The days are Short and the surname Short means exactly that - short in stature. But the surname Shorter as a name turns out to mean a short-necked person - derived from the Anglo-Saxon word scorkhals meaning a person with a short neck.
There's a crest for the Short Family and it makes sense it is of Anglo-Saxon origin. It derives from sceort - the Old English word for short. The first record of the name was Ordic Scott in 1176 in Dorset.
Looking at the surname Short, it is Martin Short, the Canadian actor, who comes to mind. His family is the Griffin and Quinn families from the Crossmaglen area of County Armagh in Northern Ireland. His father was an illegal immigrant to the U.S. and made his way to Canada. That's a very short through-line for heritage.
My association of the Shorter name is with the famous Jazz Saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and his surname would be related to the legacy of slavery in the U.S. A number of his compositions are themed on slavery. He has been called a "Griot" - a member of a class of travelling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa.
Our shortest day is today - here we are at Winter Solstice - it is coming at 10:58 a.m. While the full moon reached its peak on Saturday evening, it is very bright this morning, illuminating the back garden as a faint sun might do.
It turns out that we reached and touched The Sun - Our Sun - in 2021. On April 28, 2021, during its eighth flyby of the Sun, the Parker Solar Probe encountered the specific magnetic and particle conditions at 18.8 solar radii (around 8.1 million miles) above the solar surface that told scientists it had crossed the Alfvén critical surface for the first time and finally entered the solar atmosphere.It touched "the stuff the sun is made of".
"We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse.”
It dipped around 6.5 million miles into the sun's atmosphere, and reached the pseudostreamer - massive structures that rise above the sun's surface and can be seen from Earth during solar eclipses. The next flyby is January 2022.
In all it will make 24 orbits of the sun over 7 years. If the Probe stays functional the mission could be extended to 22 years and would capture the entire solar cycle. This is the cycle that the sun's magnetic field goes through approximately every 11 years. Something to consider given we live in the Sun's atmosphere.
As for the surname Shortest - I didn't find one yet, only the shortest name - supposedly N. Yes, a single letter, usually spelled Ehn. There's a huge list of the shortest surnames HERE. They are all two letter names.
Here's a train image from one of the Model Railroad Conventions. Could this be a Winter Solstice layout? I don't ever recall another winter layout.
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