Hither and yon means:  Here and there; to this place and that place.  Origin:  'Hither and yon' is an old English expression meaning 'here and there' or 'to and fro'.  There have been several variants of 'thither' over the years - 'dider', 'thyder', 'thether' and now 'there'.  'Yon', which is of course a contraction of 'yonder', has a life all of its own.  Here's how those various words have been put together over time to mean 'here and there' or 'to and fro':  - 1412 - 'Here and yonder' - John Lydgate's translation of the History of Troy.  - 1413 - 'Hyder and thyder' - recorded in the mediaeval manuscript The Pylgremage of the Sowle.  - 1837 - 'Hithering and thithering' - Jane Carlyle, in a letter to her husband Thomas.  This may seem to be the first example of 'hither and thither' in print but it appears that it was there being used to mean 'going to and fro in a confused manner' i.e. 'dithering'.  Thomas Carlyle also used the expression later in his own writing, but it wasn't widely adopted with that meaning.  Read more and find additional examples at http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/hither-and-yon.html

HOW THE NATIVES PRONOUNCE NAMES:  Boise  BOY-see  *  Nevada  Nih-VA-duh (almost rhymes with Nebraska)  *   Oregon  ORE-ih-gun  *  Cairo (Illinois) KEH-ro  Cairo (Georgia) KAY-ro Cairo (Egypt) KAI-ro  *  Lima (Ohio) LYE-ma  Lima (Peru) LEE-ma

See also http://mentalfloss.com/article/50967/20-towns-named-other-towns-pronounced-differently

One of the most widely appreciated and imitated writers of light verse, Frediric Ogden Nash was born in Rye, New York, on August 19, 1902, to Edmund Strudwick and Mattie Nash.  He came from a distinguished family; the city of Nashville, Tennessee, was named in honor of one of his forbearers.  Nash attended Harvard College, but dropped out after only one year.  He worked briefly on Wall Street, and as a schoolteacher, before becoming a copywriter.  In 1925, he took a job in the marketing department with the publishing house Doubleday.  Nash’s first published poems began to appear in the New Yorker around 1930.  His first collection of poems, Hard Lines (Simon & Schuster), was published in 1931.  The book was a tremendous success; it went into seven printings in its first year alone, and Nash quit his job with Doubleday.  Nash worked briefly for the New Yorker in 1932, before deciding to devote himself full-time to his verse.  Nash considered himself a “worsifier.”  Among his best known lines are “Candy / Is dandy, / But liquor / Is quicker” and “If called by a panther / Don’t anther.”  https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/ogden-nash

The Republic of Seychelles is a small island nation consisting of an archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean off the eastern coast of Africa.  The natural environment of Seychelles is a stunningly beautiful topical paradise, with crystal clear blue water and pristine white sand beaches.  The economy of Seychelles is largely dependent on preserving a healthy natural environment for tourism purposes and to maintain sustainable fisheries, and the Seychellois people are deeply interconnected with the wild nature of the island ecosystems in their every day lives.  The Seychelles government has therefore taken significant action to establish a nation that is committed to preserving and protecting its natural environment by enacting policies that protect more than half of the nation’s total terrestrial land area and 30% of its marine territory by law.  The government of Seychelles has demonstrated its dedication to conserving and protecting its natural environment by enacting laws and policies that work to ensure the long-term vitality and preservation of its wild nature.  The Constitution of the Republic of Seychelles, which was enacted in 1993, guarantees its citizens the right to a clean environment, and at the same time also obliges its citizens to work to protect the Seychelles’ natural environment.  Article 38 of the Constitution of Seychelles states that it is “the right of every person to live in and enjoy a clean, healthy, and ecologically balanced environment,” and that that the state undertakes the responsibility of taking measures to protect, preserve, and improve the environment and to ensure the judicious and sustainable usage and management of Seychelles’ natural resources.  Article 40 of the Constitution of Seychelles dictates that “it shall be the duty of every citizen of Seychelles to protect, preserve, and improve the environment.”  The language incorporated into Seychelles’ Constitution establishes its commitment to preserving its environment, and it has furthered this dedication set forth in the Constitution by enacting several policies to ensure the long-term preservation of its wild nature.  In July of 2011, the Seychelles government announced its intention to declare several new protected areas in the archipelago, resulting in over half (50.59%) of its total land area becoming protected by law.  In addition to protecting its terrestrial land area, Seychelles has also demonstrated a significant dedication to protecting its marine environment as well.  Seychelles has created fourteen Marine Protected Areas covering 30% of the nation’s total marine territory, with 15% of the total marine environment being designated as no-take areas.  Read more and see pictures at http://natureneedshalf.org/seychelles/

