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Richard Walker

Tom Swifty

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

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Richard Walker

The Food of the Gods

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Edited by Richard Walker, Wednesday, 10 July 2024, 23:08


The Olympian Gods and Goddesses on Mount Olympus lived on ambrosia. I've never thought much about what ambrosia was, I just assumed it was some delicious food reserved for deities and denied to mortals, and probably so delightful that the gods could put up with eating it day after day ("Oooh goody, ambrosia again, my favourite.")

However I just found out this diet is what made the gods immortal.

I'm currently reading the wonderful book Words from Hell by the witty and erudite Jess Zafarris, who blogs, writes and makes podcasts about etymology. Reading the origins of the word murder, I was astonished to find the word ambrosia shares a common origin with murder. Whatever is the connection between these two things?

It turns out they are both descended from a root that was something like mer-, which means rub out or harm or die and which appears in many words like mortal and mortuary and so on. It pops up in ancient Greek as ἄμβροτος, ambrotos. The a- means not and mbrotos meant mortal, so the word ambrosia literally meant "not-mortal".

The Greek gods also had a special drink, nectar. This seems to mean essentially the same thing; the Ancient (and modern) Greek νξκροs, necros, means dead or death, and the -tar element is from a root tere which has the sense of through or crossing or overcoming. So nectar helped the gods overcome death and was the perfect drink to have with your ambrosia.

At least if you were an Olympian deity you didn't have to worry about what to have for lunch. This reminds me of an anecdote about the physicist Richard Feynman, who wrote about the problem of choice and said "... when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again."

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Richard Walker

Somewhere over the rainbow

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Speaking of rain I saw this rainbow this other day. Although rainbows are a familiar sight, when one appeared all the people around me were quite excited, and I was too.


This got me wondering what rainbows are called in other languages. Is the name a compound, similar to the English rain+bow? On a quick look I found some where it was, and one or two rather different. 

German is regen-bogen, evidently cognate with the English. Old English had regnboga, also very close, but it also had scurboga, and recalling that "sc" in Old English was pronounced as "sh" this would be shower-bow, which rather sadly is now lost. I think we shyould bring it back.

In French we have arc-en-ciel, "arc in the sky", so no reference to rain. Italian is arco baleno, which I think means something like "arc-flash", so that's a bit different, but still has the bow theme.

Latin was iris, borrowed from Ancient Greek I think. Iris was personification of the rainbows. Her name may have originally been Wiris, starting with the archaic digamma, a letter lost in later Greek.

Modern Greek has a different word from Ancient Greek and it baffled me at first, ourano toxo. But after some head-scratching I recalled that Uranus was the personification of the sky and toxo means bow (as in toxophilite, one who likes archery, and the word archer must also be related to arcs/bows). So the Greek expresses the same idea as the French arc-en-ciel.

The last one I looked at was Welsh, which has enfys. The etymology of this is trickier. The en- bit could be an "intensifier", a prefix that adds some kind of emphasis to the following element, and the fys part could be connected to finger or ring, so the origin might have been something like great ring.

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Richard Walker

Tom Swifty

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“That egg isn’t going anywhere”, said Tom ecstatically.

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Richard Walker

Raining again

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Edited by Richard Walker, Saturday, 6 July 2024, 13:15

I don't know what the weather is like where you are but where I am it's

Raining. Again.

I thought of the nursery rhyme

"Rain, rain, go away/Come again another day",

and that set me wondering if there is a similar children's verse in other languages.

When I tried French, I stumbled across the wonderful Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames, by Luis d'Antin van Rooten, which the author claims were verses "From the d'Antin Manuscript, Discovered, Edited and Annotated".  [1][2]

Here's Verse 16. Try reading it aloud in your best French accent

Reine, reine,
gueux ĂŠveille.
Gomme Ă  gaine,
en horreur, taie."

Van Rooten provides scholarly note to help us with the archaic language of the verses, for example Verse 16 he explains as

"Queen, Queen, arouse the rabble
Who use their girdles, horrors, as pillow slips."

Here are a couple more titles from the book - can you work them out?

Et qui rit des curĂŠs d'Oc?

Lit-elle messe, moffette

[1] Wikipedia

[2] Blue Ridge Journal


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Richard Walker

Evening at Godrevy, 2 July 2024

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Richard Walker

Tom Swifty

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“My cuddly bear is luminous”, Tom gloated.

