COINED WORDS  A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

unbirthday (uhn-BUHRTH-day)  noun  A day other than one’s birthday.  Coined by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) in Through the Looking-Glass (1871).  Earliest documented use:  1871.

runcible  (RUHN-suh-buhl)   noun  A utensil that is a combination of a fork and spoon.  Also known as a spork.  adjective  Shaped like a combination fork and spoon.  Coined as a nonsense word by the poet Edward Lear (1812-1888) in 1871.  

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From:  Julye Berry  To unvite:  I regularly got unvited to my mother’s home--she would invite me and my husband and children for a holiday, but then unvite us if she got an invitation to go somewhere.
From:  Ida Reichardt  When my daughter was a child, she would refer to something that had happened before as yestertime.
From:  Russell Lott  I coined the word unknowance as a somewhat less derogatory synonym for ignorance, a blend of ignorance and unknowing.  One could be highly educated and generally very astute, yet would be offended by being called ignorant for being unaware of certain knowledge.

From:  Patrick Paternott  Here in Australia, we call it a splade/splayd, which is a combination of fork, spoon, and knife . . .  not quite runcible.



June 17, 2017  The book  Arabia Felix first published by Danish novelist Thorkild Hansen in 1962, later translated into English by James and Kathleen McFarlane, and now out in a new edition—flirts with the ambiguous boundaries between history, fiction and travelogue.  But almost from the very beginning, it is unmistakably firm on one point:  Just about every one of the bright young scholars who undertake the ambitious scientific expedition at the heart of the book is going to die.  What's more, Hansen notes:  "Today, two hundred years after their expedition, they are almost completely forgotten."  Yet at the outset of the actual trip, in 1761, the Danish financiers behind it could scarcely have had higher hopes.  This quest to uncover the empirical truths behind the Bible in Arabia Felix—"Happy Arabia," or Yemen, as it's known today—was to be King Frederick V's chance to make his own splash in the era of the Enlightenment.  With a favorite phrase—"we can picture"—he and his able translators repeatedly call upon us to conjure scene after scene from the dustbin of history:  a rare balmy evening on the Atlantic, a troupe of girls dancing barefoot on the sand, a bitterly painful request from one member of the expedition to another.  These moments lurk between the lines of diaries that might otherwise have made for dry reading; in Hansen's words, they take on the weight of the living.  It can be tough sometimes to root for these guys.  Their failings can be deeply frustrating to watch, and their astute observations are matched only by their blithe obliviousness—to the plight of the slaves around them, for example, or the colonial blind spots most of them bear.  But then, that's part of the "double chord" that Hansen mentions at one point, that quietly plays throughout this book.  Colin Dwyer  https://www.npr.org/2017/06/17/531929925/in-the-refrains-of-arabia-felix-a-reminder-often-the-end-is-just-a-start



Liberty Island chronology

A.D. 994  Native Americans begin to inhabit the land that is now Liberty Island.  This island is one of the three "Oyster Islands" in New York Harbor, for the numerous shell beds in this location and a major source of food.

1609  Henry Hudson lands in New York Harbor and the Hudson River estuary.  Europeans begin to colonize the area which includes the Oyster Islands. 

1667  Isaac Bedloe, a Dutch colonist, obtains a colonial land grant for this Oyster Island.

1669  Colonial Governor Francis Lovelace confirms Bedloe's ownership of the island on the condition that it is renamed Love Island.

1673  Bedloe dies, Governor Lovelace is overthrown by the Dutch navy, and Love Island is renamed Bedloe's Island.

1877  Bedloe's Island is designated as the site for the Statue of Liberty.

1956  Bedloe's Island is renamed Liberty Island by a joint resolution in Congress and signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

1965  October 3rd - President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1960 at Liberty Island.  The bill abolishes the national origins quota system and states that all who wish to immigrate to America shall be "admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationships to those already there." 
May 11th - President Johnson signs a Presidential Proclamation, adding Ellis Island to the National Park Service, under the administration of the Statue of Liberty National Monument.

https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/liberty-island-a-chronology.htm  My husband's grandfather was born to Irish immigrants in New York Harbor in 1840 and automatically became a U.S. citizen. 



Abstract Expressionist painter Mary Abbott, known for her colorful canvases and sweeping brushstrokes, has died at the age of 98.  In 2008, the New York Times praised Abbott as “one of the last great Abstract Expressionist painters of her generation.”  Nevertheless, Abbott’s work received little scholarly recognition until 2016, when the Denver Art Museum organized the exhibition “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” which traveled to the Mint Museum in North Carolina and the Palm Springs Art Museum in California.  Abbott’s work was shown alongside that of 11 other women who were among the pioneers of the Ab Ex movement in the late 1940s and ’50s, including better-known figures such as Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan.  (Those five painters were the focus of Mary Gabriel’s prize-winning 2018 book Ninth Street Women, in which Abbott was a recurring figure.)  One of just three living artists in the show, Abbott spoke on the occasion about what drew her to abstract painting.  “It just hit me. I just liked it,” she said in a video produced by the museum.  Sarah Cascone  Read more and see graphics at 

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/painter-mary-abbott-has-died-1647730



On balance, reports from Federal Reserve Districts suggested that the economy expanded at a modest pace through the end of August.  Although concerns regarding tariffs and trade policy uncertainty continued, the majority of businesses remained optimistic about the near-term outlook.  Reports on consumer spending were mixed, although auto sales for most Districts grew at a modest pace.  Tourism activity since the previous report remained solid in most reporting Districts.  The Beige Book reporting on overall economic activity on or before August 23, 2019  https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/beigebook201909.htm


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2164  October 4, 2019