Word-Wednesday for February 15, 2023

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for February 15, 2023, the seventh Wednesday of the year, the ninth Wednesday of winter, and the 46th day of the year, with 319days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for February 15, 2023
Antler Shedding
Just in case you need a February outdoor activity that doesn’t involve snow or ice removal, this is the time of year when deer and moose shed their antlers, which only takes about two days. It comes as no surprise that testosterone fuels new antler growth, as well as certain behaviors, until the rut is over, when testosterone levels drop precipitously. Nature wastes nothing; the dropped antlers become sources of calcium for many small animals who gnaw away at the sheds.

The ground conditions after the recent warm weather should support your search.


February 15 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


February 15 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for February 15 2023
Sunrise: 7:33am; Sunset: 5:44pm; 3 minutes, 23 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 4:11am; Moonset: 11:48pm, waning crescent, 30% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for February 15, 2023
                Average            Record              Today
High            -13                     43                     9
Low              -5                    -49                   -7


February 15 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• International Angelman Day
• National Wisconsin Day
• National Flag of Canada Day
• Singles Awareness Day
• National Gumdrop Day

February 15 Word Riddle
What was was, before was was was?*


February 15 Word Pun
Giving away some small, legless birds. No perches necessary.


February 15 Walking into a Bar Grammar
An antonym crawled out of the bar.


February 15 Etymology Word of the Week
Sleet
/slēt/ n., a form of precipitation consisting of ice pellets, often mixed with rain or snow, from circa 1300, slete, "precipitation of mingled snow and rain," probably from an unrecorded Old English slete, slyte, which is perhaps related to Middle High German sloz, Middle Low German sloten (plural) "hail," from Proto-Germanic slautjan- (source also of dialectal Norwegian slutr, Danish slud, Swedish sloud "sleet"), which is of uncertain etymology. In U.S. especially fine pellets of snow mingled with rain, usually wind-driven.

Sleet
by Alan Shapiro

What was it like before the doctor got there?

Till then, we were in the back seat of the warm
dark bubble of the old Buick. We were where
we'd never not been, no matter where we were.

And when the doctor got there?

Everything outside was in a rage of wind and sleet,
we were children, brothers, safe in the back seat,
for once not fighting, just listening, watching the storm.

Weren't you afraid that something bad might happen?

Our father held the wheel with just two fingers
even though the car skidded and fishtailed
and the chains clanged raggedly over ice and asphalt.

Weren't you afraid at all?

Dad sang for someone to fly him to the moon,
to let him play among the stars, while Mom
held up the lighter to another Marlboro.

But when the doctor started speaking. . .

The tip of the Marlboro was a bright red star.
Her lips pursed and she released a ring of Saturn,
which dissolved as we caught at it, as my dad sang Mars.

When you realized what the doctor was saying. . .

They were closer to the storm in the front seat.
The high beams, weak as steam against the walled swirling,
only illuminated what we couldn't see.

When he described it, the tumor in the brain and what it meant. . .

See, we were children. Then we weren't. Or my brother wasn't.
He was driving now, he gripped the steering wheel
with both hands and stared hard at the panicked wipers.

What did you feel?

Just sleet, the slick road, the car going way too fast,
no brother beside me in the back seat, no singing father,
no mother, no ring of Saturn to catch at as it floats.


February 15 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 399 BC Philosopher Socrates is sentenced to death by the city of Athens for corrupting the minds of the youth of the city and for impiety.
• 1870 Ground broken for Northern Pacific Railway near Duluth, Minnesota.
• 1939 Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes premieres.
• 1950 WM Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba premieres.