A Muse reader has asked for a list of favorite books I read during 2016.  I read about 50 books a year, many from the public library (the largest supplier of books in the U.S.).  I may choose books from reviews, best-seller lists, by author--or recommended by reviewers or friends.  Sometimes I choose books for no reason.  My list for 2016:  Underworld by Don DeLillo, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery,  The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly, Visitors by Anita Brookner, Silence by Thomas Perry, Murder One by Robert Dugoni, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, and You Should Pity Us Instead by Amy Gustine.

It’s nearly the end of the year, which means it must be time to collect and review the various Word of the Year (WOTY) nominees and “winners” for 2016.  Oxford Dictionaries this year, as in most years, made an odd choice.  Oxford’s selection was “post-truth,” an adjective they define as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”  That barely begins to capture what this phrase means and how it’s used.  Oxford hopes each year’s WOTY “captures the ethos, mood, or preoccupations” of the year just past.  That applies well to post-truth.  They note that the use of post-truth increased by over 2000% from 2015, which is data but not necessarily useful data.  Post-truth had not even registered with me prior to Oxford’s selection of it and I’m not completely behind this one.  The choice seems contrived, as if they went out of their way to find a word they could broadly apply to the politics of the past year, even if it wasn’t heavily used.  And their mainstreaming of this term seems to go in the opposite direction of their intent.  Elevating it doesn’t highlight or address the problem of post-truth:  it normalizes it and trivializes it.  Oxford had several better candidates on their short list, with adulting and alt-right being the best.  Both terms crossed my desk much more than post-truth, in many different contexts.  As with post-truth, their proposed definition of alt-right is far too watered down. T hey also included a new popular definition of woke, showing that they might be more tuned into the culture than they sometimes get credit for.  The Australian National Dictionary Centre chose “democracy sausage.”  Which, it turns out, is an actual food item, and not the metaphor you might have expected.  Those crazy Aussies.  Read all about it at http://ozwords.org/?p=8168     Christopher Daly  Read much more at https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2016/12/23/word-of-the-year-woty-2016-have-some-post-truth-with-your-democracy-sausage/

Paraphrase from For Better or Worse comic strip on December 26, 2016  Does your doll work on batteries?  Nope.  On imagination.

Watership Down author Richard Adams dies aged 96 on December 24, 2016   Watership Down, a children's classic about a group of rabbits in search of a new home after their warren was destroyed, was first published in 1972.  Adams was 52 when he wrote it.  It went on to become a best-seller, with tens of millions of copies bought around the world.  Watership Down was made into a film version in 1978 and enjoyed huge success, but was notoriously frightening for young children, with its graphic, apocalyptic scenes of impending doom.  The film's theme song Bright Eyes, sung by Art Garfunkel, spent six weeks at the top of the UK charts the following year.  The event that changed Richard Adams' life occurred on a car journey with his family to see Twelfth Night at Stratford-upon-Avon.  His bored children asked for a story and he began telling them a tale about a group of rabbits attempting to escape from their threatened warren.  Adams was persuaded to write it all down, a process that took him more than two years, but he was, at first, unable to find a publisher.  Many of his rejection letters complained that the book was too long and his characters did not fit the common perception of cuddly bunnies.  Eventually, in 1972, after 14 rejections, the publisher Rex Collings saw the potential and agreed to take it on with an initial print run of 2,500 copies.  A new animated series of the book, co-produced by the BBC and Netflix, is due to be aired in 2017 with four hour-long episodes.  Read more and see pictures at http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-38446309

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1670  December 28, 2016  On this date in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen published a paper detailing his discovery of a new type of radiation, which later will be known as x-rays.  On this date in 1902, the Syracuse Athletic Club defeated the New York Philadelphians, 5–0, in the first indoor professional football game, which was held at Madison Square Garden.