WORD THURSDAY

“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.” - Marcel Proust

Today, July 10th is the Bahamas - National Day. The Bahamas are a group of about 700 islands and 2,000 coral reefs to the North of Cuba and the Southeast of Florida. The country became independent of the UK in 1973, the capital being Nassau. The Bahamas are just under 14,000 square km in area and have a population of about 300,000. The major employer is tourism while other economic supports are ship registration and off-shore financing and banking. Fishing and domestic agriculture are under development in order to reduce imports.

Henbane, Hyoscyamus niger, is the birthday plant for this day. The generic name of the plant was given it by Dioscorides and is derived from two Greek words, hyos, “of a hog” and kyamos, “bean”, supposedly because hogs ate the fruit. The whole plant has an offensive smell and is poisonous. The plant has been used medicinally and has narcotic and analgesic properties. The poison hyoscyamine, derived from the young shoots and leaves of the plant was used by Dr Crippen in 1910 to murder his wife. The plant symbolises imperfection and is under the astrological rule of Saturn.

Today is the birthday of:
John Calvin, theologian (1509);
James McNeill Whistler, artist (1834);
Henryk Wieniawski, composer (1835);
Marcel Proust, novelist (1871);
Giorgio da Chirico, Italian artist (1888);
Carl Orff, composer (1895);
Saul Bellow, novelist (1915);
David Brinkley, TV personality (1920);
Owen Chamberlain, physicist (1920);
Fred Gwynne, actor/writer (1926);
Alice Munro, writer (1931);
Jerry Herman, composer (1933);
Arlo Guthrie, singer (1947);

Carl Orff (1895–1982) was a German composer and music educator. His best-known work is Carmina Burana (1937), a secular oratorio derived from medieval German and Latin poems. His system for teaching music to children, based on rhythmic and verbal patterns and the pentatonic scale, is widely used. He also wrote several operas, amongst which are (1937-8) and Der MondDie Kluge (1941-2).



"O Fortuna" (the introduction to Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana") is one of the most recognisable pieces of music all over the world. It is a wry comment on the vicissitudes of life and how fortune seems to rule our existence with its whimsical twists and turns.

vicissitude |vəˈsisəˌt(y)oōd|noun (usu. vicissitudes)
A change of circumstances or fortune, typically one that is unwelcome or unpleasant: Her husband's sharp vicissitudes of fortune.
• poetic/literary alternation between opposite or contrasting things : The vicissitude of the seasons.
DERIVATIVES
vicissitudinous |-ˈtjuːdɪnəs| adjective
ORIGIN
Early 17th century (in the sense [alternation] ): from French, or from Latin vicissitudo, from vicissim ‘by turns,’ from vic- ‘turn, change.’