Word-Wednesday for April 17, 2024

 And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for April 17, 2024, the sixteenth Wednesday of the year, the fifth Wednesday of spring, the third Wednesday of April, and the one-hundred-eighth day of the year, with two-hundred fifty-eight days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for April 17, 2024
Ruffed Grouse
Bonasa umbellus is a medium-sized grouse occurring in forests from the Appalachian Mountains through Wannaska across Canada to Alaska. It is the most widely distributed game bird in North America, and it is a non-migratory, not-so-clever bird. The ruffed grouse differs from other grouse species in its courtship display, where it relies entirely on a non-vocal acoustic display, known as drumming, unlike other grouse species. The drumming itself is a rapid, wing-beating display that creates a low-frequency sound now heard throughout Wannaska, starting slow and speeding up: thump ... thump ... thump..thump-thump-thumpthump). Even in thick woods, this can be heard for a quarter of a mile or more.

April 17, 2024 Hummingbird Migration Update
We at Wannaskan Almanac Word-Wednesday Headquarters now have all our feeders out, filled, and ready for visitors.

April 17 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


April 17 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily, occasionally.


Earth/Moon Almanac for April 17, 2024
Sunrise: 6:28am; Sunset: 8:18pm; 3 minutes, 27 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 1:44pm; Moonset: 4:38am, waxing gibbous, 63% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for April 17, 2024
                Average            Record              Today
High             48                     79                     51
Low              25                     10                     35

Spring
by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

April 17 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Banana Day
• National Crawfish Day
• National Cheeseball Day
• National Haiku Poetry Day
• National Ellis Island Family History Day

April 17 Word Pun
Sven tried to catch some fog. He mist.


April 17 Word Riddle
Why do ophthalmologists live longer?*


April 17 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
IGNORAMUS, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.

    Dumble was an ignoramus,
    Mumble was for learning famous.
    Mumble said one day to Dumble:
    "Ignorance should be more humble.
    Not a spark have you of knowledge
    That was got in any college."
    Dumble said to Mumble: "Truly
    You're self-satisfied unduly.
    Of things in college I'm denied
    A knowledge—you of all beside."
    —Borelli


April 17 Etymology Word of the Week
sad
/sad/ adj., feeling or showing sorrow; unhappy, from Old English sæd "sated, full, having had one's fill (of food, drink, fighting, etc.), weary of," from Proto-Germanic sathaz (source also of Old Norse saðr, Middle Dutch sat, Dutch zad, Old High German sat, German satt, Gothic saþs "satiated, sated, full"), from Proto-Indo-European seto-, from root sa- "to satisfy."

In Middle English and into early Modern English the prevailing senses were "firmly established, set; hard, rigid, firm; sober, serious; orderly and regular," but these are obsolete except in dialect. The sense development seems to have been via the notion of "heavy, ponderous" (i.e. "full" mentally or physically), thus "weary, tired of." By circa 1300 the main modern sense of "unhappy, sorrowful, melancholy, mournful" is evident. An alternative course would be through the common Middle English sense of "steadfast, firmly established, fixed" (as in sad-ware "tough pewter vessels") and "serious" to "grave." In the main modern sense, it replaced Old English unrot, negative of rot "cheerful, glad."


April 17 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1387 Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales characters begin their pilgrimage to Canterbury (according to scholars).
• 1397 Geoffrey Chaucer tells the Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of English King Richard II.
• 1534 Thomas More confined in the Tower of London.
• 1907 Ellis Island, New York records 11,745 immigrants.
• 1964 Jerrie Mock becomes first woman to fly solo around the world.
• 1978 Pulitzer prize awarded to Carl Sagan for Dragons of Eden.
• 1986 Pulitzer prize awarded to Larry McMurtry for Lonesome Dove.
• 1987 Richard Wilbur appointed as American poet laureate.
• 2015 Marianne Winkler finds "message in a bottle" on the shore of the German island of Amrum; it had been dropped in the North Sea by British marine scientist George Parker Bidder on November 30th, 1906, making its length of time spent adrift 108 years, 138 days.

April 17 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1539 Tobias Stimmer, Swiss painter.
• 1586 John Ford, English dramatist.
• 1587 Ivan Lukačić, Croatian composer.
• 1622 Henry Vaughan, English poet.
• 1699 Robert Blair, Scottish poet.
• 1715 Johann Wolfgang Kleinknecht, German composer.
• 1772 Vojtěch Nejedlý, Czech poet.
• 1774 Václav Tomášek, Czech pianist.
• 1811 Ann Mounsey, English composer.
• 1863 Johannes Petrus Boskaljon, Curacaoian composer.
• 1870 Robert Tressell Irish novelist.
• 1876 Ian Hay [John Hay Beith], British novelist and playwright.
• 1881 Anton Wildgans, Austrian poet and playwright.
• 1885 Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen-Finecke], Danish writer.
• 1897 Thornton Wilder, Wisconsin playwright.
• 1899 Vincent Wigglesworth, British entomologist.
• 1911 Hervé Bazin, French writer.
• 1920 Bengt Anderberg, Swedish poet.
• 1920 Joan Warburton, Scottish painter.
• 1923 Lloyd Biggle Jr., American science fiction author.
• 1928 Cynthia Ozick, American author.
• 1931 Ruth Etchells, English poet.
• 1937 Daffy Duck, Warner Bros. cartoon character.
• 1946 Clare Francis, British novelist.
• 1947 Linda Martin, Irish singer.
• 1957 Nick Hornby, English writer.
• 1970 Petr Borkovec, Czech poet.

