Personal Blogs

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 νεκροs, 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."

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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 21^st 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.

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

It is generally agreed that the first crossword was composed by Arthur Wynne and appeared in The New York World on 21^st 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 croissés

Spanish crucigramma

Welsh croesair

Here are languages that use crossword as a loan

Yiddish crossvert

Russian Krossoword Кроссворд

Georgian h'rosvordi კროსვორდი

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

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

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.