Word-Wednesday for June 11, 2025

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for June 11, 2025, the seventeenth Wednesday of the year, the twelfth Wednesday of spring, the second Wednesday of June, and the one-hundred sixty-second day of the year, with two-hundred three days remaining. 

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for June 11, 2025
Wild Sarsaparilla
Aralia nudicaulis is now appearing in its spectacular blossoming bursts throughout Wannaska. Also known as false sarsaparilla, shot bush, small spikenard, wild liquorice, and rabbit root, Wild Sarsaparilla is a species of flowering plant in the ivy family Araliaceae, native to northern and eastern North America. The flowers eventually become a ¼-inch green berry that ripens to dark purple. The Anishinaabemowin word for Wild Sarsaparilla is waaboozojiibik, which literally translates to "rabbit root", used in reference to one of the legends regarding this plant, where its root is said to run far into the ground. The roots are used for making root beer or tea; the shoots are eaten like asparagus; the berries are sweet and can be eaten fresh or used to make jelly or wine; and the leaves, when young, taste sweet and can be chewed or used to make tea, but only if you identify the plant properly. As the old saying goes, “Leaves of 3, let it be...”

June 11 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


June 11 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily, occasionally.


Earth/Moon Almanac for June 11, 2025
Sunrise: 5:20am; Sunset: 9:27pm; 48 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 6:38pm; Moonset: 4:53am, full moon, 99% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for June 11, 2025
                Average            Record              Today
High             71                     93                     73
Low              50                    34                     46

Today
by Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

June 11 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Making Life Beautiful Day
• National German Chocolate Cake Day
• National Corn on the Cob Day

June 11 Word Pun
Sven’s writer’s block got so bad he went to see an Authorpedic Surgeon. 


June 11 Word Riddle
The more you take, the more you leave behind. What am I?*


June 11 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.

    "More dear than all my bosom knows, O thou
    Whose 'lips are sealed' and will not disavow!"
    So sang the blithe reporter-man as grew
    Beneath his hand the leg-long "interview."
                        —Barson Maith


June 11 Etymology Word of the Week
sheep
/SHēp/ n., a domesticated ruminant animal with a thick woolly coat and (typically only in the male) curving horns, kept in flocks for its wool or meat, and is proverbial for its tendency to follow others in the flock; a person who is too easily influenced or led, from Old English sceap, scep, Northumbrian scap, from West Germanic skæpan (source also of Old Saxon scap, Old Frisian skep, Middle Low German schap, Middle Dutch scaep, Dutch schaap, Old High German scaf, German Schaf), a word of unknown origin. Not found in Scandinavian (Danish has faar for "sheep") or Gothic (which uses lamb), and with no known cognates outside Germanic. The more usual Indo-European word for the animal is represented in English by ewe. The plural was leveled with the singular in Old English, but Old Northumbrian had a plural scipo. It has been used from Old English times as a type of timidity and figuratively of those under the guidance of God. The meaning "stupid, timid person" is attested from 1540s.

The image of the wolf in sheep's clothing was in Old English (from Matthew vii.15); that of separating the sheep from the goats is from Matthew xxv.33; the phrase itself by 1570s. To count sheep in a bid to induce sleep is recorded from 1854 but seems not to have been commonly written about until 1870s. It might simply be a type of a tedious activity, but an account of shepherd life from Australia from 1849 [Sidney's Emigrant's Journal] describes the night-shepherd ("hut-keeper") taking a count of the sheep regularly at the end of his shift to protect against being answerable for any animals later lost or killed.

Sheep's eyes "loving looks" is attested from 1520s (compare West Frisian skiepseach, Dutch schaapsoog, German Schafsauge). A sheep-biter was "an ill-trained mongrel, a dog that worries sheep" (1540s) and had extended senses: a mutton-monger" (1590s); and "a whore-monger" (1610s, i.e. one who "chases mutton"); hence Shakespeare's sheep-biting "thieving, sneaky." An old London chronicle circa 1450 has went to sheep-wash for "were slain."


June 11 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 738 Smoke Monkey ascends to the throne of the Maya city of Copán, after the capture and killing of his predecessor 18 Rabbit by rival city Quirigua.
• 1144 Basilica of St Denis is dedicated near Paris, the first fully Gothic church.
• 1644 Florentine scientist Evangelista Torricelli describes his invention of the mercury barometer in 1643 in a letter to Michelangelo Ricci.
• 1742 Benjamin Franklin invents his Franklin stove.
• 1776 Continental Congress creates committee to draft a Declaration of Independence with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston as members.
• 1793 First American stove patent is granted to Robert Haeterick.
• 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition opens in London, England.

