A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Hamlet  (HAM-lit)  noun  1.  An apprehensive, indecisive person.  2.  A small village.

For 1:  After Hamlet, the prince of Denmark in Shakespeare's play Hamlet.  The opening of Hamlet's soliloquy "To be, or not to be" is among the best-known lines in literature.  Earliest documented use:  1903.  For 2:  From Old French hamelet, diminutive of hamel (village), which itself is a diminutive of ham (village).  Ultimately from the Indo-European root tkei- (to settle or dwell), which also gave us home, haunt, hangar, and site.  Earliest documented use:  1330.  The idiom "Hamlet without the Prince" is used to refer to an event or a performance taking place without its main character.

Polonian  (po-LO-nee-uhn) adjective  1.  Abounding in aphoristic expressions.  2 . A native or inhabitant of Poland.  For 1:  After Polonius, a courtier and the father of Ophelia in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, known for his moralistic aphorisms.  Earliest documented use: 1847.  For 2:  From Latin Polonia (Poland).  Earliest documented use:  1533.  Some of Shakespeare's best-known quotations come out of Polonius's mouth.  As his son Laertes heads for France, Polonius advises:  "Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend."  "This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man."  At another time, he says:  "Brevity is the soul of wit."  As happens with quotations, some of his words have become simplified and sharpened with time, such as from the original "For the apparel oft proclaims the man." to "Clothes make the man."

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From:  Joel Mabus  Subject:  hamlet  As today's word, hamlet, can mean both "village" and "an indecisive person", it leads me to observe:  It takes a Hamlet to raise a question.  

From:  F.J. Bergmann  Subject:  hamlet  The Vampire of the Village, one of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown detective stories, turns upon the dual meanings of Hamlet and hamlet.

From:  Laura Burns  Subject:  hamlet  The play Hamlet is Gamlet in Russian.  In Vladimir Nabakov's Ada, the narrator speaks of going through "Gamlet, a half-Russian village".

Cherry Republic, a company selling cherry products and cherry gifts, is headquartered in Glen Arbor, Michigan.

One Percent Off The Top  Each year, we donate 1% of our sales and give it to causes that we believe will have a positive influence in our region.  

Plus One  When someone comes into one of our stores we charge them a refundable 1% tariff on their purchase.  This tariff was enacted by the Cherry Republic legislature in 2002.  The typical tariff amount on each purchase is 25 cents.  This money is set aside and donated to agricultural programs in northern Michigan.  Primary focus is on preserving our farmland forever and strengthening the new small farm economy in northern Michigan

ISLAND Involvement  ISLAND is a non-profit arts and ecology center dedicated to connecting people with nature, art and community.  As part of that work, ISLAND is developing a slate of programs designed to double the value and increase the resilience of local agriculture by 2019.  Cherry Republic's support has been essential in making that happen.  Here are some specifics on three programs Cherry Republic has supported: The CRAFT Program (Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training) offers farm interns and beginning farmers a chance to tour area farms, learn a wide variety of management styles and farming techniques, and build the relationships that will support them as they embark on a farming career.  The Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference -- ISLAND is a planning partner for this annual conference held in Grayling.  We are specifically responsible for the new Homesteading Track designed to teach new skills to backyard growers and micro-farmers.  Skill Swaps - ISLAND hosts a series of skill building workshops for farmers, homesteaders and other folks throughout the year, with topics like cheese making, permaculture, green building, beekeeping and hand tool use.  https://www.cherryrepublic.com/about

LATIN ROOTS

centrum (center)=eccentric, concentric, concentrate

centum (hundred, tenth, ten)=percent, centimeter, centurion

civis, civilis (citizen, community)=civic, city, civility

Find Latin roots and prefixes, definitions and examples at http://www.empire.net/~merlin/latin.html

Amazon and Hachette took their cases to the public on May 28, 2014 as a dispute over contract terms became clashing visions about the distribution of information in the digital age.   “Amazon indicates that it considers books to be like any other consumer good,” Hachette said in a statement.  “They are not.”  There are many considerations here besides money, the publisher said, noting that authors are engaging “in a complex and difficult mission to communicate with readers.”  It added, “In addition to royalties, they are concerned with audience, career, culture, education, art, entertainment and connection.”  The only thing the publisher and the retailer agree on is that there is no deal in sight, and 5,000 Hachette books are caught in the middle.  Amazon said that if customers ordered them, it would ship them — eventually.  “We are not optimistic that this will be resolved soon,” Amazon said in its statement.  Hachette said any resolution would have to “value appropriately” the publisher’s role in editing, marketing and distributing books.  In Amazon’s mission to remove all barriers between readers and writers, the biggest obstacle is the New York publishers, which for the most part still publish the writers whom people want to read.  But Amazon controls the Kindle e-reader platform and sees no reason a publisher like Hachette should receive so much of the revenue from a digital book.  That was where the negotiations failed.   “This situation is rife with antitrust risk” for Amazon, said William MacLeod, chairman of the antitrust and competition practice group at the Washington firm Kelley Drye.  “Under U.S. law, even a monopolist can refuse to deal or can charge what the market will bear," said Mr. MacLeod, the former director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.  “But if the activity has the potential to create or entrench market power, a company’s exclusionary conduct or imposition of onerous terms could indeed run afoul of the law.”  Amazon declined to comment on May 28 on antitrust topics.  While it issued its statement defending itself, it also tried to take a nothing-to-see-here approach.  “This business interruption affects a small percentage of Amazon’s demand-weighted units,” it pointed out. (Demand-weighted means the things that people are actually buying.)  If customers really wanted any of those 5,000 Hachette books immediately, Amazon said, they could go “to one of our competitors.”  It was an extraordinary declaration from a company that has striven to be the “everything” store, merchandising an ever-increasing pile of goods in ever-increasing ways.  The retailer has had great success in reworking the publishing industry, partly because it has focused so relentlessly on customers that they always knew they were getting a better deal.   Thanks to Wall Street’s unwavering support, Amazon could afford to sell books for what it paid for them — something no physical bookseller could do.  It also paid higher royalty rates on e-books it published itself than the traditional publishers did on their e-books.  All those editors and other legacy overhead needed their cut.  But even those who believed Amazon was ushering in a utopia of publishing were jolted a few months ago when it abruptly chopped the royalty rates on self-published audiobooks.  David Streitfeld  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/amazon-hachette-book-publisher-dispute.html?_r=0

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1158  June 6, 2014  On this date in 1944, in World War II,  the Battle of Normandy began.  D-Day, code named Operation Overlord, commenced with the landing of 155,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in France. The allied soldiers  pushed inland in the largest amphibious military operation in history. Find suggested books, including D-Day:  The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor at http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/258767-books-on-d-day-overlord 

 On this date in 1946, the National Basketball Association was created, with eleven teams.