Word-Wednesday for March 13, 2024

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for March 13, 2024, the eleventh Wednesday of the year, the twelfth Wednesday of winter, and the seventy-second day of the year, with two-hundred ninety-three days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for March 13, 2024
GAROOO-A-A-A
So say the earliest trumpeting sandhill cranes now returning for the spring. Grus canadensis, or just sandhill, is one of Minnesota's largest bird species, standing about five feet tall and having a wingspread of nearly seven feet. Sandhills like the wet meadows and open landscapes of Wannaska, so listen for their return in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out also for first wood ducks and eastern bluebirds return about this time, and get those nesting boxes cleaned out and ready.

March 13 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


March 13 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily, occasionally.


Earth/Moon Almanac for March 13, 2024
Sunrise: 7:39am; Sunset: 7:26pm; 3 minutes, 36 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 9:00am; Moonset: not today, waxing crescent, 10% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for March 13, 2024
                Average            Record              Today
High             32                     57                    43
Low               9                    -24                    31

MARCH
by Emily Dickinson

We like March, his shoes are purple,
He is new and high;
Makes he mud for dog and peddler,
Makes he forest dry;
Knows the adder’s tongue his coming,
And begets her spot.
Stands the sun so close and mighty
That our minds are hot.
News is he of all the others;
Bold it were to die
With the blue-birds buccaneering
On his Wannaskan sky.

March 13 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Jewel Day
• National K9 Veterans Day
• National Coconut Torte Day
• National Good Samaritan Day
• National Open an Umbrella Indoors Day
• National Earmuff Day
• National Registered Dietitian Nutritionist Day

March 13 Word Pun

March 13 Word Riddle
Why don’t calculus majors throw house parties?*


March 13 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
BABE or BABY, n. A misshapen creature of no particular age, sex or condition, chiefly remarkable for the violence of the sympathies and antipathies it excites in others, itself without sentiment or emotion. There have been famous babes; for example, little Moses, from whose adventure in the bulrushes the Egyptian hierophants of seven centuries before doubtless derived their idle tale of the child Osiris being preserved on a floating lotus leaf.

    Ere babes were invented
    The girls were contented.
    Now man is tormented
    Until to buy babes he has squandered
    His money. And so I have pondered
    This thing, and thought maybe
    'Twere better that Baby
    The First had been eagled or condored.
    —Ro Amil


March 13 Etymology Word of the Week
asylum
/ə-ˈSĪ-ləm/ n., the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee; an institution offering shelter and support to people who are mentally ill, from early 15th century, earlier asile (late 14th century), "place of refuge, sanctuary," from Latin asylum "sanctuary," from Greek asylon "refuge, fenced territory," noun use of neuter of asylos "inviolable, safe from violence," especially of persons seeking protection, from a- "without" + sylē "right of seizure," which is of unknown etymology.

Literally, "an inviolable place." Formerly a place where criminals and debtors sought shelter from justice and from which they could not be taken without sacrilege. The general sense of "safe or secure place" is from 1640s; the abstract sense of "inviolable shelter, protection from pursuit or arrest" is from 1712. The meaning "benevolent institution to shelter some class of persons suffering social, mental, or bodily defects" is from 1773, originally of female orphans.


March 13 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 607 12th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.
• 1759 27th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.
• 1781 William Herschel sees what he thinks is a "comet" but is actually the discovery of the planet Uranus.
• 1846 Friedrich Hebbel's play Maria Magdalena premieres.
• 1852 Uncle Sam cartoon figure made its debut in the New York Lantern weekly.
• 1877 American Chester Greenwood patents earmuffs.
• 1900 In France the length of the working day for women and children is limited by law to 11 hours..
• 1935 Driving tests introduced in Great Britain.
• 2012 Encyclopaedia Britannica announces that it will no longer publish printed versions of its encyclopaedia.

March 13 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1700 Michel Blavet, French composer.
• 1720 Charles Bonnet, Swiss naturalist and writer.
• 1742 Anne Hunter, Irish poet.
• 1744 David Allan, Scottish painter.
• 1746 Maurus Haberhauer, Czech composer.
• 1781 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, German architect.
• 1822 Moritz von Strachwitz, German poet.
• 1864 Alexej von Jawlensky, Russian painter.
• 1875 Lizzy Ansingh, Dutch painter.
• 1884 Hugh S. Walpole, British novelist and playwright.
• 1884 Oskar Loerke, German writer.
• 1892 Janet Flanner, American journalist.
• 1896 Dorothy Aldis, American children's writer.
• 1899 Jan Lechoń [Leszek Józef Serafinowicz], Polish poet.
• 1899 Arthur Duff, Irish composer.
• 1908 Helen Sinclair Glatz, English composer.
• 1911 L. Ron Hubbard, American science fiction writer.
• 1913 Lightnin' Slim [Otis Hicks], American Louisiana blues electric guitarist, singer, and songwriter.
• 1913 Sergey Mikhalkov, Soviet writer and poet.
• 1914 W.O. Mitchell, Canadian writer.
• 1921 Al Jaffe, American cartoonist Mad Magazine.
• 1927 Charles Sickman Corsen, Dutch Antillean poet.
• 1939 Terence Brady, Irish writer.
• 1941 Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet and writer.
• 1947 Lesley Collier, English ballet dancer.
• 1960 Adam Clayton, Irish musician.
• 1960 Yuri Andrukhovych, Ukrainian writer and poet.
• 1971 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Vietnamese-American novelist.

