Word-Wednesday for August 5, 2026

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for August 5, 2026, the thirty-first Wednesday of the year, the seventh Wednesday of summer, the first Wednesday of August, and the two-hundred seventeenth day of the year, with one-hundred forty-eight days remaining.


Wannaska Phenology Update for August 5, 2026
Wild Red Raspberry
Rubus idaeus—miskominin in Anishinaabe—is now ready for picking throughout Wannaskaland. Red raspberry is ubiquitous throughout much of Minnesota and frequently found along roadsides and hiking trails. Its fruits are readily and widely decimated by both birds and mammals, resulting in widespread seed dispersal. It establishes quickly from seed, after which vigorous and aggressive rhizomes often create dense colonies.

In Anishinaabe tradition, miskomin means "blood berry", carrying teachings of resilience, gentleness, and women's health. The Raspberry Moon, Miskomini Giizis, rises in mid-summer when berries ripen, and this moon teaches that softness and strength live together. Just as sweet berries grow among sharp thorns, the raspberry plant reminds people to move through life's challenges with kindness and wisdom while keeping healthy boundaries. Raspberry leaf tea is traditionally prepared by knowledge keepers and women to support reproductive health, ease menstrual cramps, and tone the body during pregnancy and childbirth.

August 5 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


August 5 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Still closed until further notice.


Earth/Moon Almanac for August 5, 2026
Sunrise: 6:03am; Sunset: 8:57pm; 2 minutes, 57 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 11:23pm; Moonset: 2:22pm, last quarter, 55% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for August 5, 2026
                Average            Record              Today
High             79                     95                     78
Low              56                     35                     56

At the Edge of a Time Zone
by Jane Hoogestraat

Not the midnight sun exactly, or endless summer,
just that extra hour holding steady, western
horizon stable, as though shadows won’t lengthen
when in August you can outrun the night
or feel as though you do, latitude in your favor,

North of Sioux City, the sky widens into South Dakota,
turn west and you will think you could see all the way
to Wyoming, and if you drive long enough you will,
crossing the Missouri River, the bluffs gentle,
then the grasslands, the turnoffs for reservations.

As dusk approaches, you may pass a stone house,
long deserted, a star carved over the door, a small pond,
wind stirring over it even now, forming a second thought,
a space you will carry within your speech,
your soul stirred by these great expanses.

August 5 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Work Like a Dog Day
• National Underwear Day
• National Palmville Township Boycott and Girlcott of National Underwear Day
• National Oyster Day

August 5 Word Pun
Sven tried to organize a hide and seek tournament for Ozaawaa’s visit to the middle of nowhere, but good players are really hard to find.


August 5 Word Riddle
What did the surgeon say to patients who insist on closing up their own incision?*


August 5 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
PLATTER, n., A senseless thing that holds food without eating it.

    She uttered her mind, without ceasing:
    And this is the thought that it carried.
    "I fear that your love is decreasing.
    How is it, dear, now that we're married?"

    Replied that aciduous sinner,
    Fatigued of her reasonless chatter:
    "When a fellow has eaten his dinner
    He doesn't make love to the platter"
                        —Belijah H. Bimbee


August 5 Etymology Word of the Week
tomato
/tə-MA-tō/ n., a glossy red, or occasionally yellow, pulpy edible fruit that is eaten as a vegetable or in salad, from 1753, "glossy, fleshy fruit of a garden vegetable native to South America," earlier tomate (circa 1600), from Spanish tomate (mid-16th century) from Nahuatl (Aztecan) tomatl "a tomato," said to mean literally "the swelling fruit," from tomana "to swell." Spelling probably influenced by potato (1565).

A member of the nightshade family, all of which contain poisonous alkaloids. Introduced in Europe from the New World, by 1550 they were consumed in Italy but in England they were grown only as ornamental plants and the fruits were not eaten there or in the U.S. The Chambers's Cyclopedia supplement of 1753 describes it as "a fruit eaten either stewed or raw by the Spaniards and Italians and by the Jew families of England." Introduced in U.S. 1789 as part of a program by then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, but not commonly eaten there until after circa 1830.

