Word-Wednesday for November 30, 2022

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for November 30, 2022, the forty-eighth Wednesday of the year, the tenth Wednesday of fall, and the 334th day of the year, with 31 days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for November 30, 2022
Get Ready…

November 30 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


November 30 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for November 30, 2022
Sunrise: 7:55am; Sunset: 4:31pm; 1 minutes, 50 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 1:38pm; Moonset: not today; waxing gibbous, 43% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for November 30, 2022
                Average            Record              Today
High             25                    50                     12
Low               8                    -32                      1


November 30 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• Computer Security Day
• National Mason Jar Day
• National Meth Awareness Day
• National Mississippi Day
• National Mousse Day
• National Personal Space Day
• Stay Home Because You’re Well Day
• National Package Protection Day

November 30 Word Riddle
What do you call Santa’s little helpers?*


November 30 Word Pun
Did you hear about the crossed-eyed middle school teacher in Kansas who couldn’t control his pupils?


November 30 Walking into a Bar Grammar
A run-on sentence walks into a bar, starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.


November 30 Etymology Word of the Week
nothing 

November 30 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1016 Cnut the Great [Canute], King of Denmark, claims the English throne after the death of Edmund "Ironside".
• 1487 The first German Beer Purity Law, is promulgated in Munich by Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria stating beer should be brewed from only three ingredients – water, malt, and hops.
• 1735 States of Holland forbid Free Masonry.
• 1747 Dutch State of Zealand declare governorship hereditary for women.
• 1753 Benjamin Franklin receives the Godfrey Copley medal "on account of his curious Experiments and Observations on Electricity".
• 1861 Harper's Weekly publishes EE Beers' All Quiet Along the Potomac.
• 1886 The Folies Bergère stages its first revue.
• 1955 Thriller novel The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith is published.
• 1983 Radio Shack announces Tandy Model 2000 computer.

November 30 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1485 Veronica Gambara, Italian poet.
• 1622 Thomas van Apshoven, Flemish painter.
• 1667 Jonathan Swift, Irish author and satirist, Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal.
• 1693 Christoph Förster, German composer.
• 1768 Jędrzej Śniadecki, Polish writer.
• 1809 Thomas Molleson Mudie, English composer.
• 1835 Mark Twain, American author, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Sven Sawyer.
• 1874 Lucy Maud Montgomery, Canadian author, Anne of Green Gables.
• 1874 Winston Churchill, author, British Prime Minister.
• 1890 John Tasker Howard, American composer.
• 1904 Clyfford Still, American abstract painter and leading figure of the Abstract Expressionists.
• 1907 Jacques Barzun, French author.
• 1912 Gordon Parks, American film pioneering black director, photographer and author of Learning Tree.
• 1931 Gunther Herbig, Usti-nad-Labem Czech, conductor.
• 1937 Adeline Yen Mah, Chinese writer.
• 1947 David Mamet, American playwright.
• 1947 Sergio Badilla Castillo, Chilean poet.
• 1962 Daniel Keys Moran, American writer.

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

• accouchement: /ˌä-ko͞oSH-ˈmänt/ n., the process of giving birth to a baby.
• bole: /bōl/ n., the trunk of a tree.
• croggy: /ˈkrɑ-ɡi/ n., a ride given to a passenger on a bicycle, in which the recipient sits on the crossbar, handlebars, or behind the person pedalling.
• haggister: /ˈhæɡ-ə-stər/ n., the magpie.
• incontunded: /in-kuhn-TUHN-ded/ adj., free from blemishes, unbruised.
• Jólabókaflód: /yō-la-‘bōk-ə-flōd/ n., ICELANDIC for “Christmas book flood”, for the flood of new books published in Iceland each year in advance of the Christmas season, after which family members exchange books on Christmas Eve and then snuggle into their favorite  cozy reading spot along with their new books and some chocolate.
• milliard: /mil-ˈyärd/ n., British, one thousand million (a term now largely superseded by billion).
• Pinteresque: /ˌpin-(t)ə-ˈresk/ adj., resembling or characteristic of the works of the English playwright Harold Pinter, in particular by having a sense of menace and featuring dialogue marked by many pauses.
• Reinheitsgebot: /RĪN·hits·kuh·bowt/ n., GERMAN, a regulation about the purity of beer.
• thobe: /thōb/ n., an ankle-length, long-sleeved, gownlike garment worn chiefly by men of the Arabian Peninsula.

November 30, 2022 Word-Wednesday Feature
metrology
/məˈ-träl-ə-jē/ n., the scientific study of measurement, establishing a common understanding of units, crucial in linking human scientific, legal, industrial,  computational, and poetic activities. Today, Word-Wednesday will set aside the poetic meters — iambs, trochees, spondees, anapests, and dactyls — and focus on the expanding word-world of computational metrics.

The General Conference on Weights and Measures established the prefix terminology for very large and very small numbers, where while the large and small terms differ, they remain similar for each factor of largeness or smallness, at least since 1991. For example, 10 to the 24th power of something is a yotta, and 10 to the -24 power of something is a yocto, where Sven's charm is measured in yottas, and Sven's patience with Monique's long ScrabbleTM turns is measured in yoctos. Just to put yotta in perspective, human activity will generate around a yottabyte of data per year by 2030 — an amount of new data that would fill DVDs stacked all the way to Mars.

And should you feel poetic, here’s the latest list of largeness and smallness prefixes approved by the General Conference on Weights and Measures:

From A Year with Rilke, November 30 Entry
The Things I Am from The Book of Hours I, 13

I would describe myself
like a landscape I’ve studied
at length, in detail;
like a word I’m coming to understand;
like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime;
like my mother’s face;
like a ship that carried me
when the waters raged.

The Artist's Mother
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.








*subordinate clauses.