Word-Wednesday for October 11, 2023

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for October 11, 2023, the forty-first Wednesday of the year, the third Wednesday of fall, and the two-hundred eighty-fourth day of the year, with eighty-one days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for October 11, 2023
First Frost
We had our first frost last night here in Wannaska, and the local journalists were emphatically persistent in their warnings to harvest or cover our tomatoes. We got lucky this year. Roseau County has a 80% history of 32 degree temperatures by September 27. You can check out the probabilities for next year here.

Look up in the morning,

October 11 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


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


Earth/Moon Almanac for October 11, 2023
Sunrise: 7:38am; Sunset: 6:43pm; 3 minutes, 31 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 3:07am; Moonset: 5:54pm, waning crescent, 8% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for October 11, 2023
                Average            Record              Today
High            53                     79                     52
Low             33                     12                      41

Fire and Ice
by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

October 11 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Curves Day
• International Day of the Girl Child
• National Take Your Parents to Lunch Day
• National Fossil Day
• National Coming Out Day
• National Sausage Pizza Day
• National Bring Your Teddy Bear to Work Day
• National Stop Bullying Day
• National Emergency Nurses Day
• International Newspaper Carrier Day
• Feast Day of Cainnech of Aghaboe
• Feast Day of Lommán of Trim

October 11 Word Riddle
What did fans call it when Jerry Garcia gave away tickets to his concerts?*


October 11 Word Pun

October 11 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
VANITY, n. The tribute of a fool to the worth of the nearest ass.

They say that hens do cackle loudest when
     There's nothing vital in the eggs they've laid;
     And there are hens, professing to have made
A study of mankind, who say that men
Whose business 'tis to drive the tongue or pen
     Make the most clamorous fanfaronade
     O'er their most worthless work; and I'm afraid
They're not entirely different from the hen.
Lo! the drum-major in his coat of gold,
     His blazing breeches and high-towering cap—
Imperiously pompous, grandly bold,
     Grim, resolute, an awe-inspiring chap!
Who'd think this gorgeous creature's only virtue
Is that in battle he will never hurt you?
                                            Hannibal Hunsiker

October 11 Etymology Word of the Week
frost
/frôst/ n., a deposit of small white ice crystals formed on the ground or other surfaces when the temperature falls below freezing, from Old English forst, frost "frost, a freezing, frozen precipitation, extreme cold," from Proto-Germanic frustaz "frost" (source also of Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old High German frost, Middle Dutch and Dutch vorst), from the verb freusanan "to freeze" (source of Old English freosan "to freeze"), from suffixed form of Proto-Indo-European preus- "to freeze; burn". Both forms of the word were common in English till late 15th century; the triumph of frost may be due to its similarity to the forms in other Germanic languages. A black frost (late 14th Century) is one which kills plants (turns them black) but is not accompanied by visible frozen dew.


October 11 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1726 Benjamin Franklin returns to Philadelphia from England.
• 1883 US and Canadian railroads agree to use of five time-zone system for North America, based on the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• 1890 Daughters of American Revolution founded.
• 1922 First woman FBI "special investigator", Alaska Davidson, appointed.
• 1929 Sean O'Casey's Silver Tassle premieres.
• 1975 Saturday Night Live, created by Lorne Michaels, premieres.
• 1981 Then unknown musician Prince Rogers Nelson opens for The Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
• 1983 Last hand-cranked telephones US went out of service as 440 telephone customers in Bryant Pond, Maine, were switched over to direct-dial.
• 1984 August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom premieres.
• 1990 Mexican writer Octavio Paz is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
• 2001 Caribbean writer V.S. Naipaul is awarded the Noble Prize for Literature.
• 2012 Mo Yan, a Chinese hallucinatory realist writer, wins the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.

October 11 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1727 Elizabeth Griffith, Irish writer.
• 1782 Steen Steensen Blicher, Danish poet.
• 1865 Hans E. Kinck, Norwegian and writer.
• 1876 Gertrud von Le Fort, German writer.
• 1881 Stark Young, American writer.
• 1885 Francois Mauriac, French novelist, poet and playwright; Nobel prize winner in 1952.
• 1897 Arvo Hannikainen, Finnish violinist.
• 1901 Emil Hlobil, Czech composer.
• 1925 Elmore Leonard, American writer.
• 1926 Thích Nhất Hạnh [Nguyen Xuan Bao], Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, teacher, peace activist, and writer.
• 1937 R. H. W. Dillard, American poet.
• 1962 Anne Enright, Irish writer.

