Word-Wednesday for March 8, 2023

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for March 8, 2023, the tenth Wednesday of the year, the twelfth Wednesday of winter, and the 67th day of the year, with 298 days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for March 8, 2023
Maple Syrup Season Begins
March is the month that begins maple syrup season for do-it-yourself aficionados in Wannaska. But this is no hobby for the impatient or faint of heart. It takes about forty (40) gallons of sugar maple (Acer saccharum) sap to make one (1) gallon of syrup, so you need big buckets and big trees. Historically, maple tree sap begins to flow anywhere from February 28 to March 25.

Also, be on the lookout for the first migrating flocks of the Canada goose (Branta canadensis) returning to northern breeding grounds later this month. Canada geese move northward at the edge of the 32°F isotherm, when the average temperature reaches 32°F.


March 8 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


March 8 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for March 8, 2023
Sunrise: 6:52am; Sunset: 6:17pm; 3 minutes, 36 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 7:43pm; Moonset: 7:35am, waning gibbous, 99% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for March 8, 2023
                Average            Record              Today
High             29                     52                     32
Low               6                    -29                     20

A Winter Song
By William J. Harris
If I
were the
cold weather
and people
talked about me
the way they talk
about it,
I’d just
pack up
and leave town.


March 8 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Oregon Day
• International Women's Day
• International Women's Collaboration Brew Day
• National Registered Dietician Nutritionist Day
• Ntional Proofreading day
• National Peanut Cluster Day
• Organize Your Home Office Day

March 8 Word Riddle
What do you call twenty-six letters that went for a swim?


March 8 Word Pun
5/4 of people admit they’re bad at fractions.


March 8 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
Having exhausted most of the available Walking into a Bar Grammar examples, Word-Wednesday introduces a new weekly feature from The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce. An essential book for any personal library, The Devil’s Dictionary features words often accompanied by some of the best works of little-known poets as a means of demonstrating the definition, such as the following Lenten entry:

PERSEVERANCE, n. A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.
    "Persevere, persevere!" cry the homilists all,
    Themselves, day and night, persevering to bawl.
    "Remember the fable of tortoise and hare—
    The one at the goal while the other is— where?"
    Why, back there in Dreamland, renewing his lease
    Of life, all his muscles preserving the peace,
    The goal and the rival forgotten alike,
    And the long fatigue of the needless hike.
    His spirit a-squat in the grass and the dew
    Of the dogless Land beyond the Stew,
    He sleeps, like a saint in a holy place,
    A winner of all that is good in a race.
                                                                Sukker Uffro


March 8 Etymology Word of the Week
saunter
/ˈsôn-(t)ər/ v., walk in a slow, relaxed manner, without hurry or effort, involving a bit of etymological differences of opinion, from circa 1500, santren "to muse, be in reverie," a word of uncertain origin. The meaning "walk with a leisurely gait" is from 1660s, and may be a different word which, despite many absurd speculations, also is of unknown origin. Klein prints the theory (held by Skeat and Murray) that this sense of the word derives via Anglo-French sauntrer (mid-14th century) from French s'aventurer "to take risks." Century Dictionary finds the theory involves difficulties but "it is the only one that has any plausibility," OED finds it "unlikely", Word-Wednesday finds the theory "pleasing and preferable".

In his book, Walking, Thoreau has his own take on sauntering:

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. Every walk is a sort of crusade.

March 8 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1884 Susan B. Anthony addresses U.S. House Judiciary Committee arguing for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote, 16 years after legislators 1st introduced a federal women's suffrage amendment.
• 1902 First performance of Jean Sibelius' Second Symphony.
• 1934 Edwin Hubble photo shows as many galaxies as Milky Way has stars.

March 8 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1599 Suzanna van Baerle, Dutch poet.
• 1607 Johann von Rist, German composer and poet.
• 1702 Anne Bonny, Irish Caribbean pirate and lover of Calico Jack.
• 1714 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, German composer, son of J. S. Bach.
• 1843 Vilhelm Svedbom, Swedish composer.
• 1859 Kenneth Grahame, Scottish author of The Wind in the Willows.
• 1879 Mechtilde Lichnowsky, German writer.
• 1893 Mississippi John Hurt, American country blues singer and guitarist.
• 1899 Eric Linklater, British novelist and poet.
• 1911 Alan Hovhaness, Armenian-American composer.
• 1922 Cyd Charisse [Tula Finklea], American dancer and actress.
• 1941 Ivana Loudová, Czech composer.
• 1960 Jeffrey Eugenides, American author.

