Word-Wednesday for May 18, 2022

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of new words... the trill of frippary... and the apogee of offbeat... the human drama of semantic explication...here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday, May 18, 2022, the nineteenth Wednesday of the year, the eighth Wednesday of spring, and the 138th day of the year, with 237 days remaining.


Wannaska Phenology Update for May 18, 2022
The moss and the mushrooms are thriving on our abundance of rain this year.

May 18 Nordhem Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for May 18, 2022
Sunrise: 5:38am; Sunset: 9:02pm; 2 minutes, 29 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: --; Moonset: 7:10am, waning gibbous, 93% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for May 18, 2022
                Average            Record              Today
High             63                     88                     64
Low              41                      25                     44


May 18 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Cheese Soufflé Day
• National HIV Vaccine Awareness Day
• National No Dirty Dishes Day
• National Visit Your Relatives Day
• Nathonal Thpeeth Pashologisht Day
• Emergency Medical Services for Children Day
• National Juice Slush Day
• International Museum Day

May 18 Word Riddle
If a Lama is a holy man from Tibet,
and a Llama is a beast of burden,
what’s a LLL-ama?*


May 18 Word Pun
I couldn’t make the urology convention, so I watched the live stream.


May 18 Walking into a Bar Grammar
A figure of speech walks into a bar. “You’re awfully quiet tonight,” says the bartender. “My friends say I’m too ironic and should try to be more literal, so it goes without saying.”


May 18 Etymology Word of the Week
speech: /spēCH/ n., Old English spæc "act of speaking; power of speaking; manner of speaking; statement, discourse, narrative, formal utterance; language," variant of spræc, from Proto-Germanic sprek-, spek- (source also of Danish sprog, Old Saxon spraca, Old Frisian spreke, Dutch spraak, Old High German sprahha, German Sprache "speech".


May 18 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1593 Playwright Thomas Kyd's accusations of heresy lead to an arrest warrant for Christopher Marlowe.
• 1619 Dutch jurist and scholar Hugo Grotius sentenced to life in prison in Loevestein Castle in the Netherlands (later escapes in a book chest).
• 1642 Ville-Marie (later Montreal), Canada, founded by the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal.
• 1765 Fire destroys a large part of Montreal, Quebec.
• 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed Emperor of France and Montreal by the French Senate.
• 1830 Edwin Budding of England signs an agreement for the manufacture of his invention, lawn mower. Saturdays are destroyed forever.
• 1897 Irish Music Festival first held in Dublin, not Montreal.
• 1960 Jean Genet's play Le Balcon (The Balcony) premieres in Paris.
• 1965 Gene Roddenberry suggests 16 names for Star Trek Captain; they include Kirk and Sven.
• 1971 Stanley Cup Final, Chicago Stadium, Chicago, IL: Henri Richard scores twice as Montreal Canadiens beat Chicago Black Hawks for a 4-3 series victory.
• 1980 Mount St Helens erupts in Washington state.

May 18 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1048 Omar Khayyám, Persian mathematician, poet and philosopher, born in Nishapur, Khorasan (now Iran).
• 1452 Henry the Younger of Poděbrady, Prince of Bohemia, duke of Münsterberg, Czech poet, translator and writer.
• 1785 John Wilson, Scottish writer and literary critic.
• 1836 Isidor Vorobchievici, Ukrainian composer.
• 1871 Franiska [Franny] zu Reventlow, German writer and feminist.
• 1872 Bertrand Russell.
• 1886 Ole Windingstad, Norwegian composer.
• 1889 Gunnar Gunnarsson, Icelandic writer.
• 1890 Mary Charleson, Irish-American silent film actress.
• 1900 Sarah Miriam Peale, American portrait painter.
• 1915 Oisín Kelly, Irish sculptor.
• 1919 Margot Fonteyn, English ballerina.
• 1930 Barbara Goldsmith, American author.
• 1972 Turner Stevenson, Canadian NHL right wing (Montreal Canadiens).

