Word-Wednesday for June 26, 2024

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for June 26, 2024, the twenty-sixth Wednesday of the year, the first Wednesday of summer, the fourth Wednesday of June, and the one-hundred-seventy-eighth day of the year, with one-hundred eighty-eight days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for June 26, 2024
Blueberry Update
For our May 29 Vaccinium angustifolium update, we were able to report a bumper crop of flowering plants. There now appear to be a bounty of actual berries.

June 26 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


June 26 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily, occasionally.


Earth/Moon Almanac for June 26, 2024
Sunrise: 5:22am; Sunset: 9:31pm; 29 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 12:26am; Moonset: 10:38pm, waning gibbous, 76% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for June 26, 2024
                Average            Record              Today
High             74                     92                     69
Low              53                     38                     48

More Than Enough
by Marge Piercy

The first lily of June opens its red mouth.
All over the sand road where we walk
multiflora rose climbs trees cascading
white or pink blossoms, simple, intense
the scene drifting like colored mist.

The arrowhead is spreading its creamy
clumps of flower and the blackberries
are blooming in the thickets. Season of
joy for the bee. The green will never
again be so green, so purely and lushly

new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads
into the wind. Rich fresh wine
of June, we stagger into you smeared
with pollen, overcome as the turtle
laying her eggs in roadside sand.

June 26 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Barcode Day
• National Coconut Day
• National Parchment Day
• National Chocoate Pudding Day
• National Beautician’s Day
• World Refridgeration Day
• Ratcatcher's Day (Hamelin, Germany)

June 26 Word Pun
When Sven’s back rubs get out of hand, Monique accuses him of massagyny.

A Chairman Joe Original

June 26 Word Riddle
What has cities, but no houses; forests, but no trees; lakes and rivers, but no fish?*


June 26 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
CONDONE, v.t.

    Condone's a word that means to let
    The sinner think that we forget;
    Thus gaining time to meditate
    How we may best retaliate.
    Just as the cat, affecting sleep,
    Permits the wounded mouse to creep
    Half way to cover, and then vaults
    Upon him with renewed assaults,
    So man to his revenge supplies
    The added terrors of surprise.


June 26 Etymology Word of the Week
loiter
/LOI-dər/ v., stand or wait around idly or without apparent purpose; ravel indolently and with frequent pauses, from early 15th century, "idle one's time, dawdle over work;" perhaps from or akin to Middle Dutch loteren "be loose or erratic, shake, totter" like a loose tooth or a sail in a storm; in modern Dutch, leuteren "to delay, linger, loiter over one's work," according to Watkins, literally "to make smaller," and perhaps from Germanic lut-, from Proto-Indo-European leud- "small" (see little (adj.)).

The Dutch word is said to be cognate with Old English lutian "lurk," and related to Old English loddere "beggar;" Old High German lotar "empty, vain," luzen "lurk;" German Lotterbube "vagabond, rascal," lauschen "eavesdrop;" Gothic luton "mislead;" Old English lyðre "base, bad, wicked."


June 26 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1284 According to the Lüneburg manuscript, a piper leads 130 children of Hamelin away.
• 1498 Toothbrush invented in China using boar bristles.
• 1797 Charles Newbold patents first cast-iron plow, though farmers fear effects of iron on soil.
• 1870 Richard Wagner's opera Valkyrie, second in his Ring Cycle premieres.
• 1912 Gustav Mahler's 9th Symphony premieres.
• 1927 Comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke approaches within 0.0394 AUs of Earth.
• 1997 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, first book in J. K. Rowling's best-selling series, is published.

June 26 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1582 Johannes Schultz, German composer.
• 1747 Leopold Koželuch, Czech composer.
• 1763 George Morland, English artist.
• 1817 Branwell Brontë [Patrick Branwell Brontë], English painter and writer and brother of the writers Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
• 1823 Frederick Bowen Jewson, Scottish composer.
• 1831 Julius Rodenberg [Levy], German writer.
• 1869 Martin Andersen Nexø, Danish writer.
• 1875 Camille Zeckwer, American composer.
• 1878 Albert Siklós, Hungarian composer.
• 1881 Ya'akov Cahan, Hebrew poet and writer.
• 1885 Anna Maria Franciska van Wageningen-Salomons, Dutch author.
• 1892 Pearl S. Buck, American author.
• 1893 "Big" Bill Broonzy, American blues singer and guitarist.
• 1895 Jankel Adler, Polish painter.
• 1905 Teddy Grace [Stella Crowson], American jazz and blues singer.
• 1906 Stefan Andres, German writer.
• 1909 Betty Askwith, British writer.
• 1913 Aimé Césaire, French Martinican poet.
• 1914 Laurie Lee, English poet and author.
• 1915 Charlotte Zolotow, American children's book author.
• 1926 Tadeusz Konwicki, Polish writer.
• 1931 Colin Wilson, English author.
• 1941 Yves Beauchemin, Canadian novelist.
• 1956 Declan Burns, Irish canoeist.