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

• brumous:  /ˈbru-məs/ adj., foggy, wintry.
• coruscate: /ˈkôr-ə-ˌskāt/ v., (of a light) flash or sparkle.
• fermata: /fər-ˈmä-də/ n., in music, a pause of unspecified length on a note or rest; a mark over a note or rest that is to be lengthened by an unspecified amount.
• kebbie: /ˈke-bi/ n., a rough hook-headed walking stick.
• murrain: /ˈmər-ən/ n., an infectious disease, especially babesiosis, affecting cattle or other animals; a plague, epidemic, or crop blight.
• oppugn: /ə-ˈpyo͞on/ v., call into question the truth or validity of.
• plongeur: /plɑn-ˈʒər/ n., a person employed to wash dishes and carry out other menial tasks in a restaurant or hotel.
• superposition: /ˌso͞o-pər-pə-ˈzi-SHən/ n., the action of placing one thing on or above another, especially so that they coincide.
• tawpie: /tȯ-pē/ n., a foolish or awkward young person.
• zoic: /ˈzəʊ-ɪk/ adj., of or relating to animal life.

March 8, 2023 Word-Wednesday Feature
Scary Worlds and Words
Words can be scary, and we've been telling children scary stories for centuries. Every wonder why? Some of Word-Wednesday's favorite authors give us hints. Neil Gaiman wrote his own version of Hansel & Gretel, a graphic novel with drawings by Lorenzo Mattotti. As Gaiman explained to New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly:

I think if you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up. I think it is really important to show dark things to kids — and, in the showing, to also show that dark things can be beaten, that you have power. Tell them you can fight back, tell them you can win. Because you can — but you have to know that.
And for me, the thing that is so big and so important about the darkness is it’s like in an inoculation… You are giving somebody darkness in a form that is not overwhelming — it’s understandable, they can envelop it, they can take it into themselves, they can cope with it.
And, it’s okay, it’s safe to tell you that story — as long as you tell them that you can be smart, and you can be brave, and you can be tricky, and you can be plucky, and you can keep going.

And let's not forget  THE GASHLYCRUMB TINIES, by Edward Gorey. Gorey's book, sometimes gory, uses pictures and short sentences to help children learn their alphabet.

Polish poet, Nobel laureate, and Word-Wednesday favorite Wisława Szymborska is on board with Gaiman, Gorey, the brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Anderson, as she writes in her essay, "The Importance of Being Scared", from nonrequired reading: prose pieces, where she reflects on the works of Hans Christian Anderson:

Children like being frightened by fairy tales. They have an inborn need to experience powerful emotions. Andersen scared children, but I’m certain that none of them held it against him, not even after they grew up. His marvelous tales abound in indubitably supernatural beings, not to mention talking animals and loquacious buckets. Not everyone in this brotherhood is harmless and well-disposed. The character who turns up most often is death, an implacable individual who steals unexpectedly into the very heart of happiness and carries off the best, the most beloved. Andersen took children seriously. He speaks to them not only about life’s joyous adventures, but about its woes, its miseries, its often undeserved defeats. His fairy tales, peopled with fantastic creatures, are more realistic than whole tons of today’s stories for children, which fret about verisimilitude and avoid wonders like the plague. Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays (as today’s moral tales insistently advertise, though it doesn’t necessarily turn out that way in real life), but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.

It's a timeless narrative. The twins Terrible and the Terrific have the same mother — Life itself. In narrative form, the beauty and wonder of Life include terrors and tribulations. Framed by Grace, Courage, and Humor, we learn from scary stories how to traverse the fearful.


From A Year with Rilke, March 8 Entry
A New Clarity, from Letters to a Young Poet

Allow your judgments their own undisturbed development, which, like any unfolding, must come from within and can by nothing be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birth. To allow each impression and each embryo of a feeling to complete itself in the dark, in the unsayable, the not-knowing, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and humbly and patiently to await the dawning of a new clarity: that alone is the way of the artist—in understanding as in creating.

The Age of Gold
by Auguste Rodin

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.






*Alphawetical, or Alphabet Soup, if you're good in the kitchen.