“A good book is a good friend . . . A library is a collection of good friends.”  Lyman Abbott (1835–1922) was an American Congregationalist theologian, editor, and author.  https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/571732.Lyman_Abbott

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Flimflam  (FLIM-flam)  noun:  1.  Nonsense.  2.  Deception.  verb tr:  1.  To deceive.  2.  To swindle.  A reduplication, probably of the Old Norse flim (mockery).  Earliest documented use:  1538.

Reader feedback to A.Word.A.Day

From:  Eric F Plumlee  Subject:  Reduplicatives  My grandparents lived on a farm in Walla Walla, Washington, and wherever they would travel and meet people they would tell those they met that the residents liked the city so much that they named it twice.  On a parallel note, children’s books are famous for reduplicatives because, hey, they’re so much fun!  Book titles in particular make use of this kind of rhyming.  There are older book series like Amelia Bedelia and newer ones like Fancy Nancy.  One nice book series making use of reduplicatives written by Joy Cowley and illustrated by Elizabeth Fuller is about an older couple Mr. and Mrs. Wishy-Washy and the goings-on on their farm.  Some of their reduplicatives are wishy-washy, splishy-sploshy, and scrub-a-dub, a lot of fun for the younger kids.  Now because of my family ties to Walla Walla, we have a children’s book called Double Trouble in Walla Walla, written by Andrew Clements and illustrated by Salvatore Murdocca.  This book is a fun romp because the whole book revolves around reduplicatives (I counted 14 on one page), many used in common everyday conversations as well as some probably made-up ones.  I don’t know who enjoys this book the most, the person reading the book or the audience listening to the reader.  For the reader it is an obstacle course for the tongue, and for the listener it is an almost nonstop barrage of funny nonsense. 
From:  Judith Shapiro  Subject:  razzle-dazzle  You will want to watch the clip of Razzle Dazzle Them (5 min.) from the film Chicago. 
From:  Brian Clark Cole  Subject:  Reduplication in Hawaiian  Reduplication is particularly common in the Hawaiian language.  For instance, the state fish is the Humuhumunukunukuapua’a (humu-humu-nuku-nuku-apu-a-a)--three repetitions in a single word.
From:  Richard S. Russell  Subject:  flimflam  40 years old now, but still a good read:  Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions.  Eventually Randi was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.

Blackberries, mulberries, and raspberries are not berries at all, but bananas, pumpkins, avocados and cucumbers are.  So what makes a berry?  Well, a berry has seeds and pulp (properly called “pericarp”) that develop from the ovary of a flower.  The pericarp of all fruit is actually subdivided into 3 layers.  The exocarp is the skin of the fruit, and in berries it’s often eaten (like in grapes) but not always (like in bananas).  The mesocarp is the part of the fruit we usually eat, like the white yummy part of an apple, or the bulk of a plum, though in citrus fruits the mesocarp is actually the white, sort of inner-peel that we remove.  Last is the endocarp, which is the closest layer that envelopes the seeds.  In stone fruits, it’s the stone.  In many fruits, it’s actually a membrane that we don’t really notice, often because it’s been bred to be thin, like in bananas.  In citrus, the endocarp is actually the membrane that holds the juicy parts of the fruit, that is, the part you don’t want to pierce unless you want to get sticky.  If the fruit has a thick, hard endocarp, it’s probably a drupe, a fancy term for a stone fruit.  This group encompasses apricots, mangoes, cherries, olives, avocados, dates and most nuts.  If your snack has a core, it’s probably a pome. From its name you probably guessed that this bunch includes apples, as well as pears.  A multiple fruit is a fruit that is actually make up of a cluster of fruiting bodies.  Some examples of this are pineapple, figs and mulberries.  These fruits turn out to be part of a greater group called accessory fruits, in which the fruit (or many fruiting bodies) is not derived from the ovary, but some other part of the developing plant.  If you consider your favourite fruit to be a raspberry or blackberry, then you love aggregate fruits.  These are formed by many ovaries merging to become one flower, and most are also accessory fruits.  @AdaMcVean and @CassandraNLee  https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/bananas-are-berries-raspberries-are-not