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Richard Walker

Astonishing 7-Symmetric Tiling

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This astonishing tiling with 7-fold symmetry is build from identical pentagonal tiles.


I find the way it is constructed fascinating.

The drawing is by Tom Ruen and I think the discoverer of the pattern was Klaassen, who showed in 2016 that a similar pentagonal tiling can be found for any degree of symmetry, see here.

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Richard Walker

Tom Swiftie

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“I’m here”, said Tom presently.

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Richard Walker

St Neot - A medieval bone-grab

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Edited by Richard Walker, Saturday, 29 June 2024, 17:20

St Neot, d. 877, was was a monk from Glastonbury Abbey who moved to Cornwall to be more isolated (the word monk is from Greek μονος monos = alone). His piety and devotion made him famous and a number of miracle were connected with him. He visited the Pope, and on the latter's bidding found a monastery in Cornwall, where his remains were kept after his death. The relics attracted many pilgrims and an associated flow of income. Here is a rather impressive stained glass window from the church in St Neot's in Cornwall.


About a hundred years on a different monastery was founded in Cambridgeshire, at what was then called Eynesbury (probably after an earlier saint who may have existed called Arnulf) but is now named St Neot's.

Monks from this second abbey seem to have though St Neot's remains would be a useful pull for pilgrims, so they travelled to Cornwall and the saint's remains were (as Wikipedia delicately puts it) "abstracted from Cornwall without permission, and lodged at Eynesbury". In other words monks from Cambridgeshire went to Cornwall, snatched the bones and brought them back home.

Sure enough these relics brought a stead stream of visitors and a healthy revenue flow, but stealing these bones has always seemed to me a rather discreditable and cynical act, and I've often wondered too why the Cornish monks never staged a counter raid. Who knows?

 

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Richard Walker

Varignon and beyond

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Edited by Richard Walker, Friday, 28 June 2024, 16:02

Varignon's Theorom says that if we take any quadrilateral whatsoever and join the midpoints of its sides we (rather surprisingly) always get a parallelogram


I give a neat and I hope fairly intuitive proof here.

Today I read about an elegant generalisation of this theorem. The page I've linked to has much more that this, but in my diagram below, which I drew using Geogebra, I've  just illustrated the first case.


For any hexagon, STUVWX in the figure, form a triangle from each group of three adjacent vertices in turn. Mark the centroid, i.e. the centre of gravity, of each triangle, and join them up to form a hexagon A1B1C1D1E1F1 as shown.The each pair of opposite sides of the new hexagon are parallel and of equal length, in other words the new hexagon is analogous to a parallelogram, but with six sides rather than four.

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Richard Walker

Tom Swifty

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Edited by Richard Walker, Thursday, 27 June 2024, 23:37

"I seem to be developing tooth decay", said Tom precariously.

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Richard Walker

Local Saying

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Today I picked up a local saying I'd not heard before:

"He's ninety-twelve years old".

Meaning he's very old. I like it, it's vivid and humorous.

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Richard Walker

Earthlings and other -lings

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I always thought of "Earthling" as a fairly modern sci-fi type of word but I've learned from the excellent "Words Unravelled" podcast and YouTube channel that it was already word in Old English. It meant a ploughman and was still used in that sense until the early 1800s. From about 1600 it came to have the modern sense of someone who lives on the Earth.

It's interesting because it uses the suffix -ling, which has several loosely related meanings. Originally in OE it (usually) implied a person concerned with or related to some particular thing (hence earthling) and we also have hireling (someone hired) and sibling (originally a kinsman, now just a brother or sister of course, and I used to think it was just a modern word, but not so). Starling the bird also seems to use the same construction, and birds crop again below

Nowadays it can just be a diminutive, as in gosling, duckling, sapling or nestling, but can sometimes also have dismissive connotations, the OED gives the examples godling, lordling, kingling, princeling.  A princeling is definitely some way down the scale of princeliness (yes it really exists).

Chat GPT threw up quite a few more: weakling, fledgeling, hatchling, seedling, underling, yearling, changeling, foundling, stripling, mostly implying some sort of smallness or weakness.


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Richard Walker

Tom Swifty

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"I love camping", said Tom intensely.

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Richard Walker

Sun Dog

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Sun Dogs are caused by the light from the Sun being refracted by ice crystals. My brother snapped this one a couple of days ago, on the 21st of June.