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

• dorse: /ˈdȯ(ə)rs/ n., the back of a book or folded document.
• harrow: /HE-rō/ n., an implement consisting of a heavy frame set with teeth or tines which is dragged over plowed land to break up clods, remove weeds, and cover seed; v., draw a harrow over (land); to cause distress to.
• haw: /hȯ/ n., a hawthorn berry; an inflamed nictitating membrane of a domesticated mammal; interj., often used to indicate a vocalized pause in speaking; v., to utter the sound represented by haw; imp. v., used as a direction to turn to the left.
• kirtle: /KəRD-(ə)l/ n., a woman's gown or outer petticoat; a man's tunic or coat.
• Mikinaakippi: /mi-ki-na-KI-pi/ proper name, used for Mikinaak Creek when torrential rains rapidly swell the stream.
• muscicolous: /muh-SICK-uh-luhss/ adj., that lives among or in association with mosses.
• nagekinaa: /na-GÉ-ki-na/, n., ANISHINAABE, the everlasting road that the spirit travels on its four day journey to heaven.
• organdy: /ÔR-ɡən-dē/ n., a fine translucent cotton or silk fabric that is usually stiffened and used for women's clothing.
• peruke: /pə-Ro͞oK/ n., a wig.
• toyous: /TOI-əs/ adj., of little or no value or importance; trivial, worthless.

June 26, 2024 Word-Wednesday Feature
summer
/Sə-mər/ n., the warmest season of the year, in the northern hemisphere, from June to August, and in the southern hemisphere, from December to February, from "hot season of the year," Middle English somer, from Old English sumor "summer," from Proto-Germanic sumra- (source also of Old Saxon, Old Norse, Old High German sumar, Old Frisian sumur, Middle Dutch somer, Dutch zomer, German Sommer). This is from Proto-Indo-European root sm- "summer" (source also of Sanskrit sama "season, half-year," Avestan hama "in summer," Armenian amarn "summer," Old Irish sam, Old Welsh ham, Welsh haf "summer").

While our daylight becomes shorter, our weather become warmer - at least for a while. Fortunately, Wannaska has not yet become a tropical destination. Interestingly, people characterize this broad swath of time in very different ways: often portrayed as a matter of opinion; when personified, usually female; a time of freedom and sensuality; a season of romance; a time when nights become sharp due to their spareness. Here's a collection of summer thoughts...

Summer—the time when parents realize how underpaid teachers actually are.

Author Unknown

Summer is the annual permission slip to be lazy. To do nothing and have it count for something. To lie in the grass and count the stars. To sit on a branch and study the clouds.

Regina Brett

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

Hal Borland

One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter.

Author Unknown, but commonly misattributed to Henry David Thoreau

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

Russell Baker

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

Wallace Stevens

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days, and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Henry James

No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer.

James Russell Lowell

Steep thyself in a bowl of summertime.

Virgil

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

William Shakespeare

Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?

Dodie Smith

Oh, the summer night,
Has a smile of light,
And she sits on a sapphire throne.

Barry Cornwall

Our summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.

Emily Dickinson

It’s a sure sign of summer if the chair gets up when you do.

Walter Winchell

This is summer, unmistakably. One can always tell when one sees schoolteachers hanging about the streets idly, looking like cannibals during a shortage of missionaries.

Robertson Davies

It’s a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it’s light out.

Bill Watterson

In summer the song
sings itself.

William Carlos Williams

From A Year with Rilke, June 26 Entry
Charged with the Transfiguration of All Things, from Letter to Sophy Giauque, November 26, 1925

How all things are in migration! How they seek refuge in us. How each of them desires to be relieved of externality and to live again in the Beyond which we enclose and deepen within ourselves. We are convents of lived things, dreamed things, impossible things; all that is in awe of this century saves itself within us and there, on its knees, pays its debt to eternity.

Little cemeteries that we are, adorned with the flowers of our futile gestures, containing so many corpses that demand that we testify to their souls. All prickly with crosses, all covered with inscriptions, all spaded up and shaken by countless daily burials, we are charged with the transmutation, the resurrection, the transfiguration of all things. For how can we save what is visible if not by using the language of absence, of the invisible?

And how to speak this language that remains mute unless we sing it with abandon and without any insistence on being understood.

The Peasants' Churchyard
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.






*A map of Minnesota.