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.

Although the Ancient Greek mathematicians discovered an enormous amount about geometry, in modern times a number of rather nice facts have been found that the Greeks didn't know about. One of these is Bottema's Theorem, named for Oene Bottema, a Dutch mathematician of the 20th century. It goes like this 

Suppose we have a triangle, PQR in the diagrams, and draw squares on two of its sides as shown. Draw a line joining the two vertices of the square that lie opposite to the vertex P and mark the midpoint U of the line that joins them.

Then the midpoint lies at the centre of a square resting on the base of the triangle and rather unexpectedly this is true wherever we move move the vertex P. The diagrams above show two positions of P and you can see that the position of U is indeed the same in both cases. 

There are quite a few websites that discuss the theorem and give proofs, and there are also some nice animations and YouTube videos that demonstrate the fact that the midpoint is independent of P's position. 

There are also some published variations on Bottema's theorem, but here is a neat one one I discovered by chance and  which I haven't seen anywhere and which is new, to me at least.

Bottema's theorem works not just for squares but for any regular polygon with an even number of sides. For example, here is an example where the polygons have six sides.

Notice that the midpoint M is now the centre of a third hexagon, rather than a square, resting on the bases of the square, and as with the square case the position of the midpoint does not depend on the position of vertex A.

If we instead erect octagons on the sides of the triangle then the midpoint will again be independent of the location of A, and will be the centre of an octagon resting on the base of the triangle. We can construct analogous configurations for any even number of sides, and the midpoint will always be fixed in the same way. I think that's rather neat and I was pleased when I discovered it.

“If I asked ever so nicely, could I have that sofa and chairs?”, asked Tom sweetly.