Word-Wednesday for April 13, 2022

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday, April 13, 2022, the fifteenth Wednesday of the year, the fourth Wednesday of spring, and the 103rd day of the year, with 262 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for April 13, 2022
The Robins have arrived!

And they are not happy.

I dislike those Rogue April days that feel like the following winter.

Chairman Joe squib

April 13 Nordhem Lunch: Closed due to weather.



Earth/Moon Almanac for April 13, 2022
Sunrise: 6:37am; Sunset: 8:12pm; 3 minutes, 28 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 4:31pm; Moonset: 5:50am, waxing gibbous, 85% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for April 13, 2022
                Average            Record              Today
High             47                     80                     36
Low              24                     -3                     28


April 13 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Borinqueneers Day
• National Make Lunch Count Day
• National Peach Cobbler Day
• National Thomas Jefferson Day
• National Scrabble Day (a big day at WannaskaWriter's house)

April 13 Word Riddle
What has four letters, occasionally has twelve letters, always has six letters, but never has five letters?*


April 13 Word Pun

April 13 Etymology Word of the Week
humility: /(h)yo͞o-ˈmil-ə-dē/ n., a modest or low view of one's own importance; humbleness, from early 14c., "quality of being humble," from Old French umelite "humility, modesty, sweetness" (Modern French humilité), from Latin humilitatem (nominative humilitas) "lowness, small stature; insignificance; baseness, littleness of mind," in Church Latin "meekness," from humilis "lowly, humble," literally "on the ground," from humus "earth," from Proto-Indo-European root dhghem- "earth." In the Mercian hymns, Latin humilitatem is glossed by Old English eaðmodnisse.


April 13 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 837 Best view of Halley's Comet in 2,000 years.
• 1668 John Dryden (36) appointed first English poet laureate by Charles II.
• 1742 George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah performed for the first time at New Music Hall in Dublin.
• 1896 John Philip Sousa's El Capitan premieres at the Tremont Theatre in Boston.
• 1939 William Saroyan's My Heart's in the Highlands premieres.
• 1981 Pulitzer prize awarded to Beth Henley for Crimes of the Heart.

April 13 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1570 Guy Fawkes.
• 1618 Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, French writer.
• 1743 Thomas Jefferson.
• 1828 Josephine Butler, English feminist and social reformer.
• 1849 Enrique José Varona, Cuban author.
• 1872 Alexander Roda Roda, Austrian writer writer..
• 1883 Demjan Bednyi, Ukranian writer and satirist.
• 1891 Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen [Nellie Walker], African-American Harlem Renaissance novelist, author of Quicksand and Passing.
• 1891 Ladislav Černý, Czech musician.
• 1894 Ludvig Irgens-Jensen, Norwegian composer.
• 1899 Alfred Mosher Butts, American architect and game inventor of Scrabble.
• 1901 Jacques Lacan, French psychoanalyst and semanticist.
• 1902 Del Porter, American jazz singer.
• 1906 Samuel Beckett, Irish novelist and playwright.
• 1909 Eudora Welty, American novelist.
• 1931 Beverley Cross, English playwright.
• 1931 Jon Stone, American director and co-creator of Sesame Street.
• 1939 Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and playwright.

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

• aibohphobia: /ˈɑːɪ-bō-ˈfōb-ē-ə/ n., fear of palindromes.
• brontide: /BRON-tahyd/ n., a low muffled sound like distant thunder believed to be caused by faint tremors, from the Greek bronte (thunder).
• cadge: /kaj/ v., ask for or obtain (something to which one is not strictly entitled).
• Erinyes: /ɪˈrɪniˌiːz/ n., also known as the Furies, were female chthonic deities of vengeance in ancient Greek religion and mythology.
• flibbertigibbet: /ˈfli-bər-dē-ˌji-bət/ n., a frivolous, flighty, or excessively talkative person.
• ghazal: /ˈɡə-zəl/ n., (in Middle Eastern and Indian literature and music) a lyric poem with a fixed number of verses and a repeated rhyme, typically on the theme of love, and normally set to music.
• haboob: /hə-ˈbo͞ob/ n., a violent and oppressive wind blowing in summer, especially in Sudan, bringing sand from the desert. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkDBmsGIG7U
• lede: /lēd/ n., the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article, summarizing the most important aspects of the story.
• tsuris: /ˈtso͝o-ris/ n., trouble or woe; aggravation.
• vernalagnia: /vur-nuh-LAG-nee-yuh/ n., an overwhelming romantic mood induced by Springtime; Spring fever.

April 13, 2022 Word-Wednesday Feature
entropy
/ˈen-trə-pē/ n., a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system; lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. Coined in 1865 by German physicist Rudolph Clausius, historian Martin Kline notes that Clausius used word entropy as a suitable name for what he had been calling "the transformational content of the body." His new word made it possible to state the second law of thermodynamics in the brief but portentous form: "The entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum." But Clausius did not view entropy as the basic concept for understanding that law. He preferred to express the physical meaning of the second law in terms of the concept of disgregation, an earlier word that he coined to describe a process of falling to pieces, a word that never became part of the accepted structure of thermodynamics. Entropy is clearly the better word, derived from the Greek trope “a turning, a transformation”, and so similar in appearance and sound to the word energy — its twin in the making and unmaking of the universe — one giving, one taking away.

An important year for words that capture big ideas, German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology in 1895, which was also the year that Emily Dickinson wrote her poem, Bloom, prefiguring future understandings of that new word:

Bloom — is Result — to meet a Flower
And casually glance
Would cause one scarcely to suspect
The minor Circumstance
Assisting in the Bright Affair
So intricately done
Then offered as a Butterfly
To the Meridian —
To pack the Bud — oppose the Worm —
Obtain its right of Dew —
Adjust the Heat — elude the Wind —
Escape the prowling Bee
Great Nature not to disappoint
Awaiting Her that Day —
To be a Flower, is profound
Responsibility —

W.H. Auden — poet and the child of a physicist — was born just prior to World War I, leaving him with no illusions about the impact of entropy on our fragile human world. Is art our most constructive coping mechanism for entropy and misused energy? Auden’s poetry suggests that he thought so in mid-life, such as in his pram September 1, 1939, where he concludes,

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Later in life, old-man Auden comes to see less like a physicist and more from his heart, where love and life itself are all we have against the relentless creep of incremental loss.

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

From A Year with Rilke, April 13 Entry
Spanish Trilogy, from Uncollected Poems

How is it that people go around
and pick up random things
and carry them about? Like the porter
who heaves market baskets from stall to stall
as they keep filling up, and he lugs his burden
and never asks, Sir, for whom is this feast?

How is it that one just stands here, like that shepherd,
so exposed to the energies of the universe,
so integral to the streaming events of space
that simply leaning against a tree in the landscape
gives him his destiny; he need do nothing more.
And yet he lacks in his restless gaze
the tranquil solace of the herd,
has nothing but world, world, each time he looks up,
world in each downward glance.




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.


*yes.