Word-Wednesday for August 2, 2023

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for August 2, 2023, the thirty-first Wednesday of the year, the seventh Wednesday of summer, and the two-hundred fifteenth day of the year, with one-hundred fifty-one days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for August 2, 2023
Ants and Grasshoppers

You can hardly go anywhere in Wannaska without encountering one of these two insects. Of the Order Hymenoptera, including bees, wasps, and sawflies, ants belong specifically to the Formica Genus. Formica podzolica, otherwise known as the podzol mound ant, can be found building large mounds in the acidic, infertile soil of Wannaska’s coniferous and boreal forests. Metaphorically speaking, ants represent industry and preparation.

Grasshoppers and crickets belong to the Order Orthoptera, where grasshoppers belong to the Family Caelifera, and the crickets to the Family Ensifera. Members of both species Those species make familiar noises by rubbing a row of pegs on the hind legs against the edges of the forewings in a process called stridulation /ˌstri-jə-ˈlā-shən/, hence the common metaphorical use of the grasshopper or cricket as musician.

Half-way decent chance of aurora borealis activity tonight.


August 2 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


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


Earth/Moon Almanac for August 2, 2023
Sunrise: 5:58am; Sunset:9:02pm; 2 minutes, 50 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 10:06pm; Moonset: 6:41am, waning gibbous, 99% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for August 2, 2023
                Average            Record              Today
High             77                     97                     87
Low              54                    34                     60

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
By William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

August 2 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Coloring Book Day
• National Ice Cream Sandwich Day

August 2 Word Riddle
Why are anteaters never sick?*


August 2 Word Pun
Tarzan keeps getting kicked off every golf course on which he attempts to play, because he screams every time he swings.


August 2 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
ACCOUNTABILITY, n. The mother of caution.

"My accountability, bear in mind,"
     Said the Grand Vizier: "Yes, yes,"
Said the Shah: "I do— 'tis the only kind
     Of ability you possess."

                                                Joram Tate

August 2 Etymology Word of the Week
thrift
/ˈthrift/ n., the quality of using money and other resources carefully and not wastefully, from circa 1300, "fact or condition of thriving," also "prosperity, savings," from Middle English thriven "to thrive", influenced by (or from) Old Norse þrift, variant of þrif "prosperity," from þrifask "to thrive." Sense of "habit of saving, economy" first recorded 1550s (thrifty in this sense is recorded from 1520s; also see spendthrift). Thrift shop attested by 1919.


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

• 1695 Daniel Quare receives a British patent for his portable barometer.
• 1776 Formal signing of the US Declaration of Independence by fifty-six people.
• 1790 First US census conducted, the population was 3,939,214 including 697,624 slaves.
• 1865 Lewis Carroll publishes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
• 1877 San Francisco Public Library opens with 5,000 volumes.
• 1894 Dutch Society for Women Suffrage gets royal charter.
• 1909 US issues first Lincoln penny.
• 1937 Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 is passed in America, essentially rendering marijuana and all its by-products illegal.
• 1961 The Beatles first gig as house band of Liverpool's Cavern Club.
• 2018 Oldest library in Germany confirmed unearthed in Cologne dating to 2AD.

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

• 1627 Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten, Dutch painter.
• 1632 Kaspar von Stieler, German poet.
• 1757 Wojciech Żywny, Czech composer and Frédéric Chopin's piano teacher.
• 1820 John Tyndall, Irish physicist who demonstrated why the sky is blue and proved that the Earth's atmosphere has a greenhouse effect.
• 1834 Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, French sculptor.
• 1854 F. Marion Crawford, American author.
• 1858 Catharina van Rennes, Dutch composer.
• 1858 William Watson, British poet.
• 1859 Julia Frankau, Irish writer.
• 1865 Irving Babbitt, American writer.
• 1867 Ernest Dowson, British poet.
• 1871 John French Sloan, American painter and etcher.
• 1875 Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Russian-Lithuanian artist.
• 1878 Aino Kallas, Finnish writer.
• 1881 Ethel M. Dell, English author.
• 1882 Johannes Tralow, German writer.
• 1907 Mary Hamman, American writer.
• 1910 Lou Zara, American writer.
• 1910 Roger MacDougall, Scottish playwright.
• 1920 Louis Pauwels, French writer.
• 1924 James Baldwin, American writer.
• 1942 Isabel Allende, Chilean-American author.
• 1943 Rose Tremain, British novelist and playwright.
• 1948 Robert Holdstock, English science fiction author.
• 1949 James Fallows, American writer.
• 1955 Caleb Carr, American novelist.

