Richards often get called Dick - my father always did - but I never really thought much about how Richard could translate to Dick. But yesterday I was reading about how studying pet names for people can help with etymological research and came across the idea of "rhyming nicknames", the result of a process like this

name -> shortened form -> rhyming nickname

So we get Richard -> Rich -> Dick, it's as simple as that

Obviously I knew about ordinary shortenings and diminutive pet names (e.g. Thomas -> Tom ->Tommy) and I've also been intrigued by the fact that names whose shortened form would end in 'R' are modified to end in 'L', e.g. Terence becomes Tel and Harold becomes Hal (probably because "Ter" and "Har" don't trip off the tongue so easily). Another such is Chas.

We can also shorten names from the other end, so Richard can be Hud and William can become Liam for example.

However I hadn't really twigged about the rhyming nicknames but there are lots of them and they seem to have been popular in Middle English. Here are some common examples:

Richard  (again) -> Rick -> Hick

Edward -> Ed ->Ted (or Ned)

William -> Will -> Bill

Here's a surprising one:

Margaret -> Molly -> Polly

or

Margaret -> Meg -> Peg

Finally we have 

Robert -> Rob (possibly via Robin, a diminutive)  -> Bob (or Hob) and Hob is the first element in Hobgoblin, a kind of mischievous elf. Robin Goodfellow, a kind of goblin and Puck-like character, became Hob the goblin.

Goblin is interesting in itself, it seems to be from the same root as German Kobold,  and became the name of Element 27.  Element 28 another troublemaker.

Given a circle centre O and a point P in its interior, the midpoints of all the chords passing through P lie on a circle, which also passes through P and through O.

My title describes something most of us have known about all our lives without realising it.

Why do 'hip hop' and 'ding dong' sound right, but 'hop hip' and 'dong ding' sound wrong somehow? It's not just familiarity, there is a rule at work, as we shall seen. If I invented a new expression 'squop-squip' it wouldn't sound as satisfactory as the alternative 'squip-squop', because the first version doesn't follow the rule, whereas the second does.

Reduplication is when a word is repeated two or more times. In English there are several kinds of reduplication, for example it can be used to amplify the sense of a word, so 'very very' is stronger than simple 'very' and 'big big' is stronger than just 'big'.

Rhyming reduplication is also very common: higgledy piggledy, silly billy, willy-nilly, Humpty Dumpty, raggle-taggle, easy-peasy (lemon squeezy), teeny-weeny, fuddy-duddy and so on.

Ablaut reduplication is a form of reduplication following a pattern called ablaut, in which semantically related words coming from the same root keep the same consonants but vary the vowel sounds in a predictable way. A classical example in English is sing, sang, sung. Notice that if you say these words aloud, you say the first at the front of the mouth, the second further back, and the third at the back of the mouth.

We have many expressions like; tip-top, tick tock, flim-flam, pitter-patter, jim-jam, and they pretty well all follow the ablaut pattern, with the first part being a higher vowel from front-of-mouth, and the second a lower vowel from further back. We even have some examples with three elements, such as tic-tac-toe and bish bash bosh.

This ablaut pattern is thought to be inherited from the ancient and lost language that is the ancestor of moist European and West Asian languages today. This language had no written form that we know of, and no longer exists, but has been extensively reconstructed from its more recent descendants.

A friend photographed this astonishing piece of street art outside Paddington Station. With the aid of Google Lens I found it is "Wild Table of Love", by Gillie and Marc.

"There's a nail in that tyre", Tom said flatly.

It's interesting to consider that back in the day, we'd never heard the expression "Back in the day".

The latest video in the excellent series Words Unravelled, with RobWords and Jess Zafarris, is devoted to "contronyms and other 'onyms'". Most people are familiar with words such as synonym, antonym, pseudonym, acronym, but I hadn't met contronym, which means a word with two meanings that are in some way opposite. For example I might sanction someone, which would mark my disapproval, but I might also sanction a course of action, which would mean I gave it my approval. 

The suffix -onyms is from the Greek for name, and there are quite a few -onyms apart from the ones about. Rob and Jess discuss a whole range of other other interesting -onym words.

I thought I'd explore a bit further and was intrigued to find a number that describe names for physical features of the landscape, each formed by taking an Ancient Greek word for the feature in question and adding -onym. These all refer to proper names, e.g. Helvellyn is an oronym, The Grimpen Mire is a helonym, The Black Forest a drymonym, and so on. Here are the words I managed to find.

agronym – field

anemonym – hurricane

drymonym – forest

helonym – swamp

hydronym – sea

limnonym – lake

oronym – mountain

spelonym – cave

Here are some things you might find in a cycene. Although the majority of words in English today have come from French, Latin, and other non-Germanic languages, most of these familiar domestic objects still have names very similar to their Old English equivalents. See if you can recognise what the objects are.

beod

bolle

cietel

cnif

cucler

cuppe

disc

hlædel

ofn

panne

sife

stol

I was reading a list of motivational quotes and there was one that said:

"Nothing is impossible"

But if so, finding something impossible is impossible. So there is something impossible after all.

Woodworm. That's a boring life.

I was watching a very interesting lecture on YouTube, From Ronald Ross to ChatGPT: the birth and strange life of the random walk, and the speaker said "WQ" was one of the few letter pairs that do not appear in English words, and then went on to suggest we could neologise a word "cowquake" and imagine a thunder of hooves.

Well, this was a challenge, surely "WQ" must exist in some real words. So of course I went to look for them.

1. Does "cowquake" exist? (You might argue it does now, even if it didn't before).

2. Are there any other words containing "WQ"?

This is what I found on initial investigation.

1. The OED has "cow-quakes", a name for quaking grass, but I guess the hyphen disqualifies it.

However I found a BBC reference to "cowquaker", an 'off the scale thunderstorm' that frightens the cows. So looks like cowquaker exists, even if cowquake is debateable. Still I couldn't find the word in the OED.

2. Googling for words with "WQ" in throws up many acronyms and company names, and the Cornish town Newquay, plus the odd unusual word in other languages. But these don't really count, and the only promising candidates I'd found by this point are "crowquill" and "snowquake". 

A crowquill is a quill pen made not from a goose feather but with a feather from a crow, and the name is now used for a fine-tipped metal nib for map drawing and similar work. The OED hyphenates the word though, and Merriam-Webster makes two words of it, so this is another disputable example.

As for "snowquake" neither the OED nor Merriam-Webster recognise it, although I did find an Urban Dictionary entry:

This is our new planter and some really gorgeous flowers.