Word-Wednesday for October 4, 2023

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for October 4, 2023, the fortieth Wednesday of the year, the second Wednesday of fall, and the two-hundred seventy-seventh day of the year, with 88 days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for October 4, 2023
Colors!
Beautiful red autumn foliage has settled in on Virginia creeper vines, Amur maples trees, and many sumac shrubs. Eastern cottonwoods, lindens, honey locusts, and green ash trees glow in in their golden-yellow glitter.

Looking up before sunrise:

October 4 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


October 4 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for October 4, 2023
Sunrise: 7:27am; Sunset: 6:58pm; 3 minutes, 33 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 9:38pm; Moonset: 2:14pm, waning gibbous, 69% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for October 4, 2023
                Average            Record              Today
High            57                      81                     65
Low             35                      19                     47


Moon-Breath
by Mary Jo Salter

Dark mornings staying dark
longer, another autumn

come, and the body one
day poorer yet,

from restless sleep I wake
early now to note

how the pale disk of moon
caves to its own defeat,

cold as yesterday’s fish
left over in the pan,

or miserly as a sliver
of dried soap in a dish.

Oh for a sparkling froth
of cloud, a little heat

from the sun! I shiver
at the window where I plant

one perfect moon-round breath,
as I liked to do as a girl

against the filthy glass
of the yellow school bus

laboring up the hill,
not thinking what I meant

but passionate, as if
I were kissing my own life.

October 4 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Taco Day
• National Golf Lover’s Day
• National Vodka Day
• National Walk to School Day
• National Pumpkin Seed Day
• National Coffee with a Cop Day
• National Cinnamon Bun Day
• World Animal Day
• First day of World Space Week

October 4 Word Riddle
What’s the best way to describe a beehive without an exit?*


October 4 Word Pun
Sven’s selling a vintage Altoids tin, mint condition.


October 4 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
OUT-OF-DOORS, n. That part of one's environment upon which no government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful to inspire poets.

I climbed to the top of a mountain one day
     To see the sun setting in glory,
And I thought, as I looked at his vanishing ray,
     Of a perfectly splendid story.

'Twas about an old man and the ass he bestrode
     Till the strength of the beast was o'ertested;
Then the man would carry him miles on the road
     Till Neddy was pretty well rested.

The moon rising solemnly over the crest
     Of the hills to the east of my station
Displayed her broad disk to the darkening west
     Like a visible new creation.

And I thought of a joke (and I laughed till I cried)
     Of an idle young woman who tarried
About a church-door for a look at the bride,
     Although 'twas herself that was married.

To poets all Nature is pregnant with grand
     Ideas— with thought and emotion.
I pity the dunces who don't understand
     The speech of earth, heaven and ocean.

                                                            Stromboli Smith


October 4 Etymology Word of the Week

October 4 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1535 The Coverdale Bible, the first complete Bible to be published in English, is printed in Antwerp with translations by William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.
• 1648 Peter Stuyvesant establishes America's first volunteer fire service.
• 1675 Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens patents the pocket watch.
• 1854 Abraham Lincoln resumes his political career with a speech denouncing recent federal legislation extending slavery, at Illinois State Fair in Springfield; event is a precursor to his famous Peoria Speech.
• 1864 New Orleans Tribune, first black daily newspaper, forms.
• 1883 The Orient Express departs on its first official journey from Paris to Istanbul.
• 1897 George Bernard Shaw's play Devil's Disciple premieres.
• 1918 Musical Sometime with Mae West premieres.
• 1931 Dick Tracy comic strip by Chester Gould debuts.

October 4 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1528 Francisco Guerrero, Spanish composer.
• 1607 Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Spanish playwright.
• 1796 John Richardson, Canadian writer.
• 1836 Juliette Adam, French author.
• 1861 Frederic Remington, American artist and sculptor.
• 1862 Edward Stratemeyer, American author.
• 1865 Max Halbe, German playwright.
• 1876 Hugh McCrae, Australian writer and poet.
• 1885 Lennox Robinson, Irish writer.
• 1887 Francis Bull, Norwegian writer.
• 1895 Buster Keaton, American actor and comedian.
• 1895 Sergei Yesenin, Russian lyric poet.
• 1911 Mary Two-Axe Earley, Mohawk elder and human rights advocate.
• 1915 Koos Schuur, Dutch writer, poet.
• 1930 Paul Smith, Irish writer and playwright.
• 1928 Alvin Toffler, author.
• 1931 Dick Tracy, comic strip crimestopper.
• 1937 Jackie Collins, British-American romance novelist.
• 1941 Anne Rice American gothic novelist.
• 1941 Roy Blount, Jr., American writer.
• 1951 Bakhytzhan Kanapyanov, Kazakh poet.
• 1961 Kazuki Takahashi, Japanese author.
• 1963 Koji Ishikawa, Japanese children's book author and illustrator.
• 1964  Iva Klestilová, Czech playwright.

