Word-Wednesday for November 26, 2025

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for November 26, 2025, the twenty-fourth Wednesday of the year, the tenth Wednesday of fall, the fourth Wednesday of November, and the three-hundred thirtieth day of the year, with thirty-five days remaining. Brought to you by Bead Gypsy Studio, 101 Main Avenue North in downtown Roseau, celebrating 32 years of handcrafted jewelry, where you can celebrate Black Friday on November 28 AND on November 29 with in-store specials, AAAAAND enter to win a $32 Gift Certificate.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for November 26, 2025
Minnesota First Snows
Typical timeline

• Twin Cities: The first snowfall typically occurs around November 5th, based on the last decade's data.
• Statewide: It is not uncommon for snow to fall in October, with light snow even occurring around Halloween in the past.

Historic extremes

• Earliest measurable snow: September 14, 1964, in International Falls (0.3 inch).
• Earliest recorded snow (trace): August 31, 1949, in Duluth.
• Earliest first snowfall in Twin Cities (measurable): September 24, 1985, with 0.4 inches.
• Latest first snowfall in Twin Cities: December 3, 1928.
• July: July is the only month in which snow has never been recorded in Minnesota.

November 26 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


November 26 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily, occasionally.


Earth/Moon Almanac for November 26, 2025
Sunrise: 7:50am; Sunset: 4:33pm; 2minutes, 6 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 12:48pm; Moonset: 10:19pm, waxing crescent, 36% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for November 26, 2025
                Average            Record              Today
High             25                     48                     27
Low              10                    -27                     18

The Night Is Freezing Fast
by A.E. Housman

The night is freezing fast,

    To-morrow comes December;

        And winterfalls of old

Are with me from the past;

    And chiefly I remember

        How Dick would hate the cold.

 

Fall, winter, fall; for he,

    Prompt hand and headpiece clever,

        Has woven a winter robe,

And made of earth and sea

    His overcoat for ever,

        And wears the turning globe.

November 26 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Cake Day
• National Tie One On Day
• National Jukebox Day
• National Flossing Day
• National Sinkie Day

November 26 Word Pun

Sven complained of not being able to wake up in the morning until his doctor recommended sleeping in a herb garden.

Now he wakes up on thyme.


November 26 Word Riddle
What loses its head in the morning but gets it back at night?*


November 26 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
KEEP, v.t.,

    He willed away his whole estate,
    And then in death he fell asleep,
    Murmuring: "Well, at any rate,
    My name unblemished I shall keep."
    But when upon the tomb 'twas wrought
    Whose was it?—for the dead keep naught.
                —Durang Gophel Arn


November 26 Etymology Word of the Week
stomach
/ˈstəmək/ n., the internal organ in which the major part of the digestion of food occurs, being (in humans and many mammals) a pear-shaped enlargement of the alimentary canal linking the esophagus to the small intestine; v., consume (food or drink) without feeling or being sick, from late 14th century variant of earlier stomake, "the human stomach, internal pouch of the body into which food is digested," from Old French stomaque, estomac "stomach," from Latin stomachus "throat, gullet; stomach," also "taste, inclination, liking; distaste, dislike;" also "pride, indignation," which were thought to have their origin in that organ (source also of Spanish estómago, Italian stomaco), from Greek stomakhos "throat, gullet, esophagus," literally "mouth, opening," from stoma "mouth". The native word is maw (Old English maga glosses stomachus). Applied anciently to the openings of various internal organs, especially that of the stomach, then by the later Greek physicians to the stomach itself.

Some 16th century anatomists tried to correct the sense of the word back to "esophagus" and introduce ventricle for what we call the stomach. The meaning "belly, midriff, surface of the body over the stomach" is from circa 1400. In Middle English also stomack, stomac, stommak, stomoke; the spelling of the ending of the word was conformed to Latin regularly from 16th century, but the pronunciation remains as in Middle English. A 19th century attempt to make it look as it sounds yielded stummik (1888), stummock.