February 15 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1564 Galileo Galilei.
• 1705 Charles-André Van Loo, French Rococo painter.
• 1707 Claude Prosper, French novelist.
• 1748 Jeremy Bentham, English philosopher.
• 1760 Jean-François Le Sueur, French composer.
• 1764 Jens I Baggesen, Danish writer.
• 1807 Ignacy Feliks Dobrzynski, Polish composer.
• 1810 Mary S. B. Shindler, American poet.
• 1817 Charles-François Daubigny, French painter.
• 1820 Susan B. Anthony, American suffragist and activist.
• 1847 Basil Maturin, Irish writer.
• 1861 Alfred North Whitehead, British mathematician and philosopher.
• 1874 Ernest Shackleton, Anglo-Irish captain and explorer.
• 1883 Sax Rohmer [Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward], English author.
• 1901 James "Kokomo" Arnold, American blues slide guitarist.
• 1904 Mary Adshead, muralist/painter.
• 1917 Oto Mádr, Czech writer.
• 1921 Mary Morris, Irish writer.
• 1928 Norman Bridwell, American author and cartoonist, author of Clifford the Big Red Dog.
• 1939 Jo Clayton, American science fiction author.
• 1954 Matt Groening, American cartoonist.
• 1958 Chrystine Brouillet, Quebec novelist.

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

• alluvion: /ə-ˈlo͞o-vē-ən/ n., the action of the sea or a river in forming new land by deposition.
• boreen: /bôr-ˈēn/ n., a narrow country road.
• catfishing: /ˈkat-ˌfiSH-iNG/ n., the process of luring someone into a relationship by means of a fictional online persona.
• dwy: /dwai/ n., a gust or flurry of rain or snow.
• homophily: /həˈ-mä-fə-lē/ n., the tendency for people to seek out or be attracted to those who are similar to themselves.
• lorgnon: /lawr-NYAWN/ n., an eyglass or a pair of eyeglasses.
• moiré: /mohr/ adj., in silks or fabrics, presenting a watery or wavelike appearance.
• oofless: /ˈu-fləs/ adj., having no (ready) money; temporarily poor; hapless.
• periphrasis: /pə-ˈri-frə-sis/ n., he use of indirect and circumlocutory speech or writing; in grammar, the use of separate words to express a grammatical relationship that is otherwise expressed by inflection, e.g., /did go/ as opposed to /went/ and /more intelligent/ as opposed to /smarter/.
• subrogate: /ˈsə-brō-ˌgāt/ trans. v., to put in the place of another, especially, to substitute (something or someone, such as a second creditor) for another with regard to a legal right or claim.

February 15, 2023 Word-Wednesday Feature
Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. This overestimation occurs as a result of the fact that people don’t have enough knowledge to know that they don’t have enough knowledge.

While COVID-19 has garnered the greatest attention with regard to recent epidemics, Dunning-Krugeritis appears to be spreading at a deadly rate throughout the world’s population. As a remedy, Word-Wednesday offers some reflections by way of words from authors who have pondered this malady.

Self-esteem: n., An erroneous appraisement.

Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary

Self-deception: n., The low road to peace of mind.

Leonard Roy Frank

The fly sat upon the axel-tree of the chariot wheel and said, “What a dust do I raise!”

Aesop

The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

Gertrude Atherton

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

Leonardo da Vinci

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

W. Somerset Maugham

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself, but also and more particularly by himself—by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.

H. L. Mencken

If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.

The Bible, John 1:8 (KJV)

Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.

Father Zosima speaking in The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

I fear one lies more to one’s self than to any one else.

George Noel Gordon [Lord Byron]

Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.

Carl Sagan

There is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

Francis Bacon

Self-deception once yielded to, all other deceptions follow naturally.

Thomas Carlyle

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Things are as they are, and no amount of self-deception makes them otherwise.

Agnes Repplier

We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

Thomas Merton

The ingenuity of self-deception is inexhaustible.

Hannah More

Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves.

François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid, and, however unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once and for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it.

Bertrand Russell

If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely", it would not have any significant first-person, present indicative.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

We do not deal much in fact when we are contemplating ourselves.

Mark Twain

In all of history, we have found just one cure for error—a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism.

David Brin

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.

The title character speaking, in Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something…but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen…and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

No estimate is more in danger of erroneous calculation than those by which a man computes the force of his own genius.

Samuel Johnson

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It would frae mony a blunder free us,
And foolish notion.

Robert Burns

Who has deceiv’d thee so oft as thyself?

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

From A Year with Rilke, February 15 Entry
To Darkness, from Book of Hours I, 11

You, darkness, of whom I am born—

I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations—just as they are.

The Church at Auvers
by Vincent van Gogh

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.






*is.