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

• anatidaephobia: /ant-uh-tid-uh-FO-bee-uh/  n., the irrational fear that somewhere, a duck or goose is watching you.
• bongga: /ˈbɑŋɡ-ə/ adj., extravagant, flamboyant; impressive, stylish; also as a more general term of approbation: excellent, great.
• chunter: /ˈchən-tər/ intr. v., to talk in a low inarticulate way; mutter.
• decussate: /dih-KUHS-eyt/ v., (of two or more things) to cross or intersect each other to form an ‘X’; adj., shaped like an ‘X’.
• helobious: /hē-‘lō-bēəs/ adj., living in marshy places.
• phenology: /fə-NÄL-ə-jē/ n., the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life.
• reintarnation: /ˌrē-ən-tärˈ-NĀ-SH(ə)n/ n., the rebirth of a soul in a new body of a hillbilly.
• skint: /skint/ adj., having no money; broke.
• turbary: /ˈtər-bə-rē/ n., the ground where turf or peat may be dug especially for fuel; peat bog.
• yeuk: /yook/ n., an unpleasant feeling on your skin that makes you want to scratch; v., to cause to itch.

May 18, 2022 Word-Wednesday Feature
Punctuation
/ˌpəNG(k)-(t)SHə-ˈwā-SH(ə)n/ n., the marks, such as period, comma, and parentheses, used in writing to separate sentences and their elements and to clarify meaning. While not words, punctuation helps words come alive (or not). Today Word-Wednesday argues that these little marks that punctate the whiteness between words is an art, drawing upon the words of punctuation potentate - etymologist, poet, and essayist Lewis Thomas. His book, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher, contains the wonderful essay, Notes on Punctuation.

Let’s start with commas. Thomas writes by example. Consider the ways that he sparingly pins the tails in this paragraph:

The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into all sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn’t realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself.

In another more strident section of his essay, Thomas talks about the overused bunny ears of the punctuation mark family - quotation marks.

Quotation marks should be used honestly and sparingly, when there is a genuine quotation at hand, and it is necessary to be very rigorous about the words enclosed by the marks… Above all, quotation marks should not be used for ideas that you’d like to disown, things in the air so to speak. Nor should they be put in place around clichés; if you want to use a cliché you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.

In  A Man without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut referred to semicolons as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing”.  Thomas sees semicolons differently, with reference to the way that T.S. Eliot used them in Four Quartets:

I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.

You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

Parenthetically, and playfully, Thomas has this to say about the potentially messy thinking of the parenthesis-dependent:

There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with but the stops, we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavor of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity)))))))))))).

The crutch of most early or unskilled writers is the attempt to emphasize with punctuation or by means other than putting the correct arrangement of words on the page - italics, bold, underlined fonts - and especially…

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!
    […]
A single exclamation point in a poem, no matter what else the poem has to say, is enough to destroy the whole work.

Speaking of poetry, pity poor Thomas Wentworth Higginson — Emily Dickinson’s editor. He lectured her that dashes should be used only in “short allowance” lest they “lose all their proper power” — advice Dickinson thankfully went on to boldly ignore, breathing her ample dashes throughout her prams. Thomas sees dashes this way:

The dash is a handy device, informal and essentially playful, telling you that you’re about to take off on a different tack but still in some way connected with the present course — only you have to remember that the dash is there, and either put a second dash at the end of the notion to let the reader know that he’s back on course, or else end the sentence, as here, with a period.

Period!


From A Year with Rilke, May 18 Entry
A Hunger Drives Us, from Ninth Duino Elegy

A hunger drives us.
We want to contain it all in our naked hands,
our brimming senses, our speechless hearts.
We want to become it, or offer it—but to whom?
We could hold it forever—but, after all,
what can we keep? Not the beholding,
so slow to learn. Not anything that has happened here.
Nothing. There are the hurts. And, always, the hardships.
And there’s the long knowing of love—all of it
unsayable. Later, amidst the stars, we will see:
these are better unsaid.



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 big fire in Boston, in answer to Ogden Nash.