Word-Wednesday for January 8, 2025

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for January 8, 2025, the seventh anniversary of the Wannaskan Almanac, our two-thousand five-hundred fifty-seventh consecutive daily post, the second Wednesday of the year, the third Wednesday of winter, the second Wednesday of January, and the eighth day of the year, with three-hundred fifty-seven days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for January 8, 2025
Looking Up 

Unless you have a window on to Mikinaak Crick like Sven and Monique, the crunchy snow alerts wildlife to your presence before you can see them. For signs of fauna life in January, Wannaskans will see plenty of evidence looking down into the snow cover for tracks and scat, but for real fun in real life, look up in January. Male ravens are performing their elaborate courtship flight maneuvers, including steep dives, tumbles, and rolls. With one of the earliest mating seasons of all the birds in Wannaskaland, ravens are already beginning the process of selecting a mate. Although many birds are polygamous, common ravens often selecting a mate for life. For this reason, common ravens will not actually breed until they are between two and four years of age, making this whole process even more amazing to behold, because this is such an important decision. Playing the odds, male courtship rituals are extremely diverse acrobatic flight performances, which includes the delivery of food gifts to any potential mates in the vicinity. Competing males push the envelope for female attention by performing aerial games of chicken with one another.

January 8 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


January 8 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily, occasionally.


Earth/Moon Almanac for January 8, 2025
Sunrise: 8:16am; Sunset: 4:45pm; 1 minutes, 39 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 12:12pm; Moonset: 2:39am, waxing gibbous, 62% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for January 8, 2025
                Average            Record              Today
High             13                     46                     14
Low              -7                   -49                     14

January
by John Updike

The days are short,
The sun a spark,
Hung thin between
The dark and dark.

Fat snowy footsteps
Track the floor.
Milk bottles burst
Outside the door.

The river is
A frozen place
Held still beneath
The trees of lace.

The sky is low.
The wind is gray.
The radiator
Purrs all day.

January 8 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Career Coach Day
• National Winter Skin Relief Day
• National Joygerm Day
• National English Toffee Day
• National Bubble Bath Day
• National Argyle Day
• Typing Day

January 8 Word Pun

January 8 Word Riddle
When does possession give way to contraction?*

a Chairman Joe original

January 8 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

    Of Roman history, great Niebuhr's shown
    'Tis nine-tenths lying. Faith, I wish 'twere known,
    Ere we accept great Niebuhr as a guide,
    Wherein he blundered and how much he lied.
                                                        —Salder Bupp


January 8 Etymology Word of the Week
hanky-panky
/haNG-kē-PANG-kē/ n., behavior, in particular sexual or legally dubious behavior, considered improper but not seriously so, from 1841, "trickery," British slang, possibly a variant of hoky-poky "deception, fraud," altered from hocus-pocus, a magical formula used in conjuring, 1630s, earlier Hocas Pocas, common name of a magician or juggler (1620s); a sham-Latin invocation used by jugglers, perhaps based on a perversion of the sacramental blessing from the Mass, Hoc est corpus meum "This is my body." The first to make this speculation on its origin apparently was English prelate John Tillotson (1630-1694).

Compare hiccus doccius or hiccus doctius, "formula used by jugglers in performing their feats" (1670s), also a common name for a juggler, which OED says is "conjectured to be a corruption of" Latin hicce es doctus "here is the learned man," "if not merely a nonsense formula simulating Latin." Also compare holus-bolus (adv.) "all at a gulp, all at once," which Century Dictionary calls "A varied redupl. of whole, in sham-Latin form." As a noun meaning "juggler's tricks," hocus-pocus is recorded from 1640s.


January 8 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1310 The Great Frost: in London the Thames river froze so thickly bonfires were lit on it.
• 1610 German astronomer Simon Marius independently discovers the first three moons of Jupiter one day after Galileo.
• 1656 Oldest surviving commercial newspaper, Weeckelycke Courante van Europa, now known as Haarlems Dagblad, still in printed circulation begins publication in Haarlem, Netherlands.
• 1705 George Frideric Handel's first opera Almira premieres.
• 1734 Premiere of George Frideric Handel's opera Ariodante.
• 1760 Comet C/1760 A1 (Great comet) approaches within 0.0682 AUs of Earth
• 1816 Sophie Germain is the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her paper on elasticity.
• 1833 Boston Academy of Music, first US music school, established.
• 1956 Bollingen Prize for poetry awarded to Conrad Aiken.
• 1961 Bollingen Prize for Poetry is awarded to Yvor Winters.
• 1971 Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota established.