They appear 22 degrees horizontally from the Sun and if you are lucky one on each side of the Sun, depending where the ice crystals are, although it's commoner to only see one.

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Richard Walker

Dad Joke du jour

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What’s the most difficult tongue twister? It’s hard to say.

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Richard Walker

Dad Joke

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I'll never forget the time I got wax in my ears. It was a near deaf experience.

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Richard Walker

Pixie Cups

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My brother photographed this astonishing lichen, Cladonia pyxidata, or Pixie Cups.


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Richard Walker

Loanwords vs Calques, with special reference to 'Crossword'

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It is generally agreed that the first crossword was composed by Arthur Wynne and appeared in The New York World on 21st December 1913. Wynn's pioneering word cross as I think he called it is below.


You can see it still had a way to go before it evolved into its modern form. If you decide to have a go and get stuck there are some leads here.

In the more than a hundred years that have passed, crosswords have found their way into most of the world's newspapers, or so I imagine. This set me wondering about what the word for crossword is in other languages. The only one I knew was Greek stavrolexo, which is a literal translation, the stravo bit means cross (as in the name Stavros) and the lexo bit mean word (think lexicon).

This way of exporting a word to another language is called a calque. The alternative is for the target language to adopt the original as a loanword. English has thousands of loanwords, think of bistro, delicatessen, opera, wok, tomahawk, safari, sushi, taco, kiwi, bungalow, budgerigar (not forgetting calque.)

I tried a few sample European languages to see whether crossword because a calque or a loanword and fond a mix. The main reason I stuck to European languages is that outside that group it's harder for me to decide if something is a calque. Lots of languages seem to just use the loanword but there could be ones that have a completely independent word for the concept, I can't really tell.

Here are the calquesI I found, apart from the Greek

German Kreuttzworträtsel (I think rätsel is puzzle)

French mots croissĂŠs

Spanish crucigramma

Welsh croesair

Here are languages that use crossword as a loan

Yiddish crossvert

Russian Krossoword Кроссворд

Georgian h'rosvordi კროსვორდი



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Richard Walker

Nostalgia - does it mean what it used to?

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Edited by Richard Walker, Tuesday, 18 June 2024, 00:41

I used to think nostalgia meant a kind of sentimental hankering for times gone by, our own times or a past age of our romantic imagining. But it seems that when it first came into English in the 1700s it meant homesickness, derived from Ancient Greek νόστος nostos = going home and αλγία algia = pain (as in neuralgia for example), and it only came to mean longing for a time rather than for a place during the last century. 

The modern Greek word νόσταλγία does indeed refer to homesickness but I haven't been able to find with certainty whether this has come directly from Ancient Greek or is a back-borrowing from English or perhaps French,

At any rate it is a beautiful word, with a lovely wistful feel to it, and its original meaning of homesickness is the one I prefer.

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Richard Walker

More Swifties

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“My shares have gone up”, said Tom again.

“I’ve got a loft full of whisky”, said Tom dramatically.

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Richard Walker

Tom Swifty

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“Just turn where I say, and you won’t get lost”, said Tom forthrightly.

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Richard Walker

Dragon Rapide

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Here's a classic aeroplane parked up at London City Airport earlier this week. It's a 1946 de Havilland Dragon Rapide, one of only around nine airworthy examples left. This one is normally based at Duxforn in Cambridgeshire.

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Richard Walker

Monge's Theorem

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Gaspard Monge was a French mathematician of the 18th and 19th century, a man of many parts who was a friend of Napoleon and took part in the latter's expedition to Egypt. He gave his name to a theorem in geometry which is easy to see in this illustration from Wikipedia (image by Jason Quinn).


Although it is usually presented as as theorem about circles and tangents it seems more general than that. Here is my drawing of an analogue for equilateral triangles, produced using GeoGebra.


For any pair of triangles, the lines drawn through pairs of corresponding points meet at a point, and for any set of three triangles taking the triangles in pairs produces three such points that all lie on the same line.

I don't think equilateral triangles are special, as far as I can see we could choose any shape.

Monge's theorem can also be generalised to three dimensions (four spheres and six cones, one for each pair of spheres, all of whose vertices lie on a common plane), and indeed to higher dimensions, although it obviously gets harder to visualise.

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