Word-Wednesday for May 29, 2024

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for May 29, 2024, the twenty-second Wednesday of the year, the eleventh Wednesday of spring, the fifth Wednesday of May, and the one-hundred-fiftieth day of the year, with two-hundred sixteen days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for May 29, 2024
Blueberry Status Update
Having been blessed with plenty of rainfall and no recent frost or frost predictions for coming weeks, the 2024 Wannaska crop of Vaccinium angustifolium, also known as the lowbush blueberry, looks to be a bumper.  It's local darker cousin, Vaccinium myrtilloides, called velvetleaf or Canadian blueberry is looking plentiful, too.

May 29 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


May 29 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily, occasionally.


Earth/Moon Almanac for May 29, 2024
Sunrise: 5:27am; Sunset: 9:16pm; 1 minute, 50 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 2:01am; Moonset: 11:26am, waning gibbous, 64% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for May 29, 2024
                Average            Record              Today
High             67                     89                     73
Low              45                     30                     55

A Little Madness in the Spring (1356)
by Emily Dickinson

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown –
Who ponders this tremendous scene –
This whole Experiment of Green –
As if it were his own!

May 29 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National 529 Day
• National Coq Au Vin Day
• National Paperclip Day
• National Senior Health and Fitness Day
• National Flip Flop Day
• International Day of the United Nations Peacekeepers

May 29 Word Pun

May 29 Word Riddle
What model of car do chimps and monkeys drive?*

                (another Joe McDonnell original)

May 29 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
DANDLE, v.t., To set an unresisting child upon one's knee and jolt its teeth loose in a transport of affection. A grown girl may be similarly outraged, but her teeth being more firmly secure, there can be no object in doing so, and the custom is a mere mechanical survival of a habit acquired by practice on babes and sucklings.

    If you care not for the scandal
    You can hold a girl and dandle
    Her upon your knee all night;
    But the game's not worth the candle—
    When 'tis played by candle light.

    But whene'er you feel the yearning,
    And the candle isn't burning—
    Or at least not very bright,
    Then the little game concerning
    Which I sing is very quite.


May 29 Roseau Times-Region Headline:
Roseau Museum Staff Find Stash from1929 Wannaskan Suffragettes: We Demand the Right to Bare Arms!


May 29 Etymology Word of the Week
collapse
/kə-LAPS/ v., (of a structure) fall down or in; give way; (of a person) fall down and become unconscious, typically through illness or injury, from 1732, "fall together, fall into an irregular mass through loss of support or rigidity," from Latin collapsus, past participle of collabi "fall together," from assimilated form of com "with, together" (see com-) + labi "to fall, slip" (see lapse (n.)).

Figurative sense of "come to nothing, fail" is from 1801. Transitive sense "cause to collapse" is from 1883. The adjective collapsed is attested from c. 1600, originally of groups of persons, "fallen from a spiritual or religious state," perhaps from co- + lapsed.


May 29 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1453 Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire falls to the Turks under Mehmed II; ends the Byzantine Empire.
• 1630 John Winthrop begins History of New England.
• 1790 Rhode Island becomes last of original 13 colonies ratifying US Constitution .
• 1848 Wisconsin becomes 30th US state.
• 1849 Abraham Lincoln says "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
• 1851 Sojourner Truth addresses first Black Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
• 1889 August Strindberg's Hemsoborna premieres.
• 1913 Igor Stravinsky's avant-garde ballet score Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) for the Ballets Russes premieres at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, provoking a riot.

May 29 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1797 Louise-Adéone Drölling, French painter.
• 1860 Isaac Albéniz, Spanish pianist and composer.
• 1871 Clark Voorhees, American painter.
• 1874 G. K. Chesterton, English essayist, poet, and playwright.
• 1882 Doris Ulmann, American photographer.
• 1890 Martin Wickramasinghe, Sri Lankan author.
• 1892 Alfonsina Storni, Swiss-Argentinian poet and author.
• 1897 Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Czech pianist, composer, and conductor.
• 1905 Sebastian Shaw, English actor, director, and playwright.
• 1906 T. H. White, Indian-English author.
• 1908 Diana Morgan, Welsh-English playwright and screenwriter.
• 1909 Neil R. Jones, American science fiction author.
• 1912 Jan Hanlo, Dutch poet.
• 1915 Karl Münchinger, German conductor and composer.
• 1922 Edith Roger, Norwegian dancer and choreographer.
• 1923 Bernard Clavel, French author.
• 1924 Lars Bo, Danish author and illustrator.
• 1934 Nanette Newman, English writer.
• 1935 André Brink, South African author and playwright.
• 1936 Jackie Lee, Irish singer.
• 1952 Louise Cooper, British science fiction author.
• 1953 Danny Elfman, American singer-songwriter
• 1957 Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iranian film director.
• 1959 Steve Hanley, Irish bass player and songwriter.
• 1961 Melissa Etheridge, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and activist.

