Thursday, June 9, 2022

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

typomania  (ty-puh-MAY-nee-uh)  noun  1.  An obsession with typography.  2.  An obsession with typology or symbolism.  3.  An obsession with getting published.  From Greek typos (impression) + mania (excessive enthusiasm or craze).  Earliest documented use:  1882.

yestereve  (YES-tuh-reev)  noun  Yesterday evening.  adverb  During yesterday evening.  From yester- (a time one period before the present one), from Old English giestran (previous day) + eve/even (evening).  Earliest documented use:  1565.  Another form of this word is yestreen.

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From:  Janet Schiller  Subject:  Albert Schiller, typographer and artist  Typomaniac would seem to be a good word to describe the singular talent of Albert Schiller (1898-1970), a typographer and artist who created works of art using typographic elements.  We have several of his works at home.   He was my husband’s grandfather. 

From:  Dave Shelles   Subject:  typomania  Seen on a car bumper sticker over the weekend:  I’ll use Comic Sans when Helvetica freezes over.  AWADmailIssue 1035 

The creator of Comic Sans has only once used the font he became famous for.  "I used it to complain about bad service by a company," said designer Vincent Connare.  "I thought if they didn't respond to me the first time, if I write a letter and I use Comic Sans, they'll at least notice it."  The plan worked, and he scored a small refund from the company.  But he says he can't imagine using it again any time soon—except maybe in jest.  Connare designed Comic Sans 26 years ago.  It was originally intended to be the textual voice of the cartoon dog Rover in software Microsoft created for new users, called Microsoft Bob.  At the time it was being developed, Connare was a designer for the company and wanted Rover to be represented by something more whimsical than the system's default font.  "Dogs don't speak Times New Roman," he told Day 6 host Brent Bambury, laughing.  Though it didn't make its way to Microsoft Bob, Comic Sans first hit home computers back in 1995 as part of a Windows 95 update.  Connare expected the font to be a playful option for Microsoft Bob, but didn't know it would end up as a wide release for most computer users.  With its round, childlike, handwritten letters, Comic Sans was inspired by the speech bubbles of comic books.  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/oscar-villains-lynn-beyak-coronavirus-hospitals-weinstein-s-lawyer-the-creator-of-comic-sans-and-more-1.5454398/meet-the-man-who-created-the-comic-sans-font-and-no-he-s-not-sorry-1.5454405

She was an exotic orchid in a garden of daisies and would often be punished for it.  *  Rolihlahla Mandel was given the name Nelson by a teacher who couldn’t pronounce his Xhosa name.  *  Friends can sometimes be found in the most surprising places wearing the most unexpected disguises.  *  Facing your fears is always better than trying to outrun them.  Hum If You Don’t Know the Words, a novel by Bianca Marais 

Bianca Marais is a South African native who traveled to 16 countries but decided to settle in East Tennessee.  In 2017, she graduated from East Tennessee State University with a degree in mass communications and a concentration in journalism.  During her senior year at ETSU, she began interning with The Greeneville Sun newspaper and continued working as the county beat reporter and editor of the agriculture section for over a year.  In 2018, she married a Kingsport native and bought a 100-year-old farmhouse which they are renovating themselves.  https://www.wjhl.com/author/bianca-marais/ 

nut out  verb  From nut ((slang) the head) + out, referring to thinking or working something out in one’s head  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nut_out#English 

America's most famous feuding families, the Hatfields and the McCoys, enjoyed a tenuous relationship at best when a dispute over a hog in 1878 exploded tensions into an epic vendetta.  The two clans warred along the Kentucky and West Virginia border for decades, culminating in the 1888 New Year's Day ambush that left several members of the McCoy family dead.  Read “30 famous feuds throughout history” by Erin Joslyn at https://stacker.com/stories/2352/30-famous-feuds-throughout-history

In the autumn of 1924, Surrealism was announced to the public through the publication of André Breton’s first “Manifesto of Surrealism,” the founding of a journal (La Révolution surréaliste), and the formation of a Bureau of Surrealist Research.  The literary focus of the movement soon expanded when Max Ernst and other visual artists joined and began applying Surrealist ideas to their work.  Today, we tend to think of Surrealism primarily as a visual arts movement, but the group’s activity stemmed from much larger aspirations.  By teaching how to circumvent restrictions that society imposed, the Surrealists saw themselves as agents of social change.  Josh R. Rose  See illustrations including a map of the world created by members of the Surrealist movement and published in the Belgian journal Variétés in June 1929 at https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/dada-and-surrealism/xdc974a79:surrealism/a/surrealism-an-introduction

The National Puzzlers’ League is the source of the greatest anagrams on the planet.  Founded in 1883, with a current roster of about seven hundred members, the NPL is the oldest puzzle society in the world.  NPL’s puzzles are called “flats,” and were invented by the NPL way back in the 1800s.  You can find a full explanation on the NPL website, but for a simplified summary:  A flat consists of a poem with blank spaces for the answers.  The answers are two or more words that are like anagrams on steroids.  They come in various types.  There are puzzles in which you remove a letter from the beginning of a word to produce another word:  “Factor” becomes “actor.”  There’s another type of puzzle where you remove a word’s last letter:  “Aspiring” becomes “aspirin.”  That one is called curtailment.  A.J. Jacobs  https://lithub.com/how-word-puzzles-tickle-the-brain-and-satisfy-the-soul/ 

On June 9 1790, The Philadelphia Spelling Bee Book by John Barry becomes the first book copyrighted in the United States.

 http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2532  June 9, 2022 

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