June 11 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1540 Barnabe Googe, English poet.
• 1572 Ben Johnson, English playwright and poet.
• 1588 George Wither, English writer.
• 1697 Francesco Antonio Vallotti, Italian composer.
• 1704 José António Carlos de Seixas, Portuguese composer.
• 1771 Horatio Hornblower, fictional officer in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.
• 1776 John Constable, English landscape painter.
• 1815 Julia Margaret Cameron, English photographer.
• 1840 Henri Braekeleer, Flemish painter.
• 1849 Joseph Vézina, Québécois composer.
• 1861 Sigismund Vladislavovich Zaremba, Ukrainian-Russian composer.
• 1864 Richar Strauss, German composer.
• 1865 J. H. Leopold, Dutch poet.
• 1874 Richard Stöhr, Austrian composer.
• 1877 Renee Vivien, English poet.
• 1892 Edward Shanks, British poet.
• 1899 George Frederick McKay, American composer.
• 1899 Yasunari Kawabata, Japanese novelist.
• 1902 Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin, Soviet composer.
• 1904 Emil František Burian, Czech author and composer.
• 1907 Anton Hildebrand, Dutch children's book writer.
• 1910 Carmine Coppola, American composer.
• 1912 Mary Lavin, Irish author.
• 1912 Mukhtar Ashrafi, Soviet-Uzbek composer.
• 1912 William Baziotes, American painter.
• 1920 Irving Howe, American writer.
• 1921 Beatrice "Fiet" van Ommeren-Samson, Suriname writer.
• 1921 Michael Meyer, English novelist.
• 1922 Tony Charmoli, American dancer, choreographer.
• 1925 William Styron, American novelist.
• 1926 Carlisle Floyd, American opera composer.
• 1927 Beryl Grey [Groom], English prima ballerina.
• 1931 Audrey Schuh, American operatic soprano.
• 1932 Athol Fugard, South African playwright.
• 1936 Bryan Ingham, English artist.
• 1945 Robert Munsch, Canadian children's author.

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

• amaritude: /uh-MAIR-uh-tyood/ n., bitter feelings or sentiments; acrimony; resentment; (also) the quality of being bitter to the mind or feelings.
• becket: /BEK-ət/ n., a loop of rope or similar device for securing loose items on a ship.
• douzepers: /DOOZ-pərz/ n., the 12 peers or paladins represented in old romances as attendants of Charlemagne. 
• grisaille: /ɡrə-ZĀL/ n., a method of painting in gray monochrome, typically to imitate sculpture.
• hance: /ˈhan(t)s/ n., a curved, often ornamentally carved rise of a ship's fiferails or bulwarks from the waist to the quarterdeck.
• knobstacle: /NÄBZ-tək-(ə)l/ a person who consistently gets in the way, either through incompetence, arrogance, or unhelpful behavior - and makes situations more difficult that they need to be.
• nither: /NITH-ə(r)/ v., debase; humiliate.
• nithered: /NITH-ə(r)d/ adj., very cold; shriveled with cold or hunger; wasted, stunted, withered.
• spalpeen: /SPÄL-pēn/ n., IRISH, a rascal.
• spile: /spīl/ n., a small wooden peg or spigot for stopping a cask or tree; a large, heavy timber driven into the ground to support a superstructure; v., broach (a cask or tree) with a peg in order to draw off liquid.

June 11, 2025 Word-Wednesday Feature
soul
/sōl/ n., the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal; emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance; the essence or embodiment of a specified quality, from Middle English soule, from Old English sawol "spiritual and emotional part of a person, animate existence; life, living being," from Proto-Germanic saiwalō (source also of Old Saxon seola, Old Norse sala, Old Frisian sele, Middle Dutch siele, Dutch ziel, Old High German seula, German Seele, Gothic saiwala), a word of uncertain origin. It has been suspected to have meant originally "coming from or belonging to the sea," the supposed stopping place of the soul before birth or after death [Barnhart]; if so, it would be from Proto-Germanic saiwaz (see sea). Klein explains this as "from the lake," as a dwelling-place of souls in ancient northern Europe. The meaning "disembodied spirit of a deceased person" is attested in Old English. As a synonym for "person, individual, human being" (as in every living soul) it dates from early 14th century Soul-searching (n.) "deep self-reflection, examination of one's conscience" is attested from 1871, from the phrase used as a present-participle adjective (1610s). Distinguishing soul from spirit is a matter best left to theologians.