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

• bourn: /bôrn/ n., a small stream, especially one that flows intermittently or seasonally.
• colophon: /ˈkäl-ə-fən/ n., a publisher’s emblem or imprint, especially one on the title page or spine of a book.
• fabulist: /ˈfa-byə-list/ n., a person who composes or relates fables; a liar.
• guttation: /ˌgə-ˈtā-shən/ n., the secretion of droplets of water from the pores of plants.
• iwis: /ē-ˈwis/ adv., surely.
• niksen: /NĒK-suhn/ n., Dutch, the practice of doing nothing as a means of relieving stress; idle activity, as staring into the trees or listening to music, with no purpose other than relaxation.
• proselyte: /ˈprä-sə-ˌlīt/ n., a person who has converted from one opinion, religion, or party to another.
• ruche: /ˈrüsh/ n., a pleated, fluted, or gathered strip of fabric used for trimming.
• sett: /sɛt/ n., the den or burrow of a badger.
• ylem: /ˈī-ləm/ n., the primordial matter of the universe, originally conceived as composed of neutrons at high temperature and density.

August 2, 2023 Word-Wednesday Feature
fables
/ˈfā-bəl/ n., a short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral, from circa 1300, "falsehood, fictitious narrative; a lie, pretense," from Old French fable "story, fable, tale; drama, play, fiction; lie, falsehood" (12th century), from Latin fabula "story, story with a lesson, tale, narrative, account; the common talk, news," literally "that which is told," from fari "speak, tell," from Proto-Indo-European root bha- "to speak, tell, say." Restricted sense of "animal story" (early 14th century) comes from the popularity of Aesop's tales. In modern folklore terms, defined as "a short, comic tale making a moral point about human nature, usually through animal characters behaving in human ways" ["Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore"].

Does anyone write fables anymore? One might argue that Animal Farm, The Little Prince, or Jonathan Livingston Seagull might be the most recent literary fables, apart from those found in children's books. One of the most popular current ways to write a fable is to rewrite an old one, and since this is a Wednesday in summer, let's look at a seasonal fable: The Ant and the Grasshopper (or vice versa).

Number 373 in the Aesop's Fables collection, a hungry grasshopper begs for food from an ant in winter. The ant refuses. Simple moral: plan ahead. But the story is retold by subsequent authors with new morals to their fables. The French seem to be particularly fond of this fable. In the seventeenth century fabulist Jean de La Fontaine retold the fable to encompass themes of compassion and charity. In the nineteenth century Joseph Autran wrote Réhabilitation de la Fourmi, where the ant, having only straw to eat, agrees to share his stock with the grasshopper, so long as the grasshopper sings the and a song in the summer. Contemporary Tristan Corbière uses the fable to light-heartedly criticize a bad poet (one thinks of Chairman Joe). No collection of The Ant and the Grasshopper fable would be complete without the two variant versions by Word-Wednesday favorite, Ambrose Bierce, as found in his book, Fantastic Fables. In the first version, after the ant asks the grasshopper why it didn't make any stocks, grasshopper replies that it actually did, but the ants broke in and took them all away, which is supported by modern entomology studies. In the second version, the grasshopper is a miner who was too busy digging to prepare, while the ants are replaced by politicians, for whom it is the grasshopper's work which is "profitless amusement".

In the twentieth century, Frenchman Jean Anouilh bifurcates the fable into two stories: La Fourmi et la Cigale, where the ant becomes an overworked housewife whom the dust follows into the grave, and where the cicada's comment is that she prefers to employ a maid; and, La Cigale, where the cicada is a female night-club singer who asks a fox to act as her agent. Believing that she will be an easy victim for his manipulations, she handles the fox with such frosty finesse that he takes up singing himself. Pauvre renard!

