Word-Wednesday for November 2, 2022

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for November 2, 2022, the forty-fourth Wednesday of the year, the sixth Wednesday of fall, and the 306th day of the year, with 59 days remaining. Brought to you this week by Bead Gypsy Studio, celebrating Diva Day on November 4th and 5th, with sales, drawings, and, of course, coffee.


Wannaska Phenology Update for November 2, 2022
So, I took a trip to Hayes Lake early one morning last week so soak up some nature, and I saw a bevy (collective noun) of North American river otters bobbing and swimming just off shore. I didn't have my phone with me, so like Mr. Hot Coco and his mystery deer, I have nothing to show for my experience. Fortunately, Chairman Joe recently snapped this beautiful picture of Hayes Lake. Picture seven river otters swimming in the water.

Lontra canadensis is a semiaquatic mammal that only lives on the North American continent, along its waterways and coasts. An adult North American river otter can weigh between 5.0 and 14 kg (11.0 and 30.9 lb), and they live in a holt, or den, constructed in the burrows of other animals, or in natural hollows, such as under a log or in river banks. An entrance, which may be under water or above ground, leads to a nest chamber lined with leaves, grass, moss, bark, and hair. The river otter is protected and insulated by a thick, water-repellent coat of fur. Renowned for their sense of play, river otter play includes wrestling (not professional) and chasing.

November 2 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


November 2 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for November 2, 2022
Sunrise: 8:12am; Sunset: 6:03pm; 3 minutes, 11 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 4:11pm; Moonset: 12:50am, waxing gibbous, 58% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for November 2, 2022
                Average            Record              Today
High             41                     68                     71
Low              23                     -2                     40


November 2 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• Day of the Dead, second day
• National Deviled Egg Day
• National Ohio Day
• National Stress Awareness Day
• Traffic Directors Day
• Plan Your Epitaph Day
• Feast Day of Erc of Slane

November 2 Word Riddle
How do you fix a broken Jack-O-Lantern?*


November 2 Word Pun
Detective Kodiak plucked a single hair from the bearskin rug and at once understood the grisly nature of the crime: it had been a ferocious act, a real honey, the sort of thing that could polarize a community, so he padded quietly out the back to avoid a cub reporter waiting in the den.


November 2 Walking into a Bar Grammar
A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.


November 2 Etymology Word of the Week
stochiastic
/stə-ˈkas-tik/ adj., randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely, from the 1660s, "pertaining to conjecture," from Greek stokhastikos "able to guess, conjecturing," from stokhazesthai "to guess, aim at, conjecture," from stokhos "a guess, aim, fixed target, erected pillar for archers to shoot at," perhaps from Proto-Indo-European stogh-, variant of root stegh- "to stick, prick, sting." The sense of "randomly determined" is from 1934, from German stochastik (1917).

In his marvelous book, The Fragile Species, our old friend Lewis Thomas put stochastic into his own more colorful metaphors:

We need a better word than chance, even pure chance, or that succession of events, while still evading any notion of progress. But to go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness.

I like the word stochastic better, because of its lineage in our language. The first root was stegh, meaning a pointed stake in the Indo-European of 30,000 years ago. Stegh moved into Greek as stokhos, meaning a target for archers, and then later on, in our language, targets being what they are and aiming arrows being as fallible as it is, stokhos was adapted to signify aiming and missing, pure chance, randomness, and thus stochastic. On that philosophical basis, then, I’m glad to accept all of evolution in a swoop, but I’m still puzzled by it.

November 2 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1824 Popular presidential vote first recorded; Andrew Jackson beats John Quincy Adams.
• 1852 Franklin Pierce elected as President.
• 1867 Women's fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar is first published.
• 1880 James A. Garfield elected 20th President.
• 1889 North Dakota becomes 39th and South Dakota becomes 40th state in the United States of America.
• 1920 Warren G. Harding is elected President.
• 1921 Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie premieres.
• 1936 The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is established.
• 1960 Penguin Books cleared of obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.
• 1976 Jimmy Carter is elected President.
• 1977 Microbiologist Carl R. Woese and scientists from the University of Illinois announce the identification of methanogens, a form of microbial life (Archaea) dating back some 3.5 billion years.
• 2004 George W. Bush is re-elected as President.

November 2 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1777 Fortunat Alojzy Gonzaga Żółkowski, Polish actor, comedist, translator, editor of humor magazines.
• 1837 Émile Bayard, French artist and illustrator.
• 1846 Antonio Peña y Goñi, Spanish composer.
• 1890 Moa Martinson, Swedish writer.
• 1911 Odysseas Elytis, Greek poet and 1979 Nobel prize winner.
• 1935 Iva Hercíková, Czech writer.
• 1936 Lawrence Robert Shreve, Canadian pro wrestler.
• 1940 Luke Cheevers, Irish singer.
• 1951 Thomas Mallon, American novelist.
• 1969 Cookie Monster.

