Word-Wednesday for July 13, 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, July 13, 2022, the twenty-eighth Wednesday of the year, the fourth Wednesday of summer, and the 194th day of the year, with 171 days remaining.


Wannaska Phenology Update for July 13, 2022
Bellwether for Bellflowers

Campanula rapunculoides, known by the common names creeping bellflower, or rampion bellflower, is a Minnesota perennial herbaceous plant of the genus Campanula, belonging to the family Campanulaceae. It can be an invasive species in some parts of Wannaska, but not out here in the forest.


July 13 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


July 13 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for July 13, 2022
Sunrise: 5:34am; Sunset: 9:25pm; 1 minutes, 49 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 10:07pm; Moonset: 4:47am, full moon, 100% illuminated.
Today’s full Buck Moon orbits closer to Earth than any other full Moon this year, making it the biggest and brightest supermoon of 2022. At its nearest point, the Buck Moon will be 222,089.3 miles (357,418 km) from Earth so it just edges out June’s Strawberry Moon by 200km.

Temperature Almanac for July 13, 2022
                Average            Record              Today
High             77                     97                     79
Low              55                    42                     60


July 13 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Barbershop Music Appreciation Day
• National Beans ‘N’ Franks Day
• National Delaware Day
• National French Fry Day
• Dog Days of Summer, July 3-August 11, 2022
  

Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America
by Ada Limón

It’s a day when all the dogs of all
the borrowed houses are angel footing
down the hard hardwood of middle-America’s
newly loaned-up renovated kitchen floors,
and the world’s nicest pie I know
is somewhere waiting for the right
time to offer itself to the wayward
and the word-weary. How come the road
goes coast to coast and never just
dumps us in the water, clean and
come clean, like a fish slipped out
of the national net of “longing for joy.”
How come it doesn’t? Once, on a road trip
through the country, a waitress walked
in the train’s diner car and swished
her non-aproned end and said,
“Hot stuff and food too.” My family
still says it, when the food is hot,
and the mood is good inside the open windows.
I’d like to wear an apron for you
and come over with non-church sanctioned
knee-highs and the prettiest pie of birds
and ocean water and grief. I’d like
to be younger when I do this, like the country
before Mr. Meriwether rowed the river
and then let the country fill him up
till it killed him hard by his own hand.
I’d like to be that dog they took with them,
large and dark and silent and un-blamable.
Or I’d like to be Emily Dickinson’s dog, Carlo,
and go on loving the rare un-loveable puzzle
of woman and human and mind. But, I bet I’m more
the house beagle and the howl and the obedient
eyes of everyone wanting to make their own kind
of America, but still be America, too. The road
is long and all the dogs don’t care too much about
roadside concrete history and postcards of state
treasures, they just want their head out the window,
and the speeding air to make them feel faster
and younger, and newer than all the dogs
that went before them, they want to be your only dog,
your best-loved dog, for this good dog of today
to be the only beast that matters.


July 13 Word Riddle
What to you call a sunburned librarian?*


July 13 Word Pun
Sven once dated a girl called Sue Denim, until he found out that wasn’t her real name.


July 13 Walking into a Bar Grammar
Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar.
The bartender says, "Get out — we don't serve your type."


July 13 Etymology Word of the Week
bereft
/bə-ˈreft/ adj., deprived of or lacking (something); (of a person) sad and lonely, especially through someone's death or departure; from Middle English bireven, from Old English bereafian "to deprive of, take away by violence, seize, rob," from be- + reafian "rob, plunder," from Proto-Germanic raubōjanan, from Proto-Indo-European runp- "to break" (see corrupt (adj.)). A common Germanic formation (compare Old Frisian biravia "despoil, rob, deprive (someone of something)," Old Saxon biroban, Dutch berooven, Old High German biroubon, German berauben, Gothic biraubon, Wannaskan wheresmybourbon).

Since mid-17c., mostly in reference to life, hope, loved ones, and other immaterial possessions. Past tense forms bereaved and bereft have co-existed since 14c., now slightly differentiated in meaning, the former applied to loss of loved ones, the latter to circumstances.