Across the pond, and in the other half of the twentieth century, John Ciardi personalizes the fable even further in John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan, which is a fable in poetic verse that argues for poetry over fanatical hard work.

Ten years ago, or maybe twenty,
There lived an ant named John J. Plenty.
And every day, come rain, come shine,
John J. would take his place in line
With all the other ants. All day
He hunted seeds to haul away,
Or beetle eggs, or bits of bread.

These he would carry on his head
Back to his house. And John J., he
Was happy as an ant can be
When he was carrying a load
Big as a barn along the road.

The work was hard, but all John J. —
Or any other ant — would say
Was “More! Get more! No time to play!
Winter is coming."

But woe is John J., for his sister falls in love with a grasshopper named Fiddler Dan who fills the world with music, spending carefree summer days playing his fiddle in the grass. The worried John J. tries to dissuade his sister, and she elopes with Fiddler Dan, taking in his music and love as her sustenance.

All day long from rose to rose
Dan played the music the summer knows,
Of the sun and rain through the tall corn rows,
And of time as it comes, and of love as it grows.

And all the summer stirred to hear
The voice of the music. Far and near
The grasses swayed, and the sun and shade
Danced to the love the music played.

And Dan played on for the world to turn,
While his little wife lay on a fringe of fern,
And heard the heart of summer ringing,
Sad and sweet to the fiddle’s singing.

So the sun came up and the sun went down.
So summer changed from green to brown.
So autumn changed from brown to gold.
And the music sang, “The world grows old,
But never my song. The song stays new,
My sad sweet love, as the thought of you.”

And summer and autumn dreamed and found
The name of the world in that sad sweet sound
Of the music telling how time grows old.
Fields held their breath to hear it told.
The trees bent down from the hills to hear.
A flower uncurled to shed a tear
For the sound of the music. And field and hill
Woke from the music, sad and still.

John J. trudges on to the beautiful music he hears far and near, to his own inner earworm, "Get more!" John J. vows that Fiddler Dan and his sister will get nothing from him when winter comes. "That will teach them."

So John J. Plenty waited and fasted.
As for the winter, it lasted and lasted.
He nibbled a crumb one day in ten.
But he shook with terror even then
When the thought of how he might be wasting
All that food he was hardly tasting.
And that’s how it went.

Spring eventually arrives, and like a true Wannaskan, John J. decides to store twice as much over the coming summer. As he emerges from his hill, he's stopped by...

From far and near, from blade to blade,
He heard the song that springtime played.
It’s a softer fiddle than autumn knows
When the fiddler goes down tall corn rows,
But the same far song. It grows and grows,
And spring and summer stir to hear
The music sounding far and near.
And the grasses sway, and the sun and shade
Dance when they hear the music played.

It was Dan, still singing for time to turn
While his little wife lay on a fringe of fern
And heard the heart of the springtime ringing
Sweet and new as the fiddle’s singing.

Squished by disbelieve that Fiddler Dan survived, John J. Plenty goes ants over teapoetry down the hill as the music continues exuberantly, abundantly unabated, and the fable concludes...

I guess he recovered. I hope he did.
I don’t know where the Fiddler hid
With his pretty wife from ice and snow.
I guess about all I really know
Is — save a little or save a lot,
You have to eat some of what you’ve got.
And — say what you like as you trudge along,
The world won’t turn without a song.

For other fun versions of this fable, check out W. Somerset Maugham’s short story, The Ant and The Grasshopper, John Updike’s Brother Grasshopper, and if you’re feeling adventurous, James Joyce’s adaptation, “The Ondt and the Gracehoper” in Finnegans Wake.

Write your own squib about "The Svent and the Ulahopper", and have a fabulous day!


From A Year with Rilke, August 2 Entry
Afraid of What Is Difficult, from Rome, May 14, 1904, Letters to a Young Poet

Don't be confused by the nature of solitude, when something inside you wants to break free of your loneliness. This very wish, when you use it as a tool for understanding, can illumine your solitude and expand it to include all that is. Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. It is clear, however, that here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living things in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves at any cost and despite all opposition.

Vase with Daisies
by Vincent van Gogh

Be better than yesterday,
learn a new fable today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow,
and write when you have the time.




*Because they’re full of anty bodies.