Related: Stomachal (1580s); stomachical (c. 1600); stomachic (1650s). Stomachous (1540s), stomachate (1540s, from Latin stomachatus) seem to have been used only in figurative senses. The classical figurative senses also were in Middle English, such as "relish, inclination, desire; courage, spirit; inmost thoughts, consciousness; temper, disposition" (mid-15th century) or early Modern English, when the stomach was regarded as the seat of thought and emotion as well as hunger. It also sometimes was regarded in Middle Ages as the seat of sexual desire.


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

• 1835 HMS Beagle leaves Tahiti for New Zealand.
• 1847 Alfred de Mussets Un Caprice premieres.
• 1859 Last weekly installment of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities is published.
• 1865 Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is published.
• 1921 Danish composer Rued Langgaard's Music of the Spheres (Sfærernes Musik) premieres.
• 2023 Booker literary Prize won by Irish writer Paul Lynch for his novel Prophet Song.

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

• 1640 Carl Rosier, Dutch baroque composer.
• 1653 Andreas Anton Schmelzer, Austrian composer.
• 1663 Pedro de Peralta y Barnuevo, Peruvian poet.
• 1703 Theophilus Cibber, English writer.
• 1731 William Cowper, English pre-romantic poet.
• 1744 Karl Siegmund von Seckendorff, German composer.
• 1754 Georg Forster, German writer.
• 1795 Carl Philipp Fohr, German painter and cartoonist.
• 1809 Marià Obiols, Catalan composer.
• 1818 Louis Lacombe, French pianist and composer.
• 1823 Thomas Tellefsen, Norwegian pianist and composer.
• 1862 Ondřej Přikryl, Czech writer.
• 1864 Herman Gorter, Dutch poet.
• 1865 Earl Ross Drake, American violinist and composer.
• 1874 Edmond Fleg[enheimer], Swiss-French author.
• 1876 Bart van der Leck, Dutch painter.
• 1876 Bart van der Leck, Dutch painter.
• 1888 Franz Jung, German writer.
• 1889 Albert Dieudonné, French actor novelist.
• 1906 Sandro Fuga, Italian composer.
• 1908 Philipp Mohler, German composer.
• 1909 Eugine Ionesco, Romanian-French playwright.
• 1915 Earl Wild, American composer.
• 1916 Mareo Ishiketa, Japanese composer.
• 1919 Frederik Pohl, American science fiction author.
• 1920 István Sárközy, Hungarian composer.
• 1920 Paul Rodenko, Dutch poet.
• 1921 Françoise Gilot, French painter, designer, and author.
• 1921 František Listopad, Czech writer.
• 1922 Charles M. Schulz, American cartoonist.
• 1924 George Segal, American painter and sculptor.
• 1924 Irwin Hoffman, American conductor.
• 1925 Ciarán Mac Mathúna, Irish musicologist.
• 1926 Mauro Bortolotti, Italian composer.
• 1929 Slavko Avsenik, Slovenian polka and Oberkrain ethnic accordionist, piano player, and composer.
• 1931 Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Argentine painter.
• 1932 Alan Stout, American composer.
• 1943 Marilynne Robinson, American writer.
• 1946 Angus Suttie, English potter.
• 1954 Roz Chast, American cartoonist.
• 1955 Tracy Hickman, American science fiction author.
• 1956 Nico Slothouwer, Dutch poet.
• 1969 Kara Walker, American artist.

