Climax in Copenhagen

Ghost story writer M.R. James, who taught at Eton, was a crossword fiend. He boasted that he could solve The Times crossword while his four-minute egg boiled. Another crossword fanatic questioned the claim in a cryptic letter to the editor. “He may have been to Eton,” punned the letter writer, “but I am sure the egg wasn’t.” Eton fostered many intellectuals. But Henry Salt did not savour his days there. Salt, born in Nainital, stormed out of Eton in 1884, calling his fellow teachers “cannibals in cap and gown” because they ate meat. He retired to a Walden-like retreat. Gandhi, who made salt at Dandi, learnt about civil disobedience from Salt’s biography of Thoreau. Gandhi bought Salt’s book on vegetarianism for a shilling in a London restaurant. “From the date of reading this book, I may claim to have become a vegetarian by choice,” Gandhi wrote in his autobiography. He had earlier wished that “every Indian should become a meat-eater, and had looked forward to being one myself.” Meat and two veg is an English meal that offers meat with potatoes and another vegetable. The fare is so traditional that the phrase meat and two egg means boring. But look before you gulp—it also stands for the male danglers. Money collected for a festival in Eton was known as salt. The price of salt has risen with vegetable prices. But it can never regain the status it had in medieval England. Only the rich could buy salt in those days. They kept the salt cellar on a high table for dinner. Their servants who ate at a low table got no salt. The expression below the salt, meaning inferior or lowly in status, arose from this division. Roman soldiers got no pay, but only a salt allowance called salarium. This word evolved into salary. The words sauce and sausage have the same root—they were salted food. But to sauce a girl means to bed her. Sausage, the male meat, needs no pay to rise and shine. Sauce and sausage should make an ideal breakfast in bed. Supreme Court judges are so sage. They ask why not legalise prostitution if you cannot control it. The preamble will no doubt cherish the kinship that constitution has with prostitution. Both words emerged from the Latin statuere (to stand), which also produced statue and statute, status and state. The demands of turgid manhood, like those for statehood, cannot be denied. Trust the government also to redress a grievous grouse about prostitutes—they play statue when you want to play trapeze. Statesmen trying to reduce emissions in Copenhagen should erect a statue of Louis XVI. He controlled emissions like nobody else did. The king and Marie Antoinette took several years to consummate their marriage. As French courtiers suspected an erection problem, Marie’s brother Joseph, king of Austria, came investigating. After questioning the couple, Joseph recorded: “In his conjugal bed he has normal erections. He introduces his member, stays there without moving for about two minutes, then withdraws without ejaculating, and still erect, bids good night. This is incomprehensible because sometimes he has nocturnal emissions, but while inside, and in the process, never. Oh, if I could only have been present once, I would have taken care of him. He should be whipped so that he would discharge semen like a donkey.” Big emitters like the Indians cannot aspire to be like Louis. They are passionate like the couple in the 17th century poem Walking in a Meadow Greene: They lay soe close together, they made me much to wonder; I knew not which was wether, until I saw her under. Then off he came, and blusht for shame soe soon that he had endit, Yet she still lies, and to him cryes, “one more and none can mend it”. Emote, by all means, but don’t emit. Let the world not end with a bang. wickedword09@gmail.com *This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in December 2009.

Brown for the bidet

Spanish invaders in Mexico discovered vanilla in 1521. Its pod looked like a sheath—vaina in Spanish—so they called it vainilla. Vaina is the same Latin vagina which ejected an English word that rhymes with hunt. Eve Ensler has tried to revive the word in her Vagina Monologues, though she didn’t dare put it in the title.

Vanilla has long ceased to be the spice of life. The word vanilla now means conventional, even boring. But vagina hasn’t shed a bit of its mystique. It has become more exalted that many women wouldn’t use it for delivery.

The UNDP says one in four children born in Mumbai bypasses the birth canal. They get ripped from their mothers’ wombs, like the man who killed Macbeth. Many women who prefer caesarian section hate to lose their grip down there. In some hospitals in Brazil, all births are caesarian.

Don’t blame Julius Caesar for the fad or the word. The claim that he was born in a caesarian section is baseless. Surgical deliveries in his time were always fatal for the mother. Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, lived long enough to see him marry three times. But there was a Caesar’s law that forbade burial of pregnant women before taking the foetus out. Caesarian section probably was named after it.

The word caesar became kaiser in Germany and tsesar (later tsar) in Russia. The Old Norse word for Caesar was keisari. This could be related to the Sanskrit kesari, meaning lion.