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

• autarky: /Ô-tär-kē/ n., economic independence or self-sufficiency; a country, state, or society which is economically independent.
• burin: /BYOO-rən/ n., a steel tool used for engraving in copper or wood; ARCHEOLOGICAL, a flint tool with a chisel point.
• chinchery: /CHINCH-uh-ree/ n., miserliness, stinginess.
• elucubrate: /ih-LOO-kyoo-breyt/ v., to produce (especially literary work) by long and intensive effort.
• fugazi: / foo-GAH-zee/ adj., that has been forged or counterfeited. Hence more generally: not genuine; bogus, phoney, false.
• librocubicularist: /lī-broh-kyoo-bik-YOO-luh-rist/ n., someone who reads in bed.
• mochi: /MÄ-CHē/ n., a short-grained, sweet, glutinous rice with a high starch content, used in Japanese cooking.
• purblind: /PəR-blīnd/ adj.,  obsolete: wholly blind; partly blind; lacking in vision, insight, or understanding, obtuse.
• tradwife: /TRəD-wīf/ n., a neologism for traditional wife or traditional housewife, a woman who believes in and practices traditional sex roles and marriage.
• whelm: /(h)welm/ v., engulf, submerge, or bury; n., an act or instance of flowing or heaping up abundantly; a surge.

May 29, 2024 Word-Wednesday Feature
diacritical marks
/dī-ə-KRID-ə-k(ə)l märk/ n., a mark or sign serving to indicate different pronunciations of a letter above or below which it is written, from the adjective diacritic, 1690s, "serving to distinguish," especially of a mark or sign added to a letter to distinguish it from another of similar form or indicate a peculiar accent, tone, or stress, from Latinized form of Greek diakritikos "that separates or distinguishes," from diakrinein "to separate one from another," from dia "between" (see dia-) + krinein "to separate, decide, judge" (from Proto-Indo-European root krei- "to sieve," thus "discriminate, distinguish"). As a noun, "a diacritical mark," from 1866.

With two notable exceptions, English rarely uses diacritical marks, but writers (and especially editors) don't want to appear ignorant or passé. Most word aficionados can get by knowing the basic twelve:

acute accent (é): used over the letter e in French to indicate the vowel should be pronounced as ay, and in Spanish to indicate which syllable in a word is stressed.
Examples: café, née, purée

breve (ŏ): used in a few different languages, such as Romanian and Vietnamese to indicate a short vowel or unstressed syllable.
Examples: franţuzoaică (French woman in Romanian); cái chăn (blanket in Vietnamese); kŭt (pronunciation guide to the English word cut)

cedilla (ç):  used in French and Portuguese to indicate that a c should be pronounced like an s, and in Turkish, to indicate a ch or sh sound.
Examples: façade, Fraçois, çay (Turkish for tea), şeker (Turkish for sugar)

circumflex (ê): used in French to indicate that vowels should be pronounced as a long vowel according to French standards.
Examples: coup de grâce; crème brûlée; Côte d'Ivoire

diaeresis/umlaut (ë): used in French, called dieresis or diaeresis, and in German, called umlaut. While they look the same, these are two distinct marks for different uses in each language - typical of French/German relationships. In French, the dieresis denotes that a vowel is pronounced as a separate syllable. In German, an umlaut can change the meaning and pronunciation of a word. French examples: canoë, näive, Nöel; German examples: äpfel for apples; hände for hands; mäuse for mice

grave accent (è): used in French to indicate that e is pronounced as eh or is used over an a or u to distinguish between words with otherwise identical spelling and pronunciation.
Examples: déjà vu, crème de la crème; pièce de résistance

haček (č): used in letters of the alphabet of certain Baltic and Slavic languages, like Czech, to indicate that a sound is palatalized.
Examples: kuře (chicken in Czech); četvrtak (Thursday in Croatian); žvaigždė (star in Lithuanian)

tilde (ñ): used in letters from the Spanish and Portuguese alphabets to indicate nasal sounds.
Examples: piñata, mañana, Sveñ

tittle (i): used in English, a tittle is any dot or small mark used in writing the lower case letters i or j.

Less common diacritical marks include the å: bolle, ligature æ or œ, and streg ø.

While English language keyboards automatically render the tittle, one must use special keyboard functions to reproduce other diacritical marks. Those using Apple devices need only hold down the letter that requires a diacritical mark to be able to select from a pop-up menu. Otherwise, the keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Apple appear below.

From A Year with Rilke, May 29 Entry
Simplicity in Your Presence, from the Book of Hours I, 13

I'm too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy.
I'm too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing—
just as it is.

Still Life with Plate of Cherries
by Paul Cézanne

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.






*Subhumanaru