Word-Wednesday for December 21, 2022

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for December 21, 2022, the fifty-first Wednesday of the year, the first Wednesday of winter, and the 355th day of the year, with 10 days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for December 21, 2022
Solstice Shadow
On the summer solstice, the angle of sunlight falling on the surface of our state capital is 68.5 degrees. On the winter solstice, that angle is reduced to 21.5 degrees. If you have no other reason to be outside today, go out to see your longest shadow for 2022, and say hello to winter at 3:47pm.

Getty Images

December 21 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


December 21 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for December 21, 2022
Sunrise: 8:15am; Sunset: 4:29pm; 0 minutes, 0 seconds less or more daylight today
Moonrise: 6:20am; Moonset: 2:43pm, waning crescent, 4% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for December 21, 2022
                Average            Record              Today
High             17                     40                    -6
Low              -1                   -34                   -10


December 21 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Maine Day
• National Flashlight Day
• National French Fried Shrimp Day
• Phileas Fogg Win a Wager Day
• National Homeless Persons’ Remembrance Day
• Humbug Day
• Crossword Puzzle Day
• Dongzhi Festival

December 21 Word Riddle

                                                                                                          *

December 21 Word Pun
Never buy flowers from a monk. Only you can prevent florist friars.


December 21 Walking into a Bar Grammar
A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.


December 21 Etymology Word of the Week
Solstice
/ˈsōl-stəs/ n., the time or date (twice each year) at which the sun reaches its maximum or minimum declination, marked by the longest and shortest days, from mid-13th century Old French solstice, from Latin solstitium "point at which the sun seems to stand still," especially the summer solstice, from sol "the sun" (from Proto-Indo-European root sawel- "the sun") + past participle stem of sistere "stand still, take a stand; to set, place, cause to stand," from Proto-Indo-European si-st-, reduplicated form of root sta- "to stand, make or be firm." In early use, Englished as sunstead (late Old English sunstede). 

But since when has the sun ever moved? Of course, before Renaissance astronomer Nicolas Copernicus came up with the heliocentric model, who figured that everything in our solar system moved except our sun. The continued use of the word “solstice” is a beautiful reminder of just how far we’ve come — and how far we have yet to go…


December 21 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1582 Flanders adopts the Gregorian calendar, skipping 11 days making the next day Jan 1, 1583.
• 1835 HMS Beagle sails into Bay of Islands, New Zealand.
• 1872 Phileas Fogg completes his round the world trip in 80 days, in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days.
• 1898 Scientists Marie and Pierre Curie discover radium.
• 1913 First crossword puzzle (with 32 clues) printed in New York World.
• 1934 French film Zouzou premieres in Paris, starring Josephine Baker, the first black woman to star in a major motion picture.
• 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated feature film and the earliest in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, premieres.

December 21 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1401 Tommaso Masaccio, Italian painter.
• 1628 Samuel Friedrich Capricornus, Czech composer.
• 1756 Thomas Anton Kunz, Czech composer.
• 1843 Thomas Bracken, Irish poet.
• 1849 James Lane Allen, American writer.
• 1850 Zdenek Fibich, Czech classical composer.
• 1853 Isolde Kurz, German poet & short-story writer.
• 1856 Tomas O'Crohan, Irish writer.
• 1872 Albert Payson Terhune, American novelist.
• 1901 Juan A de Zunzunegui y Loredo, Spanish writer.
• 1902 Peetie Wheatstraw [William Bunch], American blues singer.
• 1905 Anthony Powell, English novelist.
• 1922 Paul Winchell (Wilchinsky), American ventriloquist.
• 1940 Frank Zappa, musician.
• 1942 Anthony Summers, Irish writer.
• 1948 Samuel L. Jackson.
• 1950 Lillebjørn Nilsen, Norwegian singer-songwriter.

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

• aydt: /ˈædət/ n., the innermost or most sacred part of a temple or other place of worship.
• bretheling: /ˈbrɛθ-(ə)-lɪŋ/ n., a worthless or contemptible person; a good-for-nothing; a wretch; = brethel n.
• carnyx: /ˈkɑr-nɪks/ n., a type of bronze horn or trumpet associated with the Celtic peoples of the Iron Age, typically consisting of a mouthpiece at the base of a long vertical tube widening at the end into a bell (often in the form of an animal’s head).
• El Caganer: /ehl kah-guh-NEH/ n., a Christmas elf who may traditionally be found popping a squat in nativity scenes all over Catalonia, Spain, literally “the pooper” from Catalan “cagar” (sh*t).
• haarschnitt: /ˈhaːɐ-ʃnɪt/ n., the act or style of cutting a person’s hair.
• lagniappe: /ˈlanˌyap/ n., a small gift given with a purchase to a customer, by way of compliment or for good measure; bonus.
• malebolge: /mæl-ə-ˈbɑldʒ/ n., a pool of filth; a hellish place or condition.
• pampootie: /pam-ˈpü-tē/ n., a shoe of untanned cowhide worn in the Aran islands, County Galway, Ireland.
• skald: /skäld/ n., (in ancient Scandinavia) a composer and reciter of poems honoring heroes and their deeds.
• yampy: /ˈjæm-pi/ adj., mad, crazy; daft, stupid.

December 21, 2022 Word-Wednesday Feature
Darkness and Light

Short days, long shadows and nights — moments in the cycles of the seasons, life and death, and spiritual renewal. Today, Word-Wednesday features the words of some writers musing on such solstice metaphors.

The people of Stonehenge marked the exact point when increasing darkness turned to more light. Now with more forms of artificial light and warmth at our disposal, we mark the solstice with lights and places for our ongoing celebrations. Henry Beston described our fascination with and connection to seasonality in Northern Farm, his 1948 collection of essays and diary penned over the course of a year written from a small farm in Maine, where he notes:

In the old Europe which inherited from the Bronze Age, this great feast of the Solstice was celebrated with multitudinous small fires lit throughout the countryside. Fire and the great living sun — perhaps it would be well to honor again these two great aspects of the flame. It might help us to remember the meaning of fire before the hands and fire as a symbol. As never before, our world needs warmth in its cold, metallic heart, warmth to go on and face what has been made of human life, warmth to remain humane and kind.

Susan Cooper describes the same celebration with fire in her poem, The Shortest Day, which became a book of the same name, beautifully illustrated by artist Carson Ellis.

Shortest Day
So the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow‐white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us ‐ listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

In terms of personal renewal and creativity, Walt Whitman, who wrote of “sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights,” also knew we are apt “to dwell on the bare spots and darknesses” where “no artist or work of the very first class may be or can be without them” — light or darkness.

In Nothing Personal, James Baldwin writes of the tricky interplay between darkness and hope; and light, faith, and personal responsibility:

One discovers the light in the darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light. What the light reveals is danger, and what it demands is faith.

And as Albert Camus wrote in his Lyrical and Critical Essays, “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

From A Year with Rilke, December 21 Entry
On Necessary Experiences, from Letter to Nanny von Escher

Two inner experiences were necessary for the creation of these books (The Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies). One is the increasingly conscious decision to hold life open to death. The other is the spiritual imperative to present, in this wider context, the transformations of love that are not possible in a narrower circle where Death is simply excluded as The Other.

Into the Light 2
by  J.S. Ellington

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.

*Peas on Earth, Gouda Wheel, Two Men