The infamous 'dog in a manger', who occupied the manger not because he wanted to eat the hay there but to prevent the other animals from doing so, is generally said to have been the invention of the Greek storyteller Aesop (circa 600 BC).  Many of the fables that have been credited to Aesop do in fact date from well before the 5th century BC and modern scholarship doesn't give much credence to the idea that Aesop's Fables, as we now know them, were written by him at all.  Accounts of Aesop's life are vague and date from long after his death and some scholars doubt that there ever was a real Aesop.  If he existed at all, it was as an editor of earlier Greek and Sumerian stories rather than as the writer of them.  https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/dog-in-the-manger.html 

Lois Lenski was an artist and one of the best-known American book illustrators of the twentieth century.  Lenski was born on October 14, 1893, in Springfield, Ohio.  She spent most of her youth in Anna, Ohio.  Lenski attended The Ohio State University, studied art, and graduated in 1915.  She continued her studies at the Art Students' League of New York and the Westminster School of Art in London, England.  While she lived in Great Britain, Lenski illustrated her first books.  Lenski returned to the United States in 1921.  She married Arthur Covey, a well-known muralist.  Lenski continued to illustrate books for other authors.  During the 1920s, she began to write her own books for children.  Her first books, including A Little Girl of 1900, drew heavily on her childhood experiences in Ohio.  Lenski continued to write book-length monographs through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.  Most of her works dealt with historical topics.  She commonly described how children in the past experienced life.  Lenski also tried to provide her readers with descriptions of various parts of the United States.  She wrote her books about many different places and used dialects common to those regions.  She was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1946 for Strawberry Girl, a book about strawberry pickers in Florida.  Beginning in the 1950s, Lenski began to focus more on poetry rather than prose in her writings.  Over the course of her life, Lenski authored more than one hundred books.  She also illustrated fifty-seven books for other authors.  She died on September 11, 1974.  https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Lois_Lenski  See also https://www.bookologymagazine.com/resources/authors-emeritus/lenski-lois/ 

Carbonado, commonly known as black diamond, is one of the toughest forms of natural diamond.  It is an impure, high-density, micro-porous form of polycrystalline diamond consisting of diamond, graphite, and amorphous carbon, with minor crystalline precipitates filling pores and occasional reduced metal inclusions.  It is found primarily in alluvial deposits where it is most prominent in mid-elevation equatorial regions such as Central African Republic and in Brazil, where the vast majority of carbonado diamondites have been found.  Its natural colour is black or dark grey, and it is more porous than other diamonds.  Carbonado diamonds are typically pea-sized or larger porous aggregates of many tiny black crystals.  The most characteristic carbonados are mined in the Central African  Republic and in Brazil, in neither place associated with kimberlite, the source of typical gem diamonds.  Lead isotope analyses have been interpreted as documenting crystallization of carbonados about 3 billion years ago; yet carbonado is found in younger sedimentary rocks.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonado 

 

Carbonado in Washington State was one of quite a few towns in the Carbon River valley to be settled during an economic boom in the region.  The boom was brought on by raw material demands in nearby growing towns such as Seattle and Tacoma.  Starting with the town of Wilkeson and moving on through Burnett, Carbonado, Montezuma, Fairfax, and finally Manley Moore, these settlements sprawled up the valley to the very boundary of Mount Rainier National Park.  Most of these towns were company towns, meaning that they specialized in the harvest of raw materials on the plot of land that the town was situated on which was owned by a commercial company.  Often—and such was the case of Carbonado—the company also owned the houses and the energy resources as well.  The energy resource in Carbonado was also the raw material that the citizens of the company town were harvesting, coal.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonado,_Washington

 

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Hoyle  (hoyl)  noun  1.  A rule book.  2.  Rules.  After Edmond Hoyle (1672?-1769), British writer on games.  Earliest documented use:  1906.  The word is typically used in the phrase according to Hoyle, meaning strictly following rules and regulations.

Houdini  (hoo-DEE-nee)  noun:  An escape artist.  verb intr.:  To escape.  After Harry Houdini (1874-1926), a magician and escape artist.  Earliest documented use:  1923.   Houdini was born as Ehrich Weiss, but he admired the French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin so changed his name.  His nickname Ehri became Harry.  Watch a Houdini straitjacket escape in Houston, 1923:  (video, 3 min.).  How did he do his magic tricks and escapes?  Read all about it here.  In his later years, Houdini devoted his life to debunking psychics, mediums, and other fraudsters.  He worked with the Scientific American magazine to expose them.  Also see Houdini vs Arthur Conan Doyle.

pooh-bah  (POO-bah)  noun  1.  A person who holds a high office or has great influence.  2.  A pompous, self-important person.  3.  A person holding many offices or positions of power.  After Pooh-Bah, a government official in Gilbert & Sullivan’s 1885 operetta The Mikado.  Pooh-Bah holds all the high offices of the state (except Lord High Executioner), including relating to complaints about himself.  He is also known as the Lord High Everything Else.  Earliest documented use:  1886.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day

From:  Hugh Eckert  Subject:  Houdini  Made me think of lines from one of my favorite Tom Waits songs “The One That Got Away”:  He’s got a snakeskin sportshirt and he looks like Vincent Price with a little piece of chicken and he’s carving off a slice but someone tipped her off, she’ll be doing a Houdini now any day she shook his hustle, the Greyhound bus’ll take the one that got away  (video, 4 min.)

From:  Terry Curley  Subject:  McDonaldization  My two sons invented (at least in my mind) the term Starbuckification in the early 2000s to note that American culture, in the guise of Starbucks, had penetrated to London and other cities in the UK.

From:  Andrew Pressburger  Subject:  pooh-bah  Of the many songs in Gilbert and Sullivan’s most famous work, The Mikado, the one that stands out for its satirical ribbing of all the pretentious characters in the world is Pooh-Bah’s “little list” (video, 5 min.).  The list is usually updated in each performance to suit contemporary issues and local circumstances.  AWADmailIssue 986 

Make Music is a free celebration of music around the world on June 21st.  Launched in 1982 in France as the Fête de la Musique, it is now held on the same day in more than 1,000 cities in 120 countries.  Completely different from a typical music festival, Make Music is open to anyone who wants to take part.  Every kind of musician—young and old, amateur and professional, of every musical persuasion—pours onto streets, parks, plazas, and porches to share their music with friends, neighbors, and strangers.  All of it is free and open to the public.  https://www.makemusicday.org/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2380  June 21, 2021