It's all Welsh to me

Had a med student trail me around for a few hours this evening.  He seemed like a decent guy, in that he was interested in discussing things other than medicine.  As a result, when he asked me to sign his "attendance book" (to prove that he bothered to turn up, a program probably instigated as a direct result of students like me who took the university's unofficial slogan of "Teach Yourself Medicine" rather too literally), I wrote some feedback in there to the effect that I thought his pronunciation was excellent and that I appreciated his willingness to contribute anecdotes from his extensive and esoteric background knowledge.

We had this strange conversation where somehow he ended up explaining the etymology of the word "dysdiadokinesia" to me.  Because it relates to Alexander the Great and his successors, I ended up talking to him about Ptolemy, and because that sounds vaguely like Potomac we ended up talking about the American civil war and Washington crossing the Delaware river.

Interestingly, when I got home I attempted to verify the etymology of dysdiadokinesia and found it less easy than I expected.  I ended up trying to use Google Translate to translate the word "diadochos" from Greek into English, but Google insisted that "diadochos" is actually Welsh.  Welsh for "diadochos" in fact.  However did we live before Google?

So then I tried translating "diadochos" from Welsh into Greek, and got "Διάδοχος", which I then translated back into English and got "successor".  The Diadochi were indeed the Macedonian successors of Alexander the Great, like Ptolemy (who ruled in Egypt).

But I'm still not so clear on what that has to do with dysdiadokinesia.  Oh well.

Modern primitive

The Hatchling doesn't really understand Newton's third law of motion - the one about "for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction". It hadn't occurred to me that kids actually have to learn this kind of thing, but I guess they do.


I'd been pushing her up and down the driveway on her little toy tractor. She can scoot herself along pretty well, Flintstone style, using her feet. But clearly it's much faster, less effort, and more fun to get me to push her. She would lean back as I pushed her in the small of the back, putting her feet up beside her hands on her steering wheel, and saying, "a-whee!"

It's all good fun, but I'm not as fit as I used to be when I was young, so after half a dozen times I got a bit puffed out and bent over so I told her that I need a rest and she can do it by herself. She pushed herself along for a metre or two, but then had a brainwave! She put her feet up on the steering wheel again, put one hand behind her back where my my hand had been, and gave herself a good push. All to no avail. She was most perplexed. And the upshot of it all was that I had to do another half a dozen runs up and down the driveway.

I downloaded a copy of Newton's Principia Mathematica and read it to her that night at bedtime. She fell asleep pretty quickly but I think she got the general gist of it.