Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is dedicated to inspiring a love of reading by gifting books free of charge to children from birth to age five, through funding shared by Dolly Parton and local community partners in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Republic of Ireland.  Inspired by her father’s inability to read and write Dolly started her Imagination Library in 1995 for the children within her home county.  Today, her program spans five countries and gifts over 1 million free books each month to children around the world.  Subscribe to newsletter at https://imaginationlibrary.com/ 

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

pilcrow  (PIL-kroh)  noun  A symbol (¶) used to indicate paragraph breaks.  Apparently an alteration of the word paragraph, with r changing into l and remodeled along the more familiar words pill and crow. Earliest documented use:  1440.

obelus  (OB-uh-luhs)  noun 1.  A sign (- or ÷) used in ancient manuscripts to indicate a spurious or doubtful word or passage.  2.  A sign (†) used to indicate reference marks.  Also known as obelisk or dagger.  From Latin obelus, from Gree obelos (spit).  Earliest documented use:  c. 450.  In typography, an asterisk is used to indicate a footnote as is an obelus aka obelisk.  In Asterix comics, the character Obelix is the best friend of the hero Asterix.

raven messenger  (RAY-vuhn mes-uhn-juhr)  noun  A messenger who does not arrive or return in time.  In the Bible, Noah sends a raven to go scout the scene, but the bird never returns to the ark.  Earliest documented use:  1400.  Also known as a corbie messenger.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day

From:  Ian McFadyen  Subject:  dovecote  In Scotland, the word is dookit.  More commonly, these days dookit is used to mean a small cubbyhole, or alcove.  Elementary school children might store their outdoor clothes or backpack in their dookit in the classroom; the teacher might have dookits in which she puts each student’s marked homework.

From:  Steven G. Kellman  Subject:  dovecot  One of the finest short stories in Russian literature is The Story of My Dovecot, Isaac Babel’s 1925 account of how a pogrom in Odessa traumatizes a gifted Jewish boy.

From:  Tom Koehler  Subject:  raven messenger  For me, raven messenger conjures up Odin’s ravens who traveled the world to keep Odin apprised of all that was going on.

From:  Christine De Pedro  Far from being retired, the pilcrow (now I know what it is called!) is essential for those of us who design and lay out text for print.  Show invisibles is always activated to see where authors have inserted pilcrows, instead of line breaks or an extra pilcrow to add a line space between paragraphs.  Both need to be removed and corrected for style sheets to be properly applied.

From:  Joachim van Dijk  In German the word Obolus is well known in the expression “seinen Obolus leisten” meaning “to do or pay one’s share”.  Also, a synonym for a small amount of money used for a tip, fee, donation, or bribe.  It derives from obelus and refers to a small coin (obol) in the form of a small rod.  In ancient Greece the deceased were buried with an obolus in their mouth in order to pay the ferryman for a one-way trip across the Styx River to reach Hades. 

The Yemenite sauce zhug is fresh and bright from herbs, while also having an intensely spicy kick to it.    It's the ideal accompaniment for falafel or sabich sandwiches, but it also goes great with a variety of grilled vegetables, fish, meat, and eggs.  J. Kenji López-Alt  Find recipe at https://www.seriouseats.com/schug-zhug-srug-yemenite-israeli-hot-sauce-recipe 

Famous Writers’ Houses:  A Taxonomy by Emily Temple  See pictures of the Art Deco Beverley Hills mansion of Jackie Collins, “the Proust of Hollywood”.  I’d always wanted the Hockney painting A Bigger Splash,” she told Vanity Fair‘s John Heilpern.  “But I could never get it. So I thought the best alternative was to have my own Hockney pool that looked like the painting.”  Lord Byron lived in an abbey, which even, like all fancy English residences, has a name:  Newstead Abbey.  The poet inherited his ancestral family home at the age of 10, when his great uncle died; though grand, it needed a lot of work, and he rarely lived in the abbey full time.  Edith Wharton also had a named mansion:  The Mount, her gorgeous estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, where she wrote her novels, looking out at her dog cemetery (dog ghosts have indeed been spotted).  Wharton designed the house, which sits on a hill overlooking 113 acres, with architect Ogden Codman Jr. in 1901.  Toni Morrison’s three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom condo in Tribeca when it went up for sale last year.  There are over 12,000 books in Hanya Yanagihara’s one-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot Soho loft.  Alexander Pushkin only lived in a book-filled St. Petersburg apartment on the Moika River for four months, but since he died there, it is now the Pushkin Memorial Apartment.  Showcasing Pushkin’s wealth, which stemmed from his noble upbringing and profound success, his ground-floor apartment contains 11 lavish, pale-hued rooms, enhanced by elegant classical-style wood moldings and furniture.  Also find pictures of Dylan Thomas’s boathouse in Laugharne, Wales; Robert Frost’s  lovely little 1769 stone Dutch Colonial in South Shaftsbury, Vermont,  the one-room cabin in the woods of Henry David Thoreau; Mark Twain’s rambling 19th century Victorian, which was designed by architect Edward Tuckerman Potter and spans a whopping 11,500 square feet, with 25 rooms; Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore; and Stephen King’s  19th century Victorian in Bangor, Maine—complete with ironwork bats and spiderwebs—which he is now turning into a writer’s retreat.  https://lithub.com/famous-writers-houses-a-taxonomy/ 

cheshirization  noun  From Cheshire (cat) (“fictional cat which disappeared leaving only its smile, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by the English author Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)”) +‎ -ization (suffix forming nouns denoting the act, process, or result of doing or making something), coined by the American linguist James Matisoff (born 1937) in a 1991 book chapter entitled “Areal and Universal Dimensions of Grammatization in Lahu”.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cheshirization#English  The English author Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland which introduced the Cheshire cat, a fictional feline which disappeared leaving only its smile, was published November 26,1865. 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2461  November 26, 2021