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

• anemochord: /uh-NEM-uh-kord/ n., a stringed instrument which produces musical sounds when it is exposed to a current of air; an Aeolian harp.
• bilkul: /बिलकुल/BILL-kool/ adv., HINDI, absolutely.
• copra: /KÄP-rə/ n., dried coconut kernels, from which oil is obtained.
• daith: /däTH/ n., a piercing through the inner cartilage fold of the ear, just above the earhole.
• gilet: /ZHə-LĀ/ n., a light sleeveless padded jacket.
• mataeologian: /mad-ee-uh-LOH-juhn/ n., person who discourses or speculates fruitlessly.
• passionarity: /ˈpaSH-(ə)-ner-ə-dē/ n., the ability for and urge towards changing the environment, both social and natural, or, physically speaking, towards the disturbance of inertia of the aggregative state of an environment.
• quart: /kwôrt/ adj., in good condition, healthy; physically or spiritually sound.
• shuriken: /ˈSHo͝o-ri-ken/ n., a weapon in the form of a star with projecting blades or points, used as a missile in some martial arts.
• yardang: /YÄR-däNG/ n., a sharp irregular ridge of compact sand lying in the direction of the prevailing wind in exposed desert regions, formed by the wind erosion of adjacent material that is less resistant.

March 13, 2024 Word-Wednesday Feature
spring
/spriNG/ n., the season after winter and before summer, in which vegetation begins to appear, in the northern hemisphere from March to May and in the southern hemisphere from September to November, from "season following winter, first of the four seasons of the year; the season in which plants begin to rise," by 1540s, a shortening of spring of the year (1520s), which is from a special sense of an otherwise now-archaic spring (n.) "act or time of springing or appearing; the first appearance; the beginning, birth, rise, or origin" of anything.

The earliest form seems to have been springing time (early 14th century). The notion is of the "spring of the year," when plants begin to rise and trees to bud (as in spring of the leaf, 1520s). The Middle English noun also was used of sunrise, the waxing of the moon, rising tides, sprouting of the beard or pubic hair, etc.; compare 14th century spring of dai "sunrise," spring of mone "moonrise." Late Old English spring meant "carbuncle, pustule."

As the word for the vernal season it replaced Old English lencten (see Lent). Other Germanic languages take words for "fore" or "early" as their roots for the season name (Danish voraar, Dutch voorjaar, literally "fore-year;" German Frühling, from Middle High German vrueje "early").

In 15th century English, the season also was prime-temps, after Old French prin tans, tamps prim (Modern French printemps, which replaced primevère 16th century as the common word for spring), from Latin tempus primum, literally "first time, first season."

Spring fever is from 1843 as "surge of romantic feelings". In Wannaska, astronomical spring begins at 10:06pm next Tuesday, March 19, should you have a date-night planned. It was almost certainly Emily Dickinson's favorite season. To celebrate this season of beginnings, Word-Wednesday springs some famous words on the subject:

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King.

Emily Dickinson

In our spring-time every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground.

George Eliot

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest.

Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast

Spring is nature’s way of saying, “Let’s party!”

Robin Williams

The Spring is generally fertile in new acquaintances.

Fanny Burney

Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.

Doug Larson

Spring cold is like the poverty of a poor man who has had a fortune left him—better days are coming.

Margaret Oliphant

Every year, back Spring comes, with the nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off, and the ground all mucked up with arbutus.

Dorothy Parker

The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearl’d;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!

Robert Browning

Spring’s first conviction is a wealth beyond its whole experience.

Emily Dickinson

Everything is blooming most recklessly: if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Rainer Maria Rilke

When lonely feelings chill
The meadows of your mind
Just think if Winter comes
Can Spring be far behind?
Beneath the deepest snows
The secret of a rose
Is merely that it knows
You must believe in Spring!

Alan and Marilyn Bergman, lyrics to the song, You Must Believe in Spring

Birds that cannot even sing—
Dare to come again in spring!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Spring never comes abruptly; it makes promises in a longer twilight or a day of warmer sunshine, and then takes them back in a dark week of storm.

Bertha Damon

Spring is the season of hope, and autumn is that of memory.

Marguerite Gardiner

At last the spring came, when Nature and Hope wake up together.

Constance Cary Harrison

The older I grow the more do I love spring and spring flowers. Is it so with you?

Emily Dickinson

However long we have to live, there are never enough springs.

P. D. James

I am thankful that in a troubled world no calamity can prevent the return of spring.

Helen Keller

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Margaret Atwood

From A Year with Rilke, March 13 Entry
I Opened My Self, from Uncollected Prams

I opened myself too wide. I forgot
there's more outside than things and animals
at ease with themselves, whose eyes reflect
the wholeness of their lives.
I forgot my habit of grasping every look
that fell on me: looks, opinions, scrutiny.

Terrace of a Cafe on Montmartre (La Guingette)
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.






*Because you should never drink and derive.