Esther premieres in Saint-Cyr.
• 1784 Benjamin Franklin expresses unhappiness over eagle as America's symbol.
• 1790 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Cosi Fan Tutte premieres in Vienna.
• 1802 Congress passes an act calling for a US Capitol library.
• 1833 Gaetano Dinozetti's opera Lucrezia Borgia premieres in Milan.
• 1838 Tennessee enacts the first prohibition law in the United States.
• 1850 First German language daily newspaper in US published in New York City.
• 1891 Oscar Wilde's Duchess of Padua premieres.
• 1900 Henrik Ibsen's Naar vi Dode Vaaguer premieres in Stuttgart.
• 1907 John Millington Synge's Playboy of Western World opens in Dublin, censors are not happy.
• 1929 Rube Goldberg's The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, A.K., cartoon series first published in Colliers Weekly.
• 1975 Edward Albee's Seascape premieres.

January 26 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1541 Florent Chrestien, French writer.
• 1748 Emmanuel Aloys Förster, Bohemian composer.
• 1778 Ugo Foscolo, Italian poet.
• 1781 Ludwig Joachim "Achim" von Arnim, German poet.
• 1831 Mary Mapes Dodge, American author of Hans Brinker & the Silver Skates.
• 1857 Trinley Gyatso, 12th Dalai Lama.
• 1887 Arnout Colnot, Dutch painter and graphic artist.
• 1893 Bessie Coleman, first African American airplane pilot.
• 1904 Seán MacBride, Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army and founder of Amnesty International.
• 1905 Maria Augusta von Trapp, Austrian singer.
• 1908 Stéphane Grappelli, French jazz violinist.
• 1910 Elmar Klos, Czech director.
• 1912 Cora Baird, American puppeteer, Kukla, Fran & Ollie.
• 1921 Frantisek Chaun, Czech composer.
• 1926 José María Valverde, Spanish philosopher and poet.
• 1929 Jules Feiffer, American cartoonist.
• 1932 George H Clements, first Roman Catholic Priest to adopt a child.
• 1944 Angela Davis, African American activist, author, and professor.
• 1949 Jonathan Carroll, American author.

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

• aliment: /AL-uh-muhnt/ n., that which provides nourishment; food, comestibles; v., to nourish or sustain.
• bantling: /ˈbant-liNG/ n., a young child.
• cordwainer: /ˈkȯrd-wā-nər/ n., a worker in cordovan leather.
• frisket: /ˈfris-kit/ n., a thin metal frame keeping the paper in position during printing on a hand press; fluid or adhesive paper used in painting or crafts to cover areas of a surface on which paint is not wanted.
• genizah: /gəˌ-nē-ˈzä/ n., a storeroom or repository in a synagogue used for discarded, damaged, or defective books and papers and sacred objects.
• philobiblist: /fil-ə-ˈbib-lə̇st/ n., a lover of books.
• serigraph: /ˈser-əɡ-raf/ n., a printed design produced by means of a silkscreen.
• tumpline: /ˈtəmp-līn/ n., a sling for carrying a load on the back, with a strap that passes around the forehead.
• unicial: /ˈən-sē-əl/ adj., of or written in a majuscule script with rounded unjoined letters which is found in European manuscripts of the 4th–8th centuries and from which modern capital letters are derived.
• xenagogue: /ZEE-nah-gohg/ , one who conducts strangers; a tour guide; from Ancient Greek “xénos” (foreign) + “agōgós”.

January 26, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Library Words
In celebration of National Shelfie Day, Word-Wednesday honors  some of the planet’s leading philobiblists - our librarians - by featuring some of their own words. The OED defines librarian as a person, typically with a degree in library science, who administers or assists in a library, even in the lowly genizah. On this side of the pond, librarians professionally organize themselves in the Society of American Archivists,  where you can subscribe to their Word of the Week email service. Yes, the SOAA has its own Dictionary of Archives Terminology. Here are a few words from their dictionary.

archivy: /AHR-kih-vee/ n., the discipline of archives.
 
blind tooling: /blīnd-ˈto͞o-liNG/ n., a method of decorating a book in which impressions are made in the covering material.

caoutchouc: /kou-ˈCHo͞ok/ n., an unvulcanized natural rubber used for the first adhesive binding, invented by William Hancock, and patented in 1836, in which the single sheets were secured with a rubber solution obtained from the latex of certain tropical plants, especially of the genera Hevea and Ficus.

catchword: /ˈkach-ˌwərd/ n., a word under the right-hand side of the last line on a book page that repeats the first word on the following page.

deaccession: /ˌdē-ak-ˈse-SHən/ v., to officially remove an item from the listed holdings of a library, museum, or art gallery, typically in order to sell it to raise funds.

Festschrift: /ˈfes(t)ˌSHrift/ n., a collection of writings published in honor of a scholar.

frisket-bite: /ˈfris-kit-bīt/ n., a missing part of printed matter, caused by the frisket moving, stretching, or otherwise intervening between inked type and the paper.

gloss: /ɡlôs/ n., a brief marginal notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text.

grimoire: /ɡrim-ˈwär/ n., a book of magic spells and invocations.

hapax legomenon: /ˌha-paks lə-ˈɡäm-ə-nän/ n., a term of which only one instance of use is recorded.

incunabula: /ˌin-kyə-ˈna-byə-ləm/ n., early printed books, especially ones printed before 1501.

inherent vice: /in-ˈhir-ənt vīs/ n., the tendency in physical objects to deteriorate because of the fundamental instability of the components of which they are made, as opposed to deterioration caused by external forces.

manicule: /ˈmanəˌkyo͞ol/ n., the ‘little hand’ — a punctuation mark created by or for readers to assist in marking noteworthy passages, ☞ .

octavo: /äk-ˈtä-vō/ n., a size of book page that results from the folding of each printed sheet into eight leaves (sixteen pages).

palimpsest: /ˈpal-əm(p)-sest/ n., a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

respect des fonds: n., principle in archival theory that proposes to group collections of archival records according to their fonds — that is to say, according to the administration, organization, individual, or entity by which they were created or from which they were received.

sammelband: /ˈza-ml̩-bantn/ n., a book comprising a number of separately printed or manuscript works that are subsequently bound together.

temoin: /te-'mwɛ̃/ n., a little bit of paper left on the edge of the page by the binder to show they didn’t over-crop when binding

tête-bêche: /tāt-ˈbeSH/ adj., from philately, meaning printed upside down or sideways relative to another.

verso/recto: /ˈvər-sō-ˈrektō/ adj., refering to the text written on the “front” and “back” sides of a leaf of paper in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet.

volvelle: /ˈväl-vel n., a type of slide chart, a paper construction with rotating parts.
 
wimmelbilderbuch: /ˈvɪ-ml̩-bɪl-dɐ-buːχ/ n., a kind of large-format picture book, characterized by full-spread drawings depicting scenes richly detailed with numerous humans, animals, and objects.

xylotheque: /ˈzī-lə-tek/ n.,  a wood library — a special form of herbarium that consists of a collection of authenticated wood specimens.

From A Year with Rilke, January 26 Entry
The Great God Sleep, from Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé January 13, 1923

That great god Sleep: I yield to him all greediness for time. What does he care about Time! Ten hours, eleven twelve — if he wants to consume them in his silencing and privileged way, let him. Alas, I seldom manage to retire early; evening is my time to read. Seductive books, aided by the improbably intensifying noises of the old house, usually keep me awake till past midnight. The personal errands of a mouse in the thick walls of some yet-to-be-cleared inner room deepen the mystery of the endless surrounding night.

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.


*fender bender menders