Old Weather Forum

North!? Send Bono to the Southern

Hemisphere

to check on the Antarctic sea ice.

Antarctic sea ice is increasing (slightly) where arctic sea ice is noticeably decreasing. US EPA says: Without better ice thickness and ice volume estimates, it is difficult to characterize how the total amount of Antarctic sea ice is responding to climate change.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/ ... ic-sea-ice

Good idea. Perhaps he could

release

a song about the harm global warming and pollution is doing there.

It would seem appropriate to have

Seal

on backing vocals

There were

also

two Royal Navy ships, one Royal Navy submarine, and two American submarines named seal.

whereas most seals live in large

social

groups called colonies, they don't have close relationships and are usually

solitary

hunters.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/blog/seal-fact-sheet/

[take your pick]

I wonder if the seals get together over feed of fish and play

ryghtmathy?

(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/philosopher%27s_game)

The only known use of the noun ryghtmathy is in the Middle English period (1150—1500). OED's only evidence for ryghtmathy is from around 1450, in the writing of John Lydgate, poet and prior of Hatfield Regis. I wonder if the poet Douglas

Hyde

was inspired at all by Lydgate, or included seals in any of his poems. Douglas Hyde is on the Irish fifty-pound note. He was Ireland's first president, and a promoter and enthusiast of the Gaelic language.

[I was disappointed there was no picture of a ryghtmathy.]

Indeed!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hyde

Hyde set a precedent by reciting the Presidential

Declaration

of Office in Irish. His recitation, in Roscommon Irish, is one of a few recordings of a dialect of which Hyde was one of the last speakers.

One

of the last speakers, you say (well Wikipedia, to correctly cite sources), interesting.

Language revival is the attempt to re-introduce an extinct language in everyday use by a new generation of native speakers. The optimistic

neologism

"sleeping beauty languages" has been used to express such a hope,though scholars usually refer to such languages as dormant.

I fear that there is

small

hope for that

You may find some people who speak Welsh in

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, officially Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (pronounced llan-vire-pooll-gwin-gill-go-gare-urch-wyn-drob-ooll-andus-ilio-gogo-goch), also known as Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll, Llanfair PG or just Llanfairpwll, is a large village and community on Anglesey, an island in Wales.

There is a small resurgence in the speaking of Welsh. Good to hear that.

Do the welsh have an analogous cheerio? "The toast of cheers, had been around well before then and it was a common custom, when somebody was leaving on a long trip to share a libation with them to toast them on their way. The toast being given being cheers. This was known as cheering off, which was corrupted to

cheerinoff

then to cheerio."

[there you go, another double letter to hunt down...]

You could say cheerio to me as I go for a walk in the (double letter back at you )

ffridd

Areas in Wales (pronounced 'frith' and also known as coedcae) with forest-like characteristics, diverse habitats between lowland and upland, a mixture of grass and heathland with bracken, scrub (often hawthorn and gorse) or rock exposures and may also include flushes, mires, streams and standing water, almost exclusively found on slopes and often grading gently into upland mosaics and lowland pasture and woodland

Some great words can be found here
http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/forests/glossary.htm

Hwyl fawr for now.

Did you go anywhere near the Afon

Ddu

?

I'm glad someone found a dd word. I couldn't find any welsh du words or places, instead I offer

Dustanburgh

Castle. a 14th-century fortification on the coast of Northumberland in northern England, between the villages of Craster and Embleton.

Does the castle have a

ghost

?

If it did then it could be the

star

of this story.

According to https://great-castles.com/dunstanburghghost.html there are a couple of ghosts here: Thomas Plantagenet, Margaret of Anjou, and Sir Guy the Seeker. And here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Crh6N6FyE4 you can find out something about the castle's

architecture

(and includes a ghost story).

I've visited Dunstanburgh Castle, I don't remember seeing any ghosts but it was a

really

long time ago (and during the day which might be more significant!)