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

• ballby: /BALL-bee/ n., a method of swaddled an infant, nose and eyes only showing.
• connectome: /kə-NEK-tōm/ n., the system of neural pathways in a brain or nervous system, considered collectively.
• demesne: /də-MĀN/ n., land attached to a manor and retained for the owner's own use.
• essent: /ˈɛ-sənt/ n., that which is; an entity, a being, an existent.
• holm: /hōm/ n., BRITISH, an islet, especially in a river or near a mainland.
• lurgy: /LUR-gee/ n., ​a mild illness or disease.
• fleer: /flir/ v., to laugh or grimace in a coarse derisive manner; to sneer.
• marcescible: /mar-SESS-uh-buhl/ adj., liable to wither or fade.
• spoor: /spo͝or/ n., the track or scent of an animal.; v., follow the track or scent of (an animal or person).
• stóirín: /sthō-RĒN/ n., IRISH, little darling.

April 17, 2024 Word-Wednesday Feature
Another Dictionary
The life-blood of our neocortex and our connections to one another, the world-of-words changes and evolves in even the stodgiest of cultures, if only because children see in new ways. As we get older, we often see inexpressible beauty or complexity, but our neocortical language centers are not part of brain's connectome that includes experiences of emotions. Fortunately, that doesn't stop some of us from synthesizing new words that connect these isolated regions of human experience. After all, many of our simplest words are surprisingly interconnected, such as sadness and satiety, as noted in this week's Etymology Word of the Week entry.

This week features another dictionary of words, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig, in which he describes as "a compendium of new words for emotions. Its mission is to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being—all the aches, demons, vibes, joys, and urges that are humming in the background of everyday life." These words come from cross-connections of different languages and cultures. Here are a few for your enjoyment:

• agnosthesia: /ag-nos-THEE-zhuh./ n., GREEK, the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.
• anoscetia: /an-oh-SEE-sha/ n., the anxiety of not knowing ‘the real you'.
• apolytus: /ah-PAHL-i-tuhs/ n., the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin.
• craxis: /KRAK-sis./ n., LATIN, the unease of knowing how quickly your circumstances could change on you—that no matter how carefully you shape your life into what you want it to be, the whole thing could be overturned in an instant, with little more than a single word, a single step, a phone call out of the blue, and by the end of next week you might already be looking back on this morning as if it were a million years ago, a poignant last hurrah of normal life.
• dès vu: /dey voo/ n., the awareness that this moment will become a memory.
• énouement: /EY-noo-mahn/ FRENCH, n., the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out but being unable to tell your past self.
• funkenzwangsvorstellung: /foon-ken-tsvang-SVOHR-stel-oong/ n., GERMAN, the primal trance of watching a campfire in the dark.
• galagog: /GAL-uh-gawg/ n., the state of being simultaneously entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest concerns feel laughably quaint, yet vanishingly rare.
• irrition: /ih-RI-shun/ TAHITIAN, n., regret at having cracked the code of something, which leaves you wishing you could forget the pattern—longing to unsee an optical illusion, to unlearn the formula behind your favorite songs and shows and movies, or re-canonize a role model you made the mistake of meeting in person.
• jouska: /ZHOOS-ka/ n., FRENCH, a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a devastating comeback, a cathartic heart-to-heart—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage that feels far more satisfying than the small-ball strategies of everyday life.
• maru mori: /MAH-roo MOH-ree/ n., the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things.
• mahpiohanzia: /mah-pee-oh-HAN-zee-uh/ n., LAKOTA, the frustration of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the burden of your own weight, which you’ve been carrying your entire life without a second thought.
• querinous: /KWEH-ruh-nuhs./ adj., MANDARIN, longing for a sense of certainty in a relationship; wishing there were some way to know ahead of time whether this is the person you’re going to wake up next to for twenty thousand mornings in a row, instead of having to count them out one by one, quietly hoping your streak continues.
• suerza: /soo-WAIR-zuh/ n., SPANISH, a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself.
• wildred: /WIL-drid/ adj., feeling the haunting solitude of extremely remote places—a clearing in the forest, a windswept field of snow, a rest area in the middle of nowhere—which makes you feel like you’ve just intruded on a conversation that had nothing to do with you, where even the gravel beneath your feet and the trees overhead are holding themselves back to a pointed, inhospitable silence.
• zielschmerz: /ZEEL-shmerts/ n., GERMAN, the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.

From A Year with Rilke, April 17 Entry
Ever Again, from Uncollected Prams

Ever again, though we've learned the landscape of love
and the lament in the churchyard's names
and the terrible, silent abyss where the others have fallen;
ever again we walk out, two together,
under the ancient trees, ever again find a place
among the wildflowers, under heaven's gaze.

Old Church Tower at Nuenen
by Vincent van Gogh

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





*Because they dilate.