In physics, horror vacui, or plenism, commonly stated as "nature abhors a vacuum", is a postulate attributed to Aristotle, who articulated a belief  that nature contains no vacuums because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately fill the rarity of an incipient void.  He also argued against the void in a more abstract sense (as "separable"), for example, that by definition a void, itself, is nothing, and following Plato, nothing cannot rightly be said to exist.  Furthermore, insofar as it would be featureless, it could neither be encountered by the senses, nor could its supposition lend additional explanatory power.  Hero of Alexandria challenged the theory in the first century CE, but his attempts to create an artificial vacuum failed.  The theory was debated in the context of 17th-century fluid mechanics, by Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, among others, and through the early 18th century by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.  Plenism means "fullness", from Latin plēnum, English "plenty", cognate via Proto-Indo-European to "full".  In Ancient Greek, the term for void is κενό (kenó).  The idea was restated as "Natura abhorret vacuum" by François Rabelais in his series of books titled Gargantua and Pantagruel in the 1530s.  The theory was supported and restated by Galileo Galilei in the early 17th century as "Resistenza del vacuo".  Galileo was surprised by the fact that water could not rise above a certain level in an aspiration tube in his suction pump, leading him to conclude that there is a limit to the phenomenon.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui_(physics)

Live streaming refers to online streaming media simultaneously recorded and broadcast in real time.  It is often referred to simply as streaming, but this abbreviated term is ambiguous because "streaming" may refer to any media delivered and played back simultaneously without requiring a completely downloaded file.  Non-live media such as video-on-demand, vlogs, and YouTube videos are technically streamed, but not live streamed.  Live stream services encompass a wide variety of topics, from social media to video games to professional sports.  Platforms such as Facebook Live, Periscope, Kuaishou, and 17 include the streaming of scheduled promotions and celebrity events as well as streaming between users, as in videotelephony.  Sites such as Twitch have become popular outlets for watching people play video games, such as in eSports, Let's Play-style gaming, or speedrunning.  Live coverage of sporting events is a common application.  User interaction via chat rooms forms a major component of live streaming.  Platforms often include the ability to talk to the broadcaster or participate in conversations in chat.  An extreme example of viewer interfacing is the social experiment Twitch Plays Pokémon, where viewers collaborate to complete Pokémon games by typing in commands that correspond to controller inputs.  Many chat rooms also consists of emotes which is another way to communicate to the live streamer.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_streaming

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  from John Reid-Rowland  I was interested to see your story about Everest, named after the Surveyor-General of India.  Of course, everyone pronounces the name of the mountain as you say, but it seems that George Everest pronounced his name EVE-rest.  Apparently the name of Winston Churchill’s nanny when he was a child, Mrs Everest, was pronounced the same way.

A Brief History of Word Games by Adrienne Raphel   When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913.   The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in our lives that I figured it must have been around for centuries—I envisioned the empress Livia in the famous garden room in her villa, serenely filling in her cruciverborum each morning­­.  But in reality, the crossword is a recent invention, born out of desperation.  Editor Arthur Wynne at the New York World needed something to fill space in the Christmas edition of his paper’s FUN supplement, so he took advantage of new technology that could print blank grids cheaply and created a diamond-shaped set of boxes, with clues to fill in the blanks, smack in the center of FUN.  Nearly overnight, the “Word-Cross Puzzle” went from a space-filling ploy to the most popular feature of the page.  Still, the crossword didn’t arise from nowhere.  Ever since we’ve had language, we’ve played games with words.  Crosswords are the Punnett square of two long-standing strands of word puzzles:  word squares, which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren’t necessarily using deliberate deception; and riddles, which use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don’t necessarily have any kind of graphic component to work through.  The first known word square, the so-called Sator Square, was found in the ruins of Pompeii.  Read about the Windsor Enigma, doublets, and many kinds of riddles at https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/23/a-brief-history-of-word-games/

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY  Oh, the comfort--the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person--having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. - Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, poet and novelist (20 Apr 1826-1887)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2257  April 20. 2020