What’s the antonym of the antonym of synonym?
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A Hydronym is the name of an individual pond/lake/stream/river/sea/ocean, as ‘The Round Pond’, ‘Lake Superior’, ‘The Tyburn Brook’, ‘The Yangtze’, ‘The South China Sea’, ‘The South Pacific’.
I came across the word when looking up the River Rhine (Wagner had come up in a quiz we did last night) and it appears that it is just the ancient Celtic name and means ‘flowing’. There is a river Reno in Italy which shares the same name origin. And the Greek roi meaning flow may be related. See also Rhône.
Names of rivers tend to be conservative : new arrivals may speak a different language but often just go with the flow and retain local names of physical features such as hills and rivers. And quite often the local name is not really a name so much as the literal description. For example, ‘Avon’, just means river, as in modern Welsh Afon.
Particularly interesting is ‘Ouse’. This is thought to be from Celtic usso = water. The word is cognate with, that is to say has the same root, as ‘water’, and Russian voda, from which vodka, ‘little water’, is derived. And these are cognate with Gaelic uisce, which is seen in the word whiskey, using beatha =‘ water of life’.
A stunning map of different names for "cheese" across the regions of Europe. There are some interesting geographical patterns, but a few suprises too. Cheese is from Latin caesus = cheese but in Rome nowadays cheese is fromaggio, but notice Sardinia is more conservative. Good to see Manx and Friesian are recognised.
Credit: https://i.imgur.com/v8rfMC4.png
Make sure to only buy genuine false teeth. Don’t be a “tooth mug”.
WE were looking tonight at a famous picture by John Constable.
It is a wild and romantic scene and strangely some of the lighting felt to us like the Salvador Dali picture The Peristence Of Memory.
The image is from Wikimedia Commons
Our new start-up is a messaging system that doesn't rush people. We've named it e-snail.
Here is our logo
🐌 📧
What do you call someone who tricks a senior police officer?
Super duper.
Prompted by a YouTube post from Tim Spector of the ZOE Covid symptom study, I thought about how I have fared. In health terms, where have I improved, where have I done worse, and where have things stayed more or less the same?
Diet. +3: More fresh produce, more veg, more fibre, trending to less meat, especially red or cured. Ready meals right down.
Keeping in touch with family and friends. +2: In these times I’ve reached out a lot to others and they to me. So more contact, but not as good as meeting in person of course.
Exercise. -1: I’m restricted anyway in what I can do but it’s been notched down now.
Sleep pattern. -0.5: it’s always been erratic and lockdown has made it a little worse.
Alcohol. The same: a bit high but little change if any.
Imagine the lockers are numbered 1 - 100.
Each locker switches from closed to open, or vice versa, whenever it is a multiple of 1, then of 2, then of 3, of 4 etc.
So it switches as many times as its number has factors. For example locker 6 will be switched by person 1, person 2, person 3 and person 6.
If a locker is switched an even number of times it will be back where it started, i.e. closed. So lockers whose number has an even number of factors will end up closed. Conversely lockers whose number has an odd number of factors will be switched an odd number of times and end up open.
Which numbers have an odd number of factors? As a rule factors occur in pairs of distinct numbers; for example
6 = 1 x 6 = 6 x 1
6 = 2 x 3 = 3 x 2
However the exception are square numbers, which by definition have a factor (the root of the square) which is not one of a distinct pair. For example
9 = 1 x 9 = 9 x 1
9 = 3 x 3
Square numbers, and only square numbers, have an odd number of factors. So we conclude that the lockers that are open at the end are just those numbered 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81 and 100.
I found this nice puzzle on math.stackexchange.com. I hadn't seen it before.
In a school hallway there are 100 closed lockers. 100 people walk through the hallway one after another.
The first person changes the state of every locker from closed to open,
The second person changes the state of every second locker, from open to closed,
The third person changes the state of every third locker, from open to closed or vice versa,
The fourth person changes the state of every fourth locker, from open to closed or vice versa,
and so on, right on until the hundreth person, who changes the state, open or closed, of every hundredth locker.
At the end which of the lockers are open?
Answer tomorrow.
Cos it was on a roll!
I love its salty taste.
Plus it's the only word in English with six vowels all 'a' s. Maybe.
The OED allows Taramasalata, but sadly, in Greek it's Taramosalata (Ταραμοσαλάτα).
Pity.
Ti krima.
τι κρίμα
When first I saw you
When you’d gone out the door
When they were all saying shessuchaloverlygirl
I never forgot that moment.
What surprises me is how little these words have changed in a thousand years, and also that if you speak them aloud, articulating all the letters, you get a kind of feel from how they might have sounded then.
an | forma |
twa | oðer |
ðreo | ðridda |
feower | feorða |
fif | fifta |
siex | siexta |
seofon | seofoða |
eahta | eahtoða |
nigon | nigoða |
tien | teoða |
forma and oðer have been replaced by first (which looks like a natural vowel and then consonant shift perhaps, I think the German is erste) and second, from Latin secundus.
Fado is a traditional Portuguese song genre. Someone once said it is the Portuguese equivalent of Flamenco, but I'm not sure that is wholly accurate; there are Fado dances but it seems to be primarily a vocal form. The word fado perhaps means fate.
If you don't know about Fado, Google it and there are lots of hits. My favourite singer is Amalia Rodrigues (1920 - 1999); she of the heartbreaking voice, a great Fadista; but there are many other artists I like. Mariza is very good too, I think.
I went to a fancy dress party in a costume made of porridge. I called it my Oat Couture.
Foxes gather at an old tree on New Year's Eve. On the way they set foxfires, which farmers can count to predict the rice harvest.
By Hiroshige, 1857; see https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/55553
These elegant birds (altho the one of the right looks a bit grouchy) are Cattle Egrets. These birds (like many others) have been steadily extending their territory northward. (I suppose similar things have happened in the southern hemiphere, although less perhaps, since land masses are more separated there.)
My brother Simon snapped these Cattle Egrets in Bedfordshire.
Cattle Egrets are often seen in wildlife documentaries, usually perched on the back of cattle. They pick out and eat ticks and other pests, and it's a form of symbiosis. But round here they don't seem to do this; probably because there are relatively fewer cattle, and more other food opportunities, as seen in the photo.
If your gran has corn from us,
Lay her to rest in a granary.
Ants you can trust to get your sums right for you.
Grallitorial, a word describing long-legged birds like herons or cranes. From Latin grallae = stilts and later grallitorius = one on stilts.
While I was having my dinner this puzzle occurred to me.
Assume the quadrilateral is convex, and has no re-entrant corners of the sort shown in this example.
After a bit of sketching quadrilaterals and points, I saw what the really beautiful answer is. Scroll down to read more.
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Then I went off to do some research, and of course there is nothing new under the sun. Fagnano wrote about this question ca. 1750. But similar questions still arouse research interest. Suppose we had different ways of measuring distance? Or we weren't on a flat surface? Or what about 4 points in space? Or more than 4 points in the plane?
I sent my friend a joke about failed deliveries. But he didn’t get it.
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