The older English name for it, and the usual one before mid-18th century, was love-apple (quod vide). Tomato sauce "preparation made from tomatoes and used in dressing meat, etc." is by 1806. Tomato paste is attested by 1938, tomato juice is attested by 1844; its popularity dates from circa 1930 when it began to be touted as a healthy food. Tomato soup (spelled tomata) is by 1811.

The slang sense of "attractive woman" is by 1922, perhaps on the notion of juicy plumpness, though it may be from the shape (slang tomato, "buttocks" is attested by 1931).

August 5 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1884 Cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty is laid on Bedloe's Island, New York City.
• 1914 First electric traffic light installed in the US at the intersection of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.
• 1924 Little Orphan Annie comic strip by Harold Gray is first published.
• 1957 Comic strip Andy Capp makes its debut.
• 2024 British graffiti artist Banksy begins a series of animal artworks around London with a goat near Kew Bridge.

August 5 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1397 Guillaume Dufay, Franco-Flemish Renaissance composer.
• 1607 Philipp Friedrich Boddecker, German composer.
• 1623 Antonio Cesti, Italian composer, singer and musician.
• 1647 Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, French scholar, classicist, and the first woman to translate Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
• 1694 Leonardo Leo, Italian composer.
• 1796 Michael Banim, Irish writer.
• 1797 Friedrich August Kummer, German composer and musician.
• 1811 Ambroise Thomas, French opera composer.
• 1813 Ivar Aasen, Norwegian linguist and poet.
• 1822 Johann Georg Herzog, German composer and organist.
• 1828 Giovanni Rossi, Italian composer.
• 1829 Heinrich Stiehl, German organist and composer.
• 1843 James Scott Skinner, Scottish composer and dancing master.
• 1844 Ilya Repin, Russian painter and sculptor.
• 1850 Guy de Maupassant, French author.
• 1864 Resurreccion Maria de Azkue, Basque priest, composer.
• 1866 Alfred Holy, Portuguese composer and harpist.
• 1868 Oskar Merikanto [Ala-Kanto], Finnish pianist, organist, and composer.
• 1877 Tom Thomson, Canadian painter.
• 1880 Gertrude E Durden Rush, American composer, and playwright.
• 1880 Ruth Sawyer, American author.
• 1882 Joe English, Irish draftsman, painter.
• 1882 Anne Acheson, Irish sculptor.
• 1886 Óscar Esplá Spanish composer.
• 1887 Nat Ayer, American pianist, singer, and songwriter.
• 1889 Conrad Aiken, American Pulitzer poet and writer.
• 1890 Hans Gál, Austrian-British composer.
• 1890 Naum Gabo [Pevsner], Russian-American sculptor.
• 1900 Bodi Rapp [Johanna Goetmakers], Dutch mezzo-soprano.
• 1901 Juan Carlos Paz, Argentine composer.
• 1901 Juan Carlos Paz, Argentine composer.
• 1906 Francis Walder [Francois Waldburger], Belgian author.
• 1906 John Huston, American writer.
• 1908 Jose Garcia Villa, Filipino short story writer and poet.
• 1909 Ernestine "Tiny" Davis, American jazz vocalist and trumpeter.
• 1910 Jacquetta Hawkes, English archaeologist, author.
• 1910 [Johan] Erik Lindegren, Swedish poet/librettist.
• 1914 Anita Colby, American author.
• 1914 Stjepan Sulek, Croatian violinist and composer.
• 1916 Peter Viereck, American poet.
• 1918 Betty Oliphant, British-Canadian ballerina.
• 1926 Betsy Jolas, French-American composer.
• 1927 Gunnar Bucht, Swedish composer.
• 1931 Alec Reid, Irish priest and peace broker.
• 1932 Mary Vincent Otto, American nun and author.
• 1932 Tera de Marez Oyens, Dutch composer.
• 1934 Wendell Berry, American poet, writer and farmer.
• 1936 Nikolai Baturin, Estonian author and playwright.
• 1946 Ron Silliman, American poet.
• 1947 Greg Leskiw, Canadian guitarist.
• 1954 Paddy Glackin, Irish musician.