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

• amplivagant: /am-PLIH-va-gant/ adj., wide-ranging; extensive.
• botel: /boh-TEL/ n., a ship or boat which functions as a hotel, sometimes being permanently moored on the waterfront.
• coverture: /KəV-ər-CHər/ n., protective or concealing covering; the legal status of a married woman, considered to be under her husband's protection and authority.
• eutrophy: /yü-TRŌ-fik/ adj., characterized by the state resulting from healthy, adequate nutrition.
• fascine: /fəˈsēn/ n., a bundle of rods, sticks, or plastic pipes bound together, used in construction or military operations for filling in marshy ground or other obstacles and for strengthening the sides of embankments, ditches, or trenches.
• gloze: /ɡlōz/ v., make excuses for; use ingratiating or fawning language.
• heroarchy: /HEER-oh-ar-kee/ n., rule or government by people who are widely admired, either for their abilities or on account of their social status.
• mouflon: /ˈmo͞oflän/ n., a small wild sheep with chestnut-brown wool, found in mountainous country from Iran to Asia Minor. It is the ancestor of the domestic sheep.
• sutler: /ˈsətlər/ n., a person who followed an army and sold provisions to the soldiers.
• swedge: /swej/ v., to leave without paying one’s bill.

November 26, 2025 Word-Wednesday Feature
Parts and Wholes
All the way up, and all the way down, we organize our thoughts and words about the universe with synthesis and integration. Teaching the Periodic Table of the Elements starts with protons, neutrons, and electrons, joining in various combinations to comprise unique elemental atoms that cannot exist without joining another atom, which then use their properties to conjoin into the molecules that make up every organic and inorganic substance in the universe. On one end, the smallest parts are unimaginably small, and the other end, the largest wholes are unimaginably large - and themselves merely parts of larger wholes we haven't yet learned to see. All along the way, we invent new words to represent these ideas to one another.

Kevin Kelly, a really smart IT humanist recently began a project to understand cognition based on the following understanding:

...the smartest people today, especially all the geniuses creating artificial intelligence, have theories about what intelligence is, and I believe all of them (me too) will be profoundly wrong. We don’t know what artificial intelligence is in large part because we don’t know what our own intelligence is. And this ignorance will later be seen as an impediment to the rate of progress in AI.

A major part of our ignorance stems from our confusion about the general category of either electricity or intelligence. We tend to view both electricity and intelligence as coherent elemental forces along a single dimension: you either have more of it or less. But in fact, electricity turned out to be so complicated, so complex, so full of counterintuitive effects that even today it is still hard to grasp how it works. It has particles and waves, and fields and flows, composed of things that are not really there. Our employment of electricity exceeds our understanding of it. Understanding electricity was essential to understanding matter. It wasn’t until we learned to control electricity that we were able to split water — which had been considered an element — into its actual elements; that enlightened us that water was not a foundational element, but a derivative compound made up of sub elements.

It is very probable we will discover that intelligence is likewise not a foundational singular element, but a derivative compound composed of multiple cognitive elements, combined in a complex system unique to each species of mind. The result that we call intelligence emerges from many different cognitive primitives such as long-term memory, spatial awareness, logical deduction, advance planning, pattern perception, and so on. There may be dozens of them, or hundreds. We currently don’t have any idea of what these elements are. We lack a periodic table of cognition.

So with the help of a large language model, he started to develop one, that looks like this:

Kelly's goal is more than just understanding cognition; he wants to replicate it, too. The colors of the Periodic Table of Cognition show how much progress IT large language model programmers have made on each element, where red indicates that programmers can synthesize that element in a robust way; orange means that programmers can "kind of" make it work with the right scaffolding; and  yellow reflects promising research without operational generality - yet. Interestingly, perception is well understood and stands in the most active, lightest, nimblest place on the table, and Theory of Mind (social reasoning), sits in the weightiest position. This seems right, if only based on the ways that social media algorithms have turned humanity into two pools of elemental particles charged either positively or negatively, depending on one's point of view. Seems like a good time to enhance our SKL (Skill Discovery) element, ASAP.


From A Year with Rilke, November 26 Entry
Enter Death, from New Prams

When you died, there broke across the stage,
through the gash your leaving made,
a shaft of reality: green of real green,
real sunlight, real trees.

Still we keep acting: fearful and solemn,
reciting our script, taking on gestures.
But you, who have been withdrawn from us,
subtracted from our very being,

now and again you overcome us,
showing us the reality we glimpsed,
so that for a while, jolted back, we are life
with no thought of applause.

Orpheus and Eurydice
by Auguste Rodin

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.






*Sven’s pillow.