For the ancient Romans and some other European cultures, the owl represented wisdom and protection from evil spirits.  In Japan, they are thought to ward off famine and in central Asia, owl feathers are thought to protect children and livestock from evil.  However, in Russian and Slavic traditions, owls are believed to be the harbinger of death and most African and Indian cultures have taboos against owls.  Indigenous tribes in North America vary in their beliefs.  Some view owls as positive totems while others share in the belief of owls as bad luck and thieves of newly departed spirits.  Many traditions are rooted in the physical characteristics and habits of these animals.  Most owls are nocturnal and have great ability to see in very low light.  This was a wonderment in ancient times.  Before electricity, many cultures were very fearful about darkness and spirits.  They believed that any animal that could live and navigate at night surely must be evil.  Others thought that owls had abilities see past the blanket of dark magic, thus making them good and wise.  In truth, owls do have amazing night vision.  The one drawback to such huge eyes is that there is no room in the skull for them to move, so bony plates surround them.  That’s why an owl has to be able to turn its head so far--it cannot move its eyes!  Kim Calcagno  http://kidoinfo.com/the-wise-old-owl-fact-versus-fiction-whoo-knows-the-truth/

"A Wise Old Owl" is an English language nursery rhyme.  It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 7734 and in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, 2nd Ed. of 1997, as number 394.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wise_Old_Owl

For thousands of years, from Ancient Greek legend to modern literature and TV, humans have portrayed owls as sage and wise.  The wise owl appears in everything from The Iliad to Winnie the Pooh.  But, it turns out, though they’re excellent hunters, owls probably aren’t any smarter than a lot of other birds.  In fact, they may be significantly worse at problem solving than other big-brained birds like crows and parrots.  One study found that great grey owls repeatedly failed a simple cognitive test—pulling a string to get a treat—that had been successfully solved by several other bird species.  While many cultures feature owls in their mythology, not all societies see owls as wise.  In India, for instance, owls are associated with ill-gained wealth and foolishness rather than wisdom.  The pervasive myth of the wise owl, meanwhile, likely originated with legends of the Ancient Greek goddess Athena.  The goddess of wisdom, Athena was often portrayed in art holding an owl, or described in literary works as “owl-eyed” or even “owl-faced.”  Anna Green  http://mentalfloss.com/article/69941/are-owls-actually-wise

glossology   noun  The science of language; linguistics.  (botany) The naming of parts of plants.

(chiefly lexicography)  The definition and explanation of terms in constructing a glossary. 

(medicine)  The diagnosis of disease by examination of the tongue.  Wiktionary

Per aspera ad astra (or, less commonly, ad astra per aspera) is a popular Latin phrase meaning "through hardships to the stars".  The phrase is one of the many Latin sayings that use the expression ad astra, meaning "to the stars".  See uses in music, literature, government and institutions at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_aspera_ad_astra

The new 429-page tax proposal has mentioned exactly one person by name--NBA star Stephen Curry, and he isn't exactly sure why.  The quote in question is used to clarify some tax speak:  "The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act includes specific safeguards to prevent tax avoidance and help ensure taxpayers of all income levels play by the rules under this new fairer, simpler tax system.  Our legislation will ensure this much-needed tax relief goes to the local job creators it's designed to help by distinguishing between the individual wage income of NBA All-Star Stephen Curry and the pass-through business income of Steve's Bike Shop."  The great thing about this passage is that it's written in a way that implies it will only be creating a distinction between Curry and "Steve."  Kevin Skiver  https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/warriors-stephen-curry-gets-mentioned-in-republican-tax-proposal-has-no-idea-why/

When asked how she became a custodian of the lore and traditions of childhood, Iona Opie, who died aged 94 on October 23, 2017, told a bedtime story.  The publishing company that employed her husband, Peter, was exiled by the London blitz to Bedfordshire in 1943, and there the couple walked by a field of corn.  Iona, who was pregnant, picked up a bug and recited “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home / Your house is on fire and your children all gone.”  It flew and they were “left wondering about this rhyme–what did it mean?  Where did it come from?  Who wrote it?”  No index in the public library could direct them, so from scratch they started researching nursery rhymes.  Iona claimed the rhymes were uniquely British:  “All part of being frightfully tough and not minding the weather; we’re nourished with nonsense and it does us a lot of good”.  The Opies collected, codified and published that nonsense.  Iona had learned to study while young, as a silent child who read locked in a loo in the family house in Colchester, Essex.  During the second world war, she made meteorological maps in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.  Off duty, she read I Want To Be a Success, a popular 1939 publication written by, and very much about, an old Etonian, Peter Opie, another peruser of reference books.  She sent him a letter; the correspondence became a romance, an elopement, and in 1943 a marriage. Since they had no academic background, the Opies did not know they lacked proper qualifications, or how to publish within academic conventions; the keeper of western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, discovered them collecting riddles, and recommended them to the Oxford University Press.  The couple’s inquiries were exhaustive and exhausting.  Peter did the writing; Iona, whom he called “old mother shuffle paper”, did the research.  They worked three shifts daily in separate rooms, communicating by note in work hours–no social life, no money, picking nettles in the park to eat in lieu of greens.  Their first publication was I Saw Esau (1947), a slim precursor of the wide spines of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951) and The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book (1955).  “It took 50 generations to make up Mother Goose,” Iona said.  “Nursery rhymes are the smallest great poems of the world’s literature.”  The Opies wanted to do fieldwork among the juvenile tribes of Britain, about whom anthropologists knew nothing; they ignored claims that traditions were dead and recruited helpers to question children in 70 schools.  The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) revealed a complex, secret society with its “own code of oral legislation for testing, betting, swapping, keeping secrets”.  Tail Feathers From Mother Goose (1988) and Here Comes Mother Goose (1999) were meant to transmit tradition to children who no longer learned it from peers or grandmas. Iona overcame a fear that printing would dispel the spell:  “The world of childhood is too independent, too large, and too vital to be affected by any book.”  Iona changed direction temporarily with A Dictionary of Superstitions (1989), but never lost faith with children:  “I have a way of life that comes from the children, I’m going to go on playing until I expire.”  The encyclopedic by-product of this vow was Children’s Games With Things (1997).  Veronica Horwell  Read more at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/25/iona-opie-obituary

The American composer Florence Price wrote three symphonies in all.  Her first symphony was premiered by The Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933, and marked the first time a composition by an African-American woman was played by a major American orchestra.  Her third symphony, commissioned by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Music Project shortly thereafter, was premiered on November 6, 1940 by the Detroit Civic Orchestra.  The score for her second symphony is lost.  Florence Price was born in 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of three children in a mixed-race family.  Her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence's early musical training.  At age 14, she had graduated from high school at the top of her class and enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music, where she pretended to be Mexican to avoid the Ivy League racial prejudice of that time.  After teaching in the South, Price moved to Chicago in 1927, where she won some composition prizes and became acquainted with the writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both prominent figures in the African-American arts scene, and who both helped promote her music.  Price died in 1953, and for a while her music was all but forgotten.  Early 21st century performances and recordings of her works have helped revive interest in her life and career.  Composers Datebook

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1794  November 6, 2017  On this date in 1528, shipwrecked Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became the first known European to set foot in the area that would become Texas.  On this date in 1856,  Scenes of Clerical Life, the first work of fiction by the author later known as George Eliot, was submitted for publication.