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

• abhainn: /OW-in/ n., IRISH, a river.
• epopteia: /eh-pop-TYE-uh/ n., the highest stage of spiritual initiation or enlightenment, especially in the ancient Greek mystery religions.
• friluftsliv: /frē-LOOFTS-liv/ n., NORWEGIAN, open air living.
• hoggaster: /HAW-guh-stuhr/ n., a sheep in its second year; a yearling sheep.
• jurmummle: /juhr-MUM-uhl/ n., a confusion or jumble; a commotion.
• Melungeon: /muh-LUHN-jn/ proper noun, a historically marginalized group of mixed-race ancestry—primarily of Sub-Saharan African and Northern European descent—who settled in the isolated Appalachian regions of Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
• oikonisus: /oy-koh-NYE-sus/ n., the urge or desire to start a family.
• pobaireachd: /PEE-brok/ n., the classical music of the Great Highland Bagpipe.
• roitelet: /RAH-tuh-lay/ n., a little or petty king; a royalet.
• saveloy: /SAV-uh-loy/ n., a highly seasoned, processed pork sausage.

August 5, 2026 Word-Wednesday Feature
emoji
/i-MŌ-jē/ n., a small digital image or icon used to express an idea, emotion, or word, from pictorial character, by 2008, from Japanese e "picture" + moji "character" (compare kanji), coined 1999 in Japanese by Shigetaka Kurita, NTT DoCoMo. Its adoption in English was driven by Apple iPhone's inclusion of the feature in 2008. The similarity to native emoticon [/ə-MŌ-də-kän/ n., a representation of a facial expression such as :-) (representing a smile), formed by various combinations of keyboard characters and used to convey the writer's feelings or intended tone] is a happy 😊 coincidence. One might expect Word-Wednesday to eschew emoji use, but language is language, and language is ever-evolving. Word-Wednesday endeavors to explore all aspects of the written word, and emoji use is on the upswing.

The study of emojis is called curiology: /kyoor-ee-OL-uh-jee/ n., the representation of things or sounds by means of their pictures instead of by symbols or words, as in hieroglyphics or a rebus, from a Greek word kyriologia, meaning "obvious language". The go-to web site for all things curiological is emojipedia. Devices now come with an emoji keyboard — a mix of representational objects, but also many metaphorical, symbolic representations of concept as well. Emojis and emoticons all fall under the larger umbrella of semiotics: /se-mē-ÄD-iks/ n., the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation, involving a LOT of linguistics. There’s a lot of design thinking by the powers-that-be—The Unicode Consortium, aka, Unicode, which defines international digital standard for every text character in the world. About thirty years ago, the world had no common way to digitally represent a document from one language to another. Thankfully, every major group of national/cultural people on this planet includes nerds that are into text and internationalization; they banded together and came up with the Unicode standard for text. When emoji first became common, Unicode incorporated into emojis into the text standard, because just like text/numeric fonts and sizes, emojis are built from code into a code point: a sequence of letters and numbers that renders any text object or emoji object. For example the code point for the letter capital A is U+0041, and the code point for lowercase A is 0061, where every language text letter or number has a unique code point, as does each emoji. In all languages and on all devices, the code point for the skull emoji 💀 is 1F480. Every year, the Unicode Technical Committee publishes and specifies the rules, the algorithms, and all the properties necessary to achieve interoperability between different platforms and languages.

Let's all just remember that cave paintings and the Egyptian hieroglyphics were some of the first major alternatives to the alphabetical representation of language (thank you, Rosetta Stone). One of the advantages of emojis is that they more often than not represent a user's feelings. Many facile users of emojis have adopted the Egyptian practice of stringing images together to express those feelings, called portmanteau-jis. To describe a dentist, users commonly use the portmanteau-ji 🦷👨‍⚕️; to describe the current administration, users increasingly use the portmanteau-ji 💩⛈️. Users can even creatively express their ideas by combining two or more common emojis into a single "original" emoji at Emoji Kitchen.


From A Year with Rilke, August 5 Entry
May What I Do Flow From Me, from The Book of Hours I, 12

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing it and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

Nude Woman Standing in the Sea
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.






*Suture self.