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

• catoptric: /kə-ˈtäp-trik/ adj., relating to a mirror, a reflector, or reflection.
• dutch-rub: /dəCH-'rəb/ n., an act of roughly rubbing one's knuckles across the top of another person's head with the intent of causing pain and humiliation, often while pinning the other person's head with one's free arm.
• encaustic: /en-ˈkôs-tik/ adj., (especially in painting and ceramics) using pigments mixed with hot wax that are burned in as an inlay.
• furbelow: /ˈfər-bə-lō/ n., a gathered strip or pleated border of a skirt or petticoat.
• gyve: /jīv/ n., a fetter or shackle.
• incipit: /in-ˈsi-pət/ n., the opening words of a text, manuscript, early printed book, or chanted liturgical text.
• nikah: /niːkɑː/ n., a Muslim wedding.
• polydyptic: /ˌpä-lē-ˈdip-tik/ adj., excessively thirsty.
• stownlins: /STOUN-linz/ adv., secretly; stealthily.
• ukase: /yo͞o-ˈkās/ n., an edict of the Russian government; an arbitrary command.

October 4, 2023 Word-Wednesday Feature
editor
/ˈed-ə-dər/ n., a person who is in charge of and determines the final content of a text, from 1640s, "publisher," from Latin editor "one who puts forth," agent noun from editus, past participle of edere "to bring forth, produce". By 1712 in sense of "person who prepares written matter for publication.

Or from the Devil's Dictionary,
EDITOR, n. A person who combines the judicial functions of Minos, Rhadamanthus and Æacus, but is placable with an obolus; a severely virtuous censor, but so charitable withal that he tolerates the virtues of others and the vices of himself; who flings about him the splintering lightning and sturdy thunders of admonition till he resembles a bunch of firecrackers petulantly uttering his mind at the tail of a dog; then straightway murmurs a mild, melodious lay, soft as the cooing of a donkey intoning its prayer to the evening star. Master of mysteries and lord of law, high-pinnacled upon the throne of thought, his face suffused with the dim splendors of the Transfiguration, his legs intertwisted and his tongue a-cheek, the editor spills his will along the paper and cuts it off in lengths to suit. And at intervals from behind the veil of the temple is heard the voice of the foreman demanding three inches of wit and six lines of religious meditation, or bidding him turn off the wisdom and whack up some pathos.

    O, the Lord of Law on the Throne of Thought,
         A gilded impostor is he.
    Of shreds and patches his robes are wrought,
              His crown is brass,
              Himself an ass,
         And his power is fiddle-dee-dee.
    Prankily, crankily prating of naught,
    Silly old quilly old Monarch of Thought.
         Public opinion's camp-follower he,
         Thundering, blundering, plundering free.
                        Affected,
                                  Ungracious,
                        Suspected,
                                  Mendacious,
    Respected contemporaree!

                                                            J.H. Bumbleshook

Readers are often blind to editors; writers, not so much. Here's a collection of thought about editors from some pretty good writers, where surgical and gardening metaphors abound.

Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, Sir.

Emily Dickinson

There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.

Josh Billings

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Truman Capote

When you see a manuscript as an editor…you’re at ease in the book the way a surgeon is at ease in a human chest, with all the blood and the guts and everything.

E. L. Doctorow

Each manuscript laid on my desk was a carcass, to be stripped of its fat and gristle and made sufficiently presentable for the somewhat less than lustrous showcase in which it would eventually appear.

Joseph Epstein

The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.

Robert Heinlein

Editing might be a bloody trade, but knives aren’t the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.

Blake Morrison

In writing as in gardening, prune prune prune.

Sollace Mitchell

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

Arthur Quiller-Couch

It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen.

Frank Yerby

Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind. New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech.

William Zinsser

It’s a little like going to the tailor or barber. I have never liked haircuts and I don’t like being edited, even slightly.

John Updike

The poem will please if it is lively—if it is stupid it will fail—but I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing.

George Gordon (Lord Byron)

Prostitutes have clients, wives have husbands,
Poets, you will understand, have editors.

Elizabeth Bartlett

There are editors, it is apparently an occupational hazard, who cannot leave a piece, or a line of a piece, intact—eating through a text, leaf and branch, like tent caterpillars, leaving everywhere their mark.

Renata Adler

A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.

Peter F. Drucker

Revise, revise, revise. I cannot stress this enough. Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t.

Colson Whitehead

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.

Ernest Hemingway

All writers know how hard it is to practice tough love on the children of our verbiage. Kick, the silly, labored metaphor out of the house. 

P. J. O’Rourke

Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.

William Safire

Listen, there were creative writing teachers long before there were creative writing courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

H. G. Wells

Naturally, Mark Twain had several choice words about editors:

I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words.

How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity, that his intentions were good.

From A Year with Rilke, October 4 Entry
Saint Francis of Assisi, from Book of Hours III, 34

Where is he, the clear one
whose song has died away?
Do the poor, who can only wait,
feel that young and joyous one among them?

Does he rise for them, perhaps at nightfall—
poverty's evening star?

Still Life with Three Birds Nests
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.



*unbelievable.