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

• amoretto: /ˌam-ə-ˈred-ō/ n., a love poem or love song; /esp./ a love sonnet; alover, a paramour; a representation of Cupid; a cupid.
• banjax: /ˈban-jaks/ v., ruin, incapacitate, or break.
• drooking: /ˈdru-kɪŋ/ n., a drenching; a soaking.
• ens: /ɛnz/ n., abstract being; existence, in the most general sense.
• fumarole: /ˈfyo͞o-mə-ˌrōl/ n., an opening in or near a volcano, through which hot sulfurous gases emerge.
• 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.
• haimish: /ˈheɪ-mɪʃ/ adj., Yiddish, having qualities associated with a homelike atmosphere; simple, warm, relaxed, cozy, unpretentious.
• mosker: /ˈmɑ-skər/ v., to decay, rot; to crumble or moulder away.
• prefatory: /ˈpref-ə-ˌtô-rē/ adj., serving as an introduction; introductory.
• sweven: /ˈswe-vən/ n., dream; vision.

Ghazal of Oranges
Jan-Henry Gray   

On New Year’s Eve, my father overfills the baskets with oranges,
mangoes, grapes, grapefruits, other citrus too, but mostly oranges.

The morning of the first, he opens every window to let the new year in.
In Chinatown, red bags sag with mustard greens and mandarin oranges.

A farmer in a fallow season kneels to know the dirt. More silt than soil,
he wipes his brow and mumbles to his dog: time to give up this crop of oranges.

The woman knows she let herself say too much to someone undeserving.
She lays her penance on her sister’s doorstep: a case of expensive oranges.

At the Whitney, I take a photo of a poem in a book behind the glass.
Above it, a painting: smears of blue, Frank O’Hara, his messy oranges.

The handsome server speaks with his hands: Tonight is grilled octopus
with braised fennel and olives, topped with peppercress, cara caras, and blood oranges.

No one at the table looks up, ashamed by the prices on the chic menus.
The busser fills my water and I inhale him: his faraway scent of oranges.

Seventh grade, Southern California: we monitored the daily smog alerts.
Red: stay inside. White: play outside. I forget what warning orange is.

Clutch was serious about art and said our final projects could be
whatever . . . performative . . . like, just show up with a wheelbarrow full of oranges.

Jan, in all of those first six years, why is all you can remember this:
the mist rising in the sunny air as you watched her peeling oranges.


November 2, 2022 Word-Wednesday Feature
joy
/joi/ n., a feeling of great pleasure and happiness, from Old French joie "pleasure, delight, erotic pleasure, bliss, joyfulness" (11c.), from Latin gaudia "expressions of pleasure; sensual delight," plural of gaudium "joy, inward joy, gladness, delight; source of pleasure or delight," from gaudere "rejoice," from Proto-Indo-European root gau- "to rejoice" (cognates: Greek gaio "I rejoice," Middle Irish guaire "noble"). Word-Wednesday staff are the first to admit that words often fall short of many human experiences, but try we must.

As a season of harvest — and for many fortunate inhabitants of Wannaska — a season of plenty, autumn is a time when we look share our bounty and joy with others. Here are some words by some who have attempted to capture the colors, flavors, harmonies, fragrances, and textures of joy.

It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.

Erica Jong

I think joy is just as instructive as pain, and I like it better. I never meant to suffer any more than I could help; my nature was meant for happiness, a daylight art and living.

Katherine Anne Porter

Love and joy are twins, or born of each other.

William Hazlitt

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Mark Twain

Joy is not in things, it is in us.

Richard Wagner

The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.

Herman Melville

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

George Bernard Shaw

Joy is the best makeup. Joy, and good lighting.

Anne Lamott

The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable. 

John Cheever from The Bus to St. James’s

Joy’s smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

Victor Hugo

When large numbers of people share their joy in common, the happiness of each is greater because each adds fuel to the other's flame.

Augustine

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

The Bible — Psalms 30:5

Love to faults is always blind,
Always is to joy inclined.

William Blake

We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. Find a place where there's joy,
and the joy will burn out the pain.

Joseph Campbell

Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow.

Helen Keller

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

William Morris

I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

Rebecca West

Every joy digs its own grave.

Comtesse Diane

The second half of joy
Is shorter than the first.

Emily Dickinson

Present joys are more to flesh and blood,
Than a dull prospect of a distant good.

John Dryden

Joy seems to me a step beyond happiness — happiness is a sort of atmosphere you can live in sometimes when you're lucky. Joy is a light that fills you with hope and faith and love.

Adela Rogers St. Johns

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.

Rollo May

Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.

Barbara Holland

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

Albert Einstein

Joy is really the simplest form of gratitude.

Karl Barth

I trust all joy.

Theodore Roethke

From A Year with Rilke, November 2 Entry
What I Want, from Book of Hours I, 14

You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

Rocks at L'Estaque
by Paul Cézanne

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.






*Use a pumpkin patch.