Manmohan Singh—a lion—likes the colour blue, not kesar (saffron). He sticks to blue turbans, and uses green against the Maoists in the Operation Green Hunt. The hunted in Chhattisgarh have fled to Andhra Pradesh, where the Greyhound commandos are alert. The Greyhounds may not know that the ‘grey’ in their name came from an Old Norse word for bitch. It had nothing to do with the colour grey. Grighund (bitch-dog) became greyhound.

Some colours have humbler origins. Crimson was made from insects called kermes. Arabs had called them qirmiz, borrowing the Sanskrit krimi, meaning worm. Another worm produced vermilion, sacred for Hindus. The colour was obtained from vermiculus, which is Latin for ‘little worm’.

Magenta is more inspirational. It was named after the Battle of Magenta, which furthered Italian independence. Indigo, named after India, had a role in the Indian freedom struggle. Indigo farmers in Bengal revolted against the British in 1859, and Gandhi led their Champaran struggle in 1917.

An associate of Gandhi in the Dandi march, a young Hindu, figures in Tropic of Cancer. Henry Miller takes him to a whorehouse in Paris, where "he was like a dog with his tongue hanging out". Unfortunately, he decides to use the bidet. Writes Miller: “As I am putting on my pants suddenly I hear a commotion in the next room. The girl is bawling him out, calling him a pig, a dirty little pig.”

The madam rushes in and drags Miller to the Hindu client’s room. “The five of us are standing there looking at the bidet. There are two enormous turds floating in the water…. The Hindu boy looks at me reproachfully. ‘You should have told me!’ he says. ‘I didn’t know it wouldn’t go down.’ He is almost in tears.”

Elmer Gertz, the lawyer who fought the ban on Tropic of Cancer, shed light on the Hindu boy in his book To Life. One of his fellow students at Chicago University was “Haridas T. Mazumdar, a Hindu who had written the first book in the English language on his master Gandhi.… I did not hear the name of Haridas after I left college, until I was discussing Tropic of Cancer with Henry Miller in 1962, in Minneapolis, and learnt the amazing fact that Haridas was the model for the Hindu in some fantastic passages in that highly original work.” Part of the originality came from the liberal use of the word that vagina usurped.
wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in December 2009.

Devil take the printer

Captain Bertie Clay developed a soft-nosed bullet at Dum Dum arsenal in Calcutta in the 1890s. Such bullets expanded on impact, and inflicted ghastly wounds. These came to be called dumdum bullets. The Hague convention of 1899 banned their use in “civilised warfare”. But the word dumdum means dumb-dumb.

Gordon Brown looks dumdum. He sent a handwritten condolence letter to a dead soldier’s mother, but got the surname wrong. “Dear Mrs James,” he began the letter to Mrs Janes, whose son Jamie Janes died young fighting somebody else’s uncivilised war in Afghanistan. The mother called it “a hastily scrawled insult”. Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan’s father felt the same way when he saw his son’s name misspelt as Unnikrishan at a war memorial.

Most Indians don’t mind misspellings. The old Dum Dum airport now preens as Subhash Chandra Bose airport. The final ‘h’ in Subhash is an insult to Subhas Bose. But the Fuhrer admired his surname, no doubt. Bose in German means evil. Bose onkel (evil uncles) is a German euphemism for child molesters.

Morarji Desai declared Jayaprakash Narayan dead seven months early, in 1979. India commemorates JP by mangling his name. JP is Jai Prakash for the government-run Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in Delhi. Its website swears by Jai Prakash. The Lok Nayak hospital in Patna is called Jai Prabha Hospital. It tries to mate JP with his wife, Prabhavati, who was a lifelong celibate.

Gandhi was Ghandy to many Englishmen. Feroze Gandy styled himself as Feroze Gandhi for political gain. Congress baiters would love to link him with Kobad Ghandy. Of all freedom fighters, Abul Kalam Azad’s name is the most abused. Even textbooks called him Abdul. Journalists were enamoured of A.B. Vajpayee. They spelt his middle name as Behari. It sounded grand and expansive like the man, unlike the actual name, the earthy Bihari.

To err is human; to forgive you need the wine. Ruth in the Bible lay with the merry Boaz to give him warmth at night, after he had eaten and drunk. Pleased, he gave her six measures of barley, and “then she went into the city”. In many copies of the King James Bible of 1611 “she went into the city” was misprinted as “he went into the city.”

The King James Bible of 1631 is called the Wicked Bible. Its printers forgot to put the word ‘not’ in one of the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt commit adultery,” it urged the faithful. The first Bible printed in Ireland, in 1716, offered similar advice. It encouraged the flock to “sin on more” instead of finger-wagging them to “sin no more”.

