Word-Wednesday for March 16, 2022

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday, March 16, 2022, the eleventh Wednesday of the year, the thirteenth (and last) Wednesday of winter, and the 75th day of the year, with 290 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for March 16, 2022
Our temperatures have finally reached seasonal averages!

March 16 Nordhem Lunch: Updated daily.



Earth/Moon Almanac for March 16, 2022
Sunrise: 7:35am; Sunset: 7:30pm; 3 minutes, 37 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 5:39pm; Moonset: 7:27am, waxing gibbous, 95% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for March 16, 2022
                Average            Record              Today
High             33                     57                     38
Low              10                    -18                     30


March 16 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• Everything You Do Is Right Day
• National Artichoke Hearts Day
• National Curl Crush Day
• National Freedom of Information Day
• National Panda Day
• National Small Business Development Centers Day
• Lips Appreciation Day

March 16 Word Riddle
What did Edgar Allan Poe’s parent shout when he almost walked into a tree?*


March 16 Word Pun
In his early days, Sven vas torn betveen two lovers. One made vonderful pancakes; the other wrote beautiful poetry. Sven vasn’t sure if he should marry for batter or for verse.


March 16 Etymology Word of the Week
lose
/lo͞oz/  v., Old English losian "be lost, perish," from los "destruction, loss," from Proto-Germanic lausa- (source also of Old Norse los "the breaking up of an army;" Old English forleosan "to lose, destroy," Old Frisian forliasa, Old Saxon farliosan, Middle Dutch verliesen, Old High German firliosan, German verlieren, as well as English less, loss, loose). The Germanic word is from Proto-Indo-European leus, an extended form of root *leu "to loosen, divide, cut apart."

In Lost & Found, A Memoir, Kathryn Schulz  expands upon this etymology as follows:
The modern sense of misplacing an object only appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, “to lose” acquired the meaning of failing to win. In the sixteenth century we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and each other and has been steadily expanding ever since. This is how loss felt to me after my father died: like a force that constantly increased its reach, gradually encroaching on more and more terrain.


March 16 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 597 BC Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king.
• 1827 First US newspaper owned and operated by African Americans, Freedom's Journal, begins publishing in New York City.
• 1829 Ohio authorizes high school night classes.
• 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter published.
• 1867 First publication of an article by Joseph Lister outlining the discovery of antiseptic surgery, in The Lancet.
• 1900 Isadora Duncan giver her first dance performance in Europe.

March 16 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1634 Contessa Marie Madeleine La Fayette, novelist.
• 1750 Caroline Herschel, German astronomer.
• 1757 Bengt Lidner, Swedish poet.
• 1799 Anna Atkins, English botanist, photographer and the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images.
• 1822 Marie-Rosalie "Rosa" Bonheur, French animalière painter.
• 1839 René F Armand Sully-Prudhomme, French poet, first Nobel winner.
• 1860 Josef Šváb-Malostranský, Czech playwright, actor, director, and writer.
• 1883 Ethel Anderson, Australian poet.
• 1922 Zdeněk Liška, Czech composer.
• 1927 Josef Jedlička, Czech writer.
• 1977 Donal Óg Cusack, Irish hurler.

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

• bletonism: /‘ble-ton-ism/ n., the skill or talent of water divining.
• cuddy wifter: /ˈkədi ˌwɪftər/ n., a left-handed person.
• heredipety: /huh-RED-ih-pet-ee/ n., legacy hunting; being attentive to an old wealthy person in the hope of obtaining an inheritance.
• jussulent: /JUHS-yoo-lihnt/ adj., brimming with or full of pottage.
• lexicomane: /LEK-sih-koh-meyn/ n., a lover of dictionaries; one who enjoys looking up words in the dictionary.
• peculate: /'pĕk-yə-lāt/ tr. & intr.v., to embezzle (funds) or engage in embezzlement.
• sitooterie: /ˌsɪ-ˈtuː-t(ə)-ri/ n., secluded area within a building where people can sit apart from others; an alcove, recess; an area where people can sit outside; a conservatory, gazebo.
• tessellated: /ˈtes-ə-ˌlā-dəd/ adj., denoting or characterized by a pattern of repeated shapes, especially polygons, that fit together closely without gaps or overlaps.
• ughten: /UHT-n/ (rhymes with button) n., the early morning period of pre-dawn twilight.
• wonky: /ˈwäNG-kē/ adj., crooked; off-center; askew.

March 16, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Loss
/lôs/ n., the fact or process of losing something or someone. Isn't it interesting that a loss is more intense in direct proportion to how much we love the something or someone we have lost? As creatures living simultaneously with a past, a present, and a future, isn't it also interesting that losing something or someone can simultaneously be a fact and a process?