January 8 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1037 Su Shi [Zizhan], Chinese poet.
• 1589 Ivan Gundulić, Croatian poet and playwright.
• 1601 Baltasar Gracián, Spanish writer.
• 1668 Jean Gilles, French composer.
• 1777 Filippo Traetta, Italian-born American composer.
• 1787 Johann Ludwig Bohner, German composer.
• 1788 Erik Drake, Swedish composer.
• 1812 Sigismond Fortune Francois Thalberg, Swiss pianist.
• 1812 William Henry Holmes, English composer.
• 1814 Johannes Kneppelhout, Dutch writer.
• 1822 Alfredo Carlo Piatti, Italian composer.
• 1824 Francisco González Bocanegra, Mexican poet.
• 1824 Per August Olander, Swedish composer.
• 1824 [William] Wilkie Collins, English writer.
• 1830 Hans von Bülow, German pianist and composer.
• 1836 Lawrence Alma Tadema, Dutch-British painter.
• 1846 Albert Cahen, French opera composer.
• 1846 William Wallace Gilchrist, American composer.
• 1873 Lucien Capet, French composer.
• 1883 Josue Teofilo Wilkes, Argentine composer.
• 1883 Pavel Filonov, Russian painter.
• 1891 Bronislava Nijinska, Polish-Russian ballet dancer.
• 1891 Storm Jameson, English writer.
• 1892 Werner Wehrli, Swiss composer.
• 1896 Jaromir Weinberger, Czech-American composer.
• 1896 Manuel Rojas, Chilean writer.
• 1897 Dennis Wheatley, British author.
• 1900 Serge Poliakoff, Russian-French modernist-abstract painter,.
• 1901 Edmond Vandercammen, French-Belgian painter and poet.
• 1902 Gret Palucca, German dancer and choreographer.
• 1904 Peter Arno, American cartoonist.
• 1905 Giacinto Scelsi, Italian composer and surrealist poet.
• 1910 Galina Ulanova, Russian ballet danc.
• 1912 Rudolf George Escher, Dutch composer.
• 1914 Charles Borromeo Mills, American composer.
• 1917 Peter Taylor, American novelist.
• 1925 James Saunders, English playwright.
• 1926 Evelyn Lear [Shulman], American soprano.
• 1926 Jani Christou, Greek composer,.
• 1927 Charles Tomlinson, British poet.
• 1928 Gaston Miron, Quebec poet.
• 1934 Alexandra Ripley, American writer.
• 1935 Ian Bargh, Scottish-born Canadian jazz pianist and composer.
• 1936 Zdeněk Mácal, Czech conductor.
• 1937 Shirley Bassey, Welsh singer.
• 1941 Graham Chapman, English comedian.
• 1942 Stephen Hawking, English physicist.
• 1944 Terry Brooks, American fantasy fiction author.
• 1945 Kevin Conneff, Irish singer.
• 1947 Don Bendell, American author.
• 1965 Rossen Milanov, Bulgarian conductor.

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

• aery: /ˈER-ē/ adj., having an aerial quality; ethereal.
• bedel: /bə-DEL/ n., an English university officer who walks at the head of processions of officers and students.
• druse: /dro͞oz/ n., a rock cavity lined with a crust of projecting crystals.
• eristic: /ə-RIS-tik/ adj., of or characterized by debate or argument; n., a person given to debate or argument.
• fustanella: /fəs-tə-NE-lə/ n., a stiff white kilt, worn by men in Albania and Greece.
• higgle: /HI-ɡəl/ v., archaic spelling of haggle, dispute or bargain persistently, especially over the cost of something.
• jobation: /jō-BĀ-shən/ n., a long tedious reproof; a scolding lecture.
• maigre: /MĀ-grə/ adj., being a day on which the eating of flesh is forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church; constituting a food that contains no flesh nor juices of flesh and so may be eaten on maigre days.
• pensile: /PEN-s(ə)l/ adj., hanging down; pendulous.
• variorum: /ver-ē-Ô-rəm/ adj., (of an edition of an author's works) having notes by various editors or commentators.

January 8, 2025 Word-Wednesday Feature
Deep Dive into Calques
/kalk/ n., a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation, from 1937, from French calque, literally "a copy," from calquer "to trace by rubbing" (itself borrowed in English 1660s as calk "to copy by tracing"), a 16th century borrowing by French of Italian calcare, from Latin calcare "to tread, to press down," from calx "heel" (see calcaneus). When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new word or phrase - a lexeme [/ˈlekˌsēm/, n., a basic lexical unit of a language, consisting of one word or several words, considered as an abstract unit, and applied to a family of words related by form or meaning] into the borrowing target language. For example, the English phrase "flea market" is a loan translation of the French marché aux puces ("market with fleas"), where at least twenty-two other languages calque the French expression directly or indirectly through another language. As previously discussed, Germans are among the worlds experts in creating calques.

Worthy of note in this discussion, the suffix -eme in linguistics, is an active suffix and element of word-formation since 1953, from French -ème "unit, sound," from phonème: /FŌ-nēm/ n., distinctive sound or group of sounds. A more modern offshoot of this evolution is meme: /mēm/ n., an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means, like a cultural gene.

Calquing is a world-wide linguistic phenomenon, where Wikipedia lists six calques from Chinese (including, 好久不見 to long time no see), twelve from French (including Nouvelle Vague to new wave), one from Irish (uisce beatha calques Latin aqua vitae – the English word whiskey is derived from this phrase), and from Scandinavia (varmrett/varmrätt to hotdish).

As pointed out by Chairman Joe, one of the more common experiential calques is the Yiddish trepverter, translated into the German, treppenwitz, calqued by the French into l'esprit de l'escalier, then calqued into English as staircase wit: /STEHR-kays wit/ n., the situation of coming up with the perfect response on your way out (when it is too late to deliver).

The Chairman kindly provided the following additional Yiddish calque examples:
Ula's about to make a witty rejoinder, but Sven jumps in and says something that would make my contribution sound ridiculous.
In Yiddish, it's Er leygt zikh areyn  He butts in.
This happens a lot on group texts. I need to be quicker.

Then there are great rejoinders that are too cruel.
Tzu groyzam, Too cruel.

Aaaand finally (for now) retorts that are saved for my stand-up routine [or Sunday Squibs]:  
Geratevet far di Katskils


From A Year with Rilke, January 8 Entry
Balance, from the Fourth Duino Elegy

Oh trees of life, when is your wintertime?
We are not in balance. Not in agreement
as migrating birds are. Late and overtaken,
we hurriedly try to catch the wind
and fall into a random swamp.
To bloom and to wilt is all the same to us.
Somewhere lions still walk the earth.
As long as their majesty endures, so does their power.

Collecting Apples
by Leonid Pasternak

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.







*it’s its.