Butterfingers  Charles Dickens used the term in his 1836 The Pickwick Papers (more properly called The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club):  "At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations as 'Ah, ah!—stupid'—'Now, butter-fingers'—'Muff'— 'Humbug'—and so forth."  Pedestrian   No one had an English word for someone who goes about on foot until 1791, when William Wordsworth coined the noun.  Robot   Coinage of Czech writer Karel Čapek's in his 1921 work R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).  Čapek took the Czech term for "serf labor" and adopted it to the animatrons that we think of today.  Asimov invented the words robotic and robotics after Čapek, in 1941.  Paul Dickson 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/17/authors-invented-words-used-every-day-cojones-meme-nerd

PARAPHRASE  In Manhattan, the East Side is the West-Sider's idea of assisted living, where everything can be ordered by phone and delivered.  The Heirs, a novel by Susan Rieger 

Susan Rieger is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Columbia Law School.  From 1992 to 2002, she was Dean of Ezra Stiles at Yale University (1992-2004) where she was also a Lecturer in the English and Women’s Studies Departments.  From 2002-2013, she was Associate Provost at Columbia University.  Earlier, she taught at Brooklyn Law School and the Five Colleges in Western Massachusetts.  http://ragdale.org/residency/resident/susan-rieger/

synecdoche  noun  a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (such as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (such as society for high society), the species for the genus (such as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (such as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (such as boards for stage)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/synecdoche  Pronunciation:  [si-nek-duh-kee] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/synecdoche

Serve potato pancakes with toppers like creme fraiche, trout roe, smoked trout, and lingonberry jam.  Find recipe for Classic Latkes and link to recipes that substitute Brussels sprouts or beets or carrots for half of the potatoes at https://www.marthastewart.com/1523047/classic-latkes

In the fall of 2017, the Nature Conservancy planted nearly 18,000 trees and shrubs in New York City.  Elsewhere, TNC and the Trust for Public Land began planting more than 1,000 trees in Boston, Atlanta, Denver and Dallas.  TNC reports that urban trees could save cities $25 million each year in lost work and health care costs associated with poor air quality.  Trees trap pollutants that people would otherwise breathe.  Nature Conservancy magazine  Winter 2017

Stationary and stationery are just one letter off, but that seemingly small difference changes the meaning of these words entirely.  These two terms share the Latin root statiōnārius, which derives from the word station meaning “a standing place.”  Stationary with an a is the older of these two terms, and it means “fixed in one place and not moving,” like a stationary bicycle at the gym.  Stationery with an e stems from the term stationer, which refers to “a person who sells the materials used in writing, such as paper, pens, pencils, and ink.”  Though now archaic, stationer also used to refer to to a bookseller or publisher.  Stationery eventually came to mean the things a stationer sold.  How do you remember the difference?  One way is to remember that a stands for adjective.  So when you see stationary with an a, you’ll know that it is an adjective and as such it must describe something or someone.  Stationery is a noun.  Another mnemonic to help you is:  let the a near the end of stationary remind you of “at rest” and the e near the end of stationery stand for “envelope.”  http://www.dictionary.com/e/stationary-vs-stationery/

Bannock is a variety of flat quick bread or any large, round article baked or cooked from grain.  When a round bannock is cut into wedges, the wedges are often called scones.  However, in Scotland the words bannock and scone are often used interchangeably  "Bannock" is a Northern English and Scottish word of Celtic origin.  The Oxford English Dictionary states the term stems from panicium, a Latin word for "baked dough", or from panis, meaning bread.  It was first referred to as "bannuc" in early glosses to the 8th century author Aldhelm (d. 709), and its first cited definition in 1562.  Its historic use was primarily in Ireland, Scotland and Northern England.  The Scottish poet Robert Burns mentions bannock in his Epistle to James Tennant of Glenconner, in reference to Alexander Tennant.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannock_(food)  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannock

Bannock recipes  https://www.curiouscuisiniere.com/bannock-bread/  and http://50campfires.com/bannock-the-original-camping-bread-unusual-but-delicious-camping-foods/ and https://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/wild-chef/2014/04/recipe-making-bannock-bread-camp

Staatliches Bauhaus, commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicised and taught.  The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar.  The German term Bauhaus—literally "construction house"—was understood as meaning "School of Building", but in spite of its name and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during its first years of existence.  Nonetheless, it was founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together.  The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, Modernist architecture and art, design and architectural education.  The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.  The school existed in three German cities:  Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933, under three different architect-directors:  Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime, having been painted as a centre of communist intellectualism.  Although the school was closed, the staff continued to spread its idealistic precepts as they left Germany and emigrated all over the world.  The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Israel in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled, or were exiled by, the Nazi regime. Tel Aviv in 2004 was named to the list of world heritage sites by the UN due to its abundance of Bauhaus architecture; it had some 4,000 Bauhaus buildings erected from 1933 onwards.  In 1928, the Hungarian painter Alexander Bortnyik founded a school of design in Budapest called Miihely (also "Muhely" or "Mugely"), which means "the studio".  Located on the seventh floor of a house on Nagymezo Street, it was meant to be the Hungarian equivalent to the Bauhaus.  The literature sometimes refers to it—in an oversimplified manner—as "the Budapest Bauhaus".  Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy re-assembled in Britain during the mid 1930s to live and work in the Isokon project before the war caught up with them.  Gropius and Breuer went to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked together before their professional split.  Their collaboration produced The Aluminum City Terrace in New Kensington, Pennsylvania and the Alan I W Frank House in Pittsburgh, among other projects.  The Harvard School was enormously influential in America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing such students as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.  Read much more and see pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus  See also http://www.theartstory.org/movement-bauhaus.htm

Time magazine is featuring "silence breakers," a group the magazine identified with some familiar faces behind the #MeToo movement and at least one that is obscured, as 2017's Person of the Year.  The focus is on those who triggered a #MeToo national outcry over sexual harassment.  "This is the fastest-moving social change we've seen in decades, and it began with individual acts of courage by hundreds of women, and some men, who came forward to tell their own stories of sexual harassment and assault," Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal said December 6, 2017 on TODAY when making the reveal.  Ashley May  Read more at https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/nation-now/2017/12/06/who-silence-breakers-featured-time-person-year-me-too/926243001/

  http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1809  December 8, 2017  On this date in 1908, at Carnegie Hall, Gustav Mahler conducted the New York Symphony, the 200-voice Oratorio Society chorus, and two vocal soloists in the American premiere of his Symphony No. 2, a work often called his “Resurrection Symphony.” These days, Mahler’s Second ranks among his most popular works.  An unsigned reviewer in the New York Daily Tribune opined: “… of the beauty and insight of certain episodes there can be no doubt… there seems, however, a lack of significant and commanding originality.  It is more cerebral than passionate, more intellectual than compellingly emotional.”  Composers Datebook  Thought for Today  All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why. - James Thurber, writer and cartoonist (8 Dec 1894-1961)