JackPineSavage recently used her words to explore the beginnings of an important loss. As noted in the etymology section of today's post, Kathryn Schulz uses her words in a book-long exploration of loss, starting from the death of her father. She begins by reflecting on her early experiences:

Perhaps because I was still in those early, distorted days of mourning, when so much of the familiar world feels alien and inaccessible, I was struck, as I had never been before, by the strangeness of the phrase. Obviously my father hadn’t wandered away from me like a toddler at a picnic, or vanished like an important document in a messy office. And yet, unlike other oblique ways of talking about death, this one did not seem cagey or empty. It seemed plain, plaintive, and lonely, like grief itself. From the first time I said it, that day on the phone, it felt like something I could use, as one uses a shovel or a bell-pull: cold and ringing, containing within it both something desperate and something resigned, accurate to the confusion and desolation of bereavement.

Grief is another important word in the world of loss and love, where the experience is best captured in the bodily inferences associated with the word's etymology: early 13c., "hardship, suffering, pain, bodily affliction," from Old French grief "wrong, grievance, injustice, misfortune, calamity" (13c.), from grever "afflict, burden, oppress," from Latin gravare "make heavy; cause grief," from gravis "weighty". Isn't it interesting that the grief associated with the single trunk of that something or someone has so many branches, each with so many twigs? A life-long relationship also includes the memories and many objects that survive the one lost. Or in Schulz's words:

Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries; seldom during that difficult fall could I distinguish my distress over these other losses from my sadness about my father. This is the essential, avaricious nature of loss: it encompasses, without distinction, the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone. We often ignore its true scope if we can, but for a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones.

Wannaskan fans of children's literature may at this point call to mind L. Frank Baum's Dot and Tot of Merryland, a story he wrote after The Wizard of Oz, about the adventures of a little girl named Dot and a little boy named Tot in a land reached by floating on a river that flowed through a tunnel. The land was called Merryland and was split into seven valleys, where the seventh and final valley of the children's voyage is called the Valley of Lost Things - the place every lost item goes. Schulz knows about this valley:

Part of the enduring appeal of this imaginary destination is that it comports with our real-life experience of losing things: when we can’t find something, it is easy to feel that it has gone somewhere unfindable. But there is also something pleasing about the idea that our missing belongings, unable to find their rightful owners, should at least find each other, gathering together like souls in the bardo or distant relatives at a family reunion. The things we lose are distinguished by their lack of any known location; how clever, how obviously gratifying, to grant them one… This may be the most alluring aspect of the Valley of Lost Things: it renders the strangeness of the category of loss visible, like emptying the contents of a jumbled box onto the floor. In my mind, it is a dark, pen-and-ink place, comic and mournful as an Edward Gorey drawing: empty clothing drifting dolefully about, umbrellas piled in heaps like dormant bats, a Tasmanian tiger slinking off with Hemingway’s lost novel in its mouth, glaciers shrinking glumly down into their puddles, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra atilt upon the ground, the air around it filled with the ghosts of nighttime ideas not written down and gone by morning. It is this taxonomically outrageous population, shoes to souls to pterodactyls, that makes the idea of such a place so mesmerizing. Its contents have a unity and meaning based only on the single common quality of being lost, a kind of vast nationality, like “American.”

Schulz devotes the second half of Lost & Found to the experience of finding that accompanies such a loss. While the verb-form of find is defined as discover or perceive by chance or unexpectedly, the noun-form is defined as a discovery of something valuable. Schulz wants us to know that finding is implicitly and explicitly an active process - we are looking. While the things we love are banished to the Valley of Lost Things, our melancholy of loss is eventually balanced by a form of delight rooted in what we find when we remember.

What an astonishing thing it is to find something. Children, who excel at it — chiefly because the world is still so new to them that they can’t help but notice it — understand this, and automatically delight in it… Finding is usually rewarding and sometimes exhilarating: a reunion with something old or an encounter with something new, a happy meeting between ourselves and some previously missing or mysterious bit of the cosmos.

Isn't it interesting that as we love and lose, the loss opens us up a different love on the other side of grief?

IN PASSING
by Lisel Mueller
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious.



From A Year with Rilke, March 16 Entry
Love the Solitude, from Worpswede, July 16, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet

Much that may one day be possible can already be prepared by the solitary individual, and built with his own hands which make fewer mistakes. Therefore love your solitude and bear the pain of it without self-pity. The distance you feel from those around you should trouble you no more than your distance from the farthest stars. Be glad that you are growing, and realize that you cannot take anyone with you; be gentle with those who stay behind. Be confident and calm before them, and don’t torment them with your doubts or distress them with your ambitions which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Find in a true and simple way what you have in common with them, which does not need to change when you yourself change and change again. When you see them, love life in a form that is not your own, and be kind to all the people who are afraid of their aloneness.



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.

*Poetry!