Word-Wednesday for December 27, 2023

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for December 27, 2023, the fifty-third and final Wednesday of the year, the first Wednesday of winter, and the three-hundred sixty-first day of the year, with four days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for December 27, 2023
There primary species of beaver in Wannaska is the North American beaver, the other Minnesota species being Castor canadensis, and the Eurasian beaver, Castor fiber. The second-largest living rodents, after capybaras, our neighbors living in Mikinaak Crick remain active chewers in the winter months.

December 27 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


December 27 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily by 11:00am, usually.


Earth/Moon Almanac for December 27, 2023
Sunrise: 8:17am; Sunset: 4:33pm;  32 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 4:45pm; Moonset: 9:25am, waning gibbous, 99% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for December 27, 2023
                Average            Record              Today
High             15                     37                     37
Low              -4                    50                     26


Year’s End
By Richard Wilbur

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show   
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   
And held in ice as dancers in a spell   
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   
Composedly have made their long sojourns,   
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze   
The random hands, the loose unready eyes   
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause   
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

December 27 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Fruitcake Day
• The Third of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

December 27 Word Riddle
How many reindeer does Santa have?*


December 27 Word Pun

December 27 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
OLD, adj., In that stage of usefulness which is not inconsistent with general inefficiency, as an old man. Discredited by lapse of time and offensive to the popular taste, as an old book.

"Old books? The devil take them!" Goby said.
"Fresh every day must be my books and bread."
Nature herself approves the Goby rule
And gives us every moment a fresh fool.
—Harley Shum

December 27 Etymology Word of the Week
Wednesday
/ˈwenz-dā/ n., the day of the week before Thursday and following Tuesday, from fourth day of the week, Old English wodnesdæg "Woden's day," a Germanic loan-translation of Latin dies Mercurii "day of Mercury" (compare Old Norse Oðinsdagr, Swedish Onsdag, Old Frisian Wonsdei, Middle Dutch Wudensdach). For Woden, see Odin.

Contracted pronunciation is recorded from circa 1500. The Odin-based name is missing in German (mittwoch, from Old High German mittwocha, literally "mid-week"), probably by influence of Gothic, which seems to have adopted a pure ecclesiastical (i.e. non-astrological) week from Greek missionaries. The Gothic model also seems to be the source of Polish środa, Russian sreda "Wednesday," literally "middle."


December 27 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1903 Sweet Adeline is first sung.
• 1904 Stage play Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie premieres.
• 1904 W B Yeats and Lady Gregory's On Baile's Strand premieres in Dublin.
• 1927 Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's musical Show Boat, based on Edna Ferber's novel, opens at the Ziegfeld Theatre.
• 1937 Mae West performs Adam & Eve skit that gets her banned from NBC radio.
• 1947 First Howdy Doody Show telecast on NBC.

December 27 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1571 Johannes Kepler, German astronomer.
• 1572 Jan Campanus, Czech composer.
• 1796 Mirza Ghalib, Indian poet.
• 1821 Jane Wilde, Irish poet, nationalist and mother of Oscar Wilde.
• 1822 John Roberts, Welsh composer and poet.
• 1888 Thea von Harbou, German author.
• 1910 Charles Olson, American poet.
• 1913 Elizabeth Smart, Canadian author.
• 1917 Onni Palaste, Finnish writer.
• 1959 Gerina Dunwich, American author.
• 1966 Wendy Coakley-Thompson, American writer.

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

• amphiscian: /æm-ˈfɪ-ʃɪən/ n., an inhabitant of the tropics.
• brinicle: /BRIGH-nuh-kuhl/ n., a long, tapering tube of ice formed around a plume of very cold, hypersaline seawater, typically descending from a developing ice sheet towards the sea floor.
• currach: /ˈkə-rəKH/ n., a small round boat made of wickerwork covered with a watertight material, propelled with a paddle; a coracle.
• endorheic: /en-duh-REE-ik/ adj., of or relating to interior drainage basins; of a region in which little or none of the surface drainage reaches the sea.
• gambol: /ˈɡambəl/ v., run or jump about playfully.
• hygge: /ˈho͞oɡ-ə/ n., a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being (regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture).
• mantling: /MANT-ling/ adj., of a liquid: that gathers a scum or coating; that acquires a head.
• roborant: /ˈrōb-ə-rənt/ n., a medicine, treatment, etc. that has a strengthening or restorative effect; adj., having a strengthening or restorative effect.
• synastry: /ˈsin-əs-trē/ n., comparison between the horoscopes of two or more people in order to determine their likely compatibility and relationship.
• tourtière: /to͝or-ˈtyer/ n., a kind of meat pie traditionally eaten at Christmas in Canada.

December 27, 2023 Word-Wednesday Feature
Words from a New Book of Hard Words
Having completed the arc of Gravity’s Rainbow, the Word-Wednesday staff has moved on to their next book of hard words: The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie.