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

• 1568 Dean of St. Paul's London, Alexander Nowell perfects a way to bottle beer.
• 1793 Journalist and French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat is assassinated in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday, a member of the opposing political faction.

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

• 1607 Václav [Wenceslaus] Hollar, Bohemian-born etcher.
• 1761  Antonín Vranický, Czech violinist and composer.
• 1773 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, German writer.
• 1793 John Clare, English poet.
• 1859 Sydney Webb, England, writer/husband of Beatrice Potter.
• 1903 Kenneth Clark, English art historian.
• 1932 Per Nørgård, Danish composer.
• 1934 Wole Soyinka, Nigerian playwright and poet.
• 1938 Myroslav Skoryk, Ukrainian contemporary classical composer.
• 1943  Patrick Campbell-Lyons, Irish musician.
• 2305 Jean-Luc Picard, fictional captain on Star Trek Next Generation.

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

• ambisinister: /ˌæm-bɪ-ˈsɪn-ə-stər/ adj., clumsy or unskillful with both hands.
• chopse: /tʃɑps/ trans. v., to call (a person) an abusive name; to insult verbally; to shout at angrily; intrans. v., to talk excessively; to talk nonsense; to chatter, gossip.
• detritivore: /də-ˈtri-də-ˌvôr/ n., an animal which feeds on dead organic material, especially plant detritus, e.g., cockroaches, termites, mosquitoes, dung and carrion flies.
  
• expostulate: /ecks-POS-tyoo-leyt/ v., to reason earnestly with someone against something that person intends to do or has done; to remonstrate; to reason earnestly with a person for purposes of dissuasion or remonstrance; objection by earnest reasoning; to reason with someone in an effort to dissuade or correct.
• flump: /fluhmp/ v., to plump down suddenly or heavily; flop.
• janissary: /ˈjanəˌserē/ n., a devoted follower or supporter.
• mickle: /ˈmik-əl/ SCOTTISH n., a large amount; adj,. very large.
• nucivorous: /nyoo-SIV-uhr-uhs/ (adj. (of animals) gaining sustenance primarily or exclusively from nuts.
• sadhu: /ˈsä-do͞o/ n., INDIAN a holy man, sage, or ascetic.
• urticate: /ˈər-dəˌ-kāt/ v., cause a stinging or prickling sensation like that given by a nettle.

July 13, 2022 Word-Wednesday Feature
Words About Writing
Yes, we make a big deal about words here at Word-Wednesday, because unless you’re a musician, you really can’t write without words. At the same time, words alone don’t make a good writer, which begs the question: What does? Let’s start with Mary Oliver’s take in her prose poem, “Sand Dabs — One, from her collection, Blue Pastures —

Lists, and verbs, will carry you many a dry mile.

To imitate or not to imitate — the question is easily satisfied. The perils of not imitating are greater than the perils of imitating.

Always remember — the speaker doesn’t do it. The words do it.

Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

The idea must drive the words. When the words drive the idea, it’s all floss and gloss, elaboration, air bubbles, dross, pomp, frump, strumpeting.

Don’t close the poem as you opened it, unless your name is Blake and you have written a poem about a Tyger.

Here are some other words of wisdom on writing:

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown

Don’t write at first for anyone but yourself.

T.S. Eliot

Between propriety and joy, choose joy.

Zadie Smith

Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.

Eudora Welty

It would only be necessary for a writer to secure universal popularity if imagination and intelligence were equally distributed among all men.

W.H. Auden

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.

Stephen King

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you.

Annie Dillard

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

Susan Sontag

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.

Anne Lamott

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

Ernest Hemingway

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.

Isabel Allende

Work on one thing at a time until finished.

Henry Miller

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand — but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

Zadie Smith

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.

John Steinbeck

Nothing any good isn’t hard.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

E.B. White

A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe’s will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.

H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

David Foster Wallace

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

Joan Didion

You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.

Neil Gaiman

Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

Margaret Atwood

From A Year with Rilke, July 13 Entry
The Swan, from New Poems

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood—
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide.



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.




*well red.