'Mistletoe' comes directly from Old English mistiltan. There's general agreement the -tan element means 'twig' and comes from an old Germanic root with the same meaning. The first element mistle is less straightforward. It's derived from missel, an old word for, well, mistletoe and the origins of this are less clear.

One theory is that it's from a root that meant something like 'urine' or 'feces', from the fact that mistletoe seeds are spread in bird droppings. If so it would be related to 'micturate', i.e. urination.

But many, many plants are spread by bird droppings, so why should mistletoe be singled out in this respect?

Another possibility that mistletoe is named for a related concept of something sticky, and this is plausible, because the berries of mistletoe are indeed very sticky and do adhere to birds' beaks and plumage and get spread that way.

Some support might be offered to this theory from the fact that the Latin word for mistletoe is viscum, which also meant something sticky, and from which we get viscous.

As an aside, the French for mistletoe is gui, and this is one of those words that has endured some surprising changes. It's said that viscum evolved first into wiscum, under Germanic influence, then into gwy, guy and finally gui. (At this point you might be wondering about 'gooey' but sadly there is no connection that we know of.)

The Ancient Greek word was ἰξoς and this seems to be cognate withe the Latin viscum; originally it would have started with a 'w' sound ϝιξoς but the ϝ letter was lost from Greek quite early. There are many other examples of words where the Latin and Greek were similar but the V or W disappeared from the Greek word, for example vicus 'village' and οἶκος 'house' (as in ecology and economy)

I got this problem from the book Mathematical Puzzles, A Connoisseurs Collection and thought about it in the shower.

Here is my solution.

The least a subset can add up to is 0 and the greatest is 91 + 92 +... +100 = 955. The pair of subsets we want to prove exist can't have these values but that doesn't matter.

Imagine we have 956 buckets labelled 0 - 955. 

0    1    2    ...   955
🪣  🪣  🪣   ...     🪣 

Form each of the possible subsets of our 10 numbers, work out its sum, then put that subset in the bucket labelled with the corresponding number. For example the subset {1, 2} goes in the bucket labelled 3.

How may possible subsets are there? For any subset of our 10 numbers a given number is either in that subset or not, so we have 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 2¹⁰ = 1024 possible subsets.

But 1024 is bigger than the number of buckets, which is only 996. Therefore at least on bucket contains two or more subsets, which must have the same sum.

This pair of subsets are different but might overlap, if so remove the numbers they have in common. This cannot empty either or both of the sets because if it did it would mean they were the same, or had different sums, and neither of those things is true.

Hence we have proved a pair of subsets with equals sums must always exist. 

Pyrex of the Caribbean

“Meet Antony. He used to be a cab driver”, said Tom exuberantly.

“Sydney and I have been chums for absolutely ages”, said Tom frenziedly.

This image was generated by Copilot and it makes me laugh every time I look at it. I love the eager enthusiam on the cats' faces.

In mythology there are many divinities who ride in chariots drawn by exotic animals, but cats are unusual, although in Norse myth the goddess Freyja is pulled by a pair of cats. These are feisty beasts, as you can see in this illustration.

Credit: Ludwig Pietsch, 1865

Some sources say they are named "Bygul" and "Trejgul" but this is a little suspect, because there are Latin words Biga and Triga which mean respectively a two-horse and a three-horse chariot. So do the names reflect an Old Norse confusion about the meaning of the Latin words? Or perhaps a learned joke by a medieval scribe?

You can read more about bigae, trigae (and even quadrigae) in a fascinating article here.

I'm surprised I haven't come across this word game before. The way it works is player A thinks of a pair of rhyming words and tells player B a humorous definition for that phrase. B then has to try and guess the words. 

For example, if A says "Young cat's gloves', B needs to guess the answer "Kitten's mittens". 

Another example could be "Jovial parrot" = "Jolly polly". You get the idea. Can you work these out?

• Solitary pebble.
• Outstanding farm produce.
• Melancholy item of footwear.
• Narcissistic locomotive.
• Classy marine life.
• Better cruise ship.
• Polished detective.
• Red Square goblin.
• Amusing currency.
• More cheerful coal miner.

I got this from the Andy Math channel on YouTube. In a. we are asked to find the combined area of the two squares.

We have no information about the relative sizes, so how can we solved this? The YouTube video shows that is possible, by doing the calculations.

However the original statement of the problem already implies the sizes don't matter. So there is no need for calculation. We can just adjust the diagram as shown in b.,so that the big square has side length r, and the small square 0. Now we see the required sum of areas is r² + 0 = r². Simples!

“I don’t want social insects living in my ditch”, said Tom trenchantly.

I remember that at school we were taught never to use double negatives. Apparently they're a no-no.

"I love sleeping under canvas", said Tom intently.

xxx

This is a very famous sonnet and has attracted a large body of commentary, see here for example. Something that has often struck me about this and several other of Shakespeare's sonnets is the way he paints a scene, with a structure like the classic foreground, middle ground and distant background. This is a formula often discussed in art or photography lessons. Shakespeare however starts his word painting from the top - the background - and moves our mental eyes downwards, ending with the gilded streams at our feet. 

In fact this is the order in which I think I view a landscape painting; my eyes are drawn at first to the distance, and then I gradually focus on the parts of the composition representing the middle and near field.

The text above is based on the 1609 Quarto but I have made the punctuation more consistent. The image was AI generated courtesy of Bing.