Where to begin?  Rushdie's fourth novel, published in September 1988, The Satanic Verses was inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu alayhi wa-sallam. As in so many of his books, Rushdie's narrative deploys magical realism in the context of contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the Satanic Verses, a group of Quranic verses about three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Al-Uzza, and Manāt, but Rushdie renames his characters with altered origins: Gibreel, the Bollywood actor for the archangel Gabriel; Salahuddin Chamchawala (aka, Spoono) an Indian Anglophile for Satan; Mahound, the desert businessman for the Prophet and Messenger, Muhammed, salla Allahu alayhi wa-sallam.
 
The book received wide critical acclaim upon its release, was a 1988 Booker Prize finalist, and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year. In perhaps its greatest accolade, the Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Rushdie in 1989.

Rushdie, an Indian-born British-American novelist loves the stories, poetries, and unique customs of all his personal and literary cultural resources. These multicultural legacies come to life throughout The Satanic Verses, where a reader is wise to regularly consult the Koran, the Bible, and of course, the many dictionaries of the WWW. Today Word-Wednesday offers a family-friendly taste of what a reader will encounter in the first hundred pages of this lively, lovely novel:

• afeem: /अफ़ीम/ n., opium.
• afreet: /ə-ˈfrēt/ n., (in Arabian and Muslim mythology) a powerful jinn or demon.
• crorepati: /ˈkrɔ-pə-tɪ/ करोड़पति, Hindustani;  کروڑ پتی‎, Arabic, n., (in India) a person whose assets are worth at least one crore or 10 million rupees.
• dacoit: /də-ˈkoit/ n., a member of a band of armed robbers in India or Burma (Myanmar).
• deliquesce: /ˌdeləˈkwes/ v. (of organic matter) to become liquid, typically during decomposition.
• dhaba: /ˈdɑ-bɑ/ n.  (in India) a roadside café or food stall.
• Farnangis: /فرنگیس/ Persian, proper name, a female character in the Persian epic Shahnameh. She is the eldest daughter of Afrasiab, king of Turan. She is also the second and favourite wife of Siyâvash, the saintlike prince of Iran (Siyâvash's first wife was Juraira daughter of Piran Viseh) and mother of a legendary hero and later Shah of Iran, Kai Khosrow. Although a Turanian by birth, Farangis shows loyalty to her husband's kingdom and dynasty. She accompanies her son when he leaves Turan in the hopes of gathering an Iranian army to avenge Siyâvash.
• grok: /ɡräk/ v., understand (something) intuitively or by empathy.
• haramzada: /हरामज़ादा/ n., child born out of wedlock.
• hoosh: /ˈhüsh/ exclam., used when shooing or driving animals and, in particular, when ordering camels to sit down; n., a thick soup or stew.
• kurtal: /ಕೂರ್ತಳ್/ n., a woman loving a man intensely; a lover.
• onager: /ˈän-ə-jər/ n., an animal of a race of the Asian wild ass native to northern Iran.
• pullulate: /ˈpəl-yə-ˌlāt/ v., multiply or spread prolifically or rapidly.
• qasidah: /kə-ˈsē-də/ n., a laudatory, elegiac, or satiric poem in Arabic, Persian, or any of various related literatures.
• rajaz: /रजज़/ n., literally "tremor, spasm, convulsion as may occur in the behind of a camel when it wants to rise", a metre used in classical Arabic poetry, where a poem composed in this metre is an urjūza, and where this metre accounts for about 3% of surviving ancient and classical Arabic verse.
• salah: /sˤaˈla/ n., prayer worship performed by Muslims.
• tiffin: /TIF-in/ n., any light meal, especially lunch; v., to eat, serve, or provide lunch or any light meal or snack.
• turbot: /ˈtər-bət/ n., a European flatfish of inshore waters, which has large bony tubercles on the body and is prized as food.
• wog: /wäɡ/ n., a person who is not white.

From A Year with Rilke, December 27 Entry
Probe the Depths from Which Your Life Springs from  

Paris, February 17, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet

My only advice for you is this. Go within yourself and probe the depths from which your life springs, and there at its source you'll find the answer to the question of whether you must write. Accept this answer, just as you hear it, without hesitation. It may be revealed that you are called to be an artist. Then take this lot upon you, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without asking for any external reward. For the creative artist must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself—and in nature, to which he is devoted.

Man Writing Facing Left
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.





*Twelve: 

There's Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen = eight. 

Then there's Rudolph, of course, so that makes nine. 

Then there's Olive: "Olive the other reindeer, used to laugh..." That makes ten. 

Then there’s Howe:  "Then Howe, the reindeer, loved him..." That makes eleven. 

Many people forget Andy:  "Andy shouted out with glee."  That makes it twelve.