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
In the vernacular, write a story or pram from the following words:

• butin: /bū-tin/ n., booty, loot.
• cowan: /ˈkau̇-ən/ n., one who builds dry stone dikes and walls; not a freemason, one who is outside the brotherhood; an amateur, a bungler.
• desuetude: /ˈdes-wə-to͞od/ n.,  a state of disuse.
• gilgai: /GIL-gigh/ n., a hollow where rainwater collects; a waterhole. Also: terrain of low relief on a plain of heavy clay soil, characterized by the presence of hollows, rims, and mounds, as formed by alternating periods of expansion during wet weather and contraction during hot dry weather.
• irrefragable: /iˈ-ref-rə-ɡə-b(ə)l/ adj., not able to be refuted or disproved; indisputable.
• jaculable: /JAK-yuh-luh-buhl/ adj., designed to be or otherwise suitable for throwing or tossing.
• mizzle: /ˈmiz-(ə)l/ n., light rain; drizzle; v., rain lightly.
• nippitatum: /nip-uh-TAH-duhm/ n., ale, or other alcoholic drink, of the highest quality and strength.
• palmy: /ˈpä(l)-mē/ adj., flourishing or successful; covered with palms.
• sociolect: /ˈsōSH-(ē)-ə-lek(t)/ n., the dialect of a particular social class.

October 11, 2023 Word-Wednesday Feature
vernacular
/vər-ˈnak-yə-lər/ n., he language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region, from circa 1600, "native to a country," from Latin vernaculus "domestic, native, indigenous; pertaining to home-born slaves," from verna "home-born slave, native," a word of Etruscan origin. Used in English in the sense of Latin vernacula vocabula, in reference to language. As a noun, "native speech or language of a place," from 1706.

"For human speech is after all a democratic product, the creation, not of scholars and grammarians, but of unschooled and unlettered people. Scholars and men of education may cultivate and enrich it, and make it flower into the beauty of a literary language; but its rarest blooms are grafted on a wild stock, and its roots are deep-buried in the common soil." Logan Pearsall Smith, Words and Idioms, 1925.

Stuffy Warroad scholars may poo-poo the vernacular, but Dante's Divina Commedia and the Norman poet Turold's The Song of Roland are some of the earliest vernacular classics. The first printed book in England was Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1476. Protestantism was a driving force in the use of the vernacular in the 1500s and many vernacular translations of the Bible: Dutch in 1526, French in 1528, Germany's Luther Bible in 1534, Spanish in 1569, Czech between 1579 and 1593; and of course, in English, the King James Bible in 1611.

Those of us in Wannaska with more vernacular tastes for the likes of Sven and Ula dialects appreciate that the vernacular expresses the language or dialect spoken by people inhabiting a particular neighborhood, town, county, country or region. As a native language, vernacular reflects patterns of speech and conversation through a distinctly local stylistic register, dialect, or sociolect.

On this day in 1727, Benjamin Franklin returned from England full of ideas about ways to achieve our independence. In one of the first editions of his Poor Richard's Almanac, he floated the following vernacular draft of the opening words of what were to become our Declaration of Independence:

When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

Jefferson and Madison eventually fancified Poor Richard's version as follows:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

From A Year with Rilke, October 11 Entry
Portrait of My Father as a Young Man, from New Prams

In the eyes, dream. The brow bearing witness
to something far off. About the mouth,
abundant youth, an unsmiling seductiveness.
And across the ornamental braiding
of the slender, elite uniform,
the saber's hilt and both hands
waiting quietly, driven toward nothing.
Now they are barely visible, as if they,
reaching for the Distant, were the first to disappear.
All else is veiled in its own mystery,
dissolved in its own depths.

You swiftly fading daguerreotype
in my more slowly fading hands.

The Earl of Percy
by  Thomas Phillips

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.






*a dead giveaway.