As an immaterial word in a material world, in its most comprehensive understanding soul can only truly resonate in the wide-open, exploratory world of the right hemisphere, and in the expressions of artists. The left hemisphere simply turns it into a sheep for the paternal clergy to enclose and shepherd. For tastes of these different temperaments, here are a few words about the soul spanning left to right. As with so many representations, our definitions shape our becomings.

SOUL, n. A spiritual entity concerning which there hath been brave disputation. Plato held that those souls which in a previous state of existence (antedating Athens) had obtained the clearest glimpses of eternal truth entered into the bodies of persons who became philosophers. Plato himself was a philosopher. The souls that had least contemplated divine truth animated the bodies of usurpers and despots. Dionysius I, who had threatened to decapitate the broad-browed philosopher, was a usurper and despot. Plato, doubtless, was not the first to construct a system of philosophy that could be quoted against his enemies; certainly he was not the last.

"Concerning the nature of the soul," saith the renowned author of Diversiones Sanctorum, "there hath been hardly more argument than that of its place in the body. Mine own belief is that the soul hath her seat in the abdomen—in which faith we may discern and interpret a truth hitherto unintelligible, namely that the glutton is of all men most devout. He is said in the Scripture to 'make a god of his belly'—why, then, should he not be pious, having ever his Deity with him to freshen his faith? Who so well as he can know the might and majesty that he shrines? Truly and soberly, the soul and the stomach are one Divine Entity; and such was the belief of Promasius, who nevertheless erred in denying it immortality. He had observed that its visible and material substance failed and decayed with the rest of the body after death, but of its immaterial essence he knew nothing. This is what we call the Appetite, and it survives the wreck and reek of mortality, to be rewarded or punished in another world, according to what it hath demanded in the flesh. The Appetite whose coarse clamoring was for the unwholesome viands of the general market and the public refectory shall be cast into eternal famine, whilst that which firmly though civilly insisted on ortolans, caviare, terrapin, anchovies, pâtés de foie gras and all such Christian comestibles shall flesh its spiritual tooth in the souls of them forever and ever, and wreak its divine thirst upon the immortal parts of the rarest and richest wines ever quaffed here below. Such is my religious faith, though I grieve to confess that neither His Holiness the Pope nor His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury (whom I equally and profoundly revere) will assent to its dissemination."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to an human soul.

Joseph Addison

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.

Josephine Hart

To me life means the growing of a soul. I do not know why this duty is imposed upon us. I merely know that it is, and I feel that we are given much latitude of free will.

Alice Foote MacDougall

The eyes are the windows of the soul.

Author Unknown

It needs no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

Max Beerbohm

To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium.

Eric Hoffer

My soul is a broken field
Ploughed by pain.

Sara Teasdale

The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer’s darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic.

Anaïs Nin

Every act alters the soul of the doer.

Oswald Spengler

In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

Samuel Ullman

The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul.

The Bible: Proverbs 13:19

The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence

The power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now.

G. K. Chesterton

We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master.

Florence Nightingale

Ecstasy, I think, is a soul’s response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.

Annie Dillard

The soul’s life has seasons of its own; periods not found in any calendar, time that years and months will not scan, but which are as deftly and sharply cut off from one another as the smoothly arranged years which the earth's motion yields us.

Olive Schreiner

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I want to save my soul, that timid wind.

Susan Sontag

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

Edward Abbey

All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability.

William Butler Yeats

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.

Vincent Van Gogh

The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.

Ferdinand Foch

It is not that we have a soul, we are a soul.

Amelia E. Barr

A Soul is partly given, partly wrought; remember always that you are the Maker of your own Soul.

Erica Jong

From A Year with Rilke, June 11 Entry
Earth, Isn’t This What You Want, from Ninth Duino Elegy

Earth, isn't this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there's nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation,
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,
I want it too. Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over—even one flower
is more than enough. Before I was named
I belonged to you. I see no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.

See, I live. On what?
Childhood and future are equally present.
Sheer abundance of being
floods my heart.

Angel
by Marc Chagall

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.







*footsteps.