A printing error made Queen Victoria’s maiden visit to Ireland memorable. She enchanted the people while passing a bridge. A newspaper reported the spectacle: “The crowd broke into tumultuous applause as the Queen pissed over the bridge.” It was an Irish rebel in the newsroom who made the queen gush. He lost his job for the gumption.

Gum became an orgasmic discharge in The Wall Street Journal in 2004 when Singapore lifted the famous ban on chewing gum sale. The paper clarified: “It was never illegal to bring come into the country for personal use.”

The Hindu recorded inadequacies at the Madras General Hospital in 1995: “Another coin-box telephone near the trauma ward is defunct and yet another fucked away near the male medical ward.” The paper meant ‘tucked away’. But if gum can be come, coin-box phones can be amorously active. If in doubt, note their slit, and the penny drops.

Robert Browning would tip his hat to them. He used the word twat in the poem Pippa Passes without knowing its meaning: “Then owls and bats/ Cowls and twats/ Monks and nuns/ In a cloister’s mood/ Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry.” He thought twat meant hat. Both must have welcomed his head.
wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in November 2009.

Angels, warts and all

The clerics at Deoband who banned Vande Mataram and television missed The Lost Symbol. The book opens with the villain, Mal’akh, drinking wine from a skull. He is tattooed all over, even on his massive sex organ. Dan Brown says Mal’akh is named after the fallen angel Moloch, whom Milton mentions in Paradise Lost. In Arabic and Hebrew, all angels are called mal’akh. The word means God’s messenger.

Another Dan Brown baddie also has an Arab name: the Hassassin is the assassin in Angels and Demons. Hassassin were followers of Hassan, the Nizari Ismaili leader. The Crusaders who fought them attributed their ferocity to hashish. The Arabic word for hashish eaters was hashishiyyin. The word assassin came out of the confusion. Hassan was no hashish eater. He was a learned man who led an austere life.

Puritan Christians emulated Islamic austerity in Cromwell’s England. Cromwell banned all merrymaking. He shut the inns where liquor flowed and the theatres where bawdy bards warbled. Black burqa was thrust upon women, and makeup went out the window.

When Cromwell died, fun returned with knobs on. The king Charles II wrote naughty verse, like his Restoration poets. One of them, John Wilmot, lampooned the royal organ. Here is a printable part of the poem: “This you’d believe, had I but time to tell ye/ The pains it cost to poor, laborious Nellie/ Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth and thighs/ Ere she can raise the member she enjoys.”

In austerity, Cromwell had Indian mind. He broke his own rules, and made merry at his daughter’s wedding. But he was not vain, and told Sir Peter Lely, the portrait artist: “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.” Lely painted him as ordered, warts and all. The expression warts and all, meaning ‘even with all faults’, is now a cliché. But Mayawati, who is building a Stonehenge in Uttar Pradesh, could still use it.

Ancient Romans accepted General Fabius Maximus warts and all. They elected him consul while fighting Hannibal. Fabius had a wart on his upper lip, so they called him Warty (Verrucosus). But he was better known as the Cunctator (delayer) as he preferred attrition, slowly rubbing away, to full frontal attack. Cunctation in bed can prolong pleasure. The Fabian Society is named after him. Fabians like Bernard Shaw influenced Nehru, who chose the slow socialist path for India.

Pratibha Patil prefers supersonic speed. The President plans to fly on a Sukhoi-30 fighter jet. Her spunk should shame the Services into playing Ranji cricket in Kashmir. She was seen as a supermom when her son became an MLA. Flying Sukhoi in the G-suit, she would look like the Supergirl.

Shaw would have been thrilled to meet her. He coined the word superman in 1903 to translate ubermensch from German. Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, had defined ubermensch as a “highly evolved human being that transcends good and evil”. Before Shaw wrote the play Man and Superman, others had translated ubermensch as ‘overman’ and ‘beyond-man’. Both these words found few takers. But uber has flourished as a vogue word for ‘superlative’.

The German uber means 'above', like the Urdu uper. The Latin uber is altogether different. It means udder or breast. This uber is seen in exuberance, which originally meant copious flow of milk from the udder (ex uber). An exuberant person is effusive and full of sap. When the stock market is exuberant, the bulls slurp. Indians are exuberant after the Reserve Bank bought 200 tonnes of gold for $6.7 billion in November. But the economy, up against the wall, may not be getting the golden showers. The liking for such showers is called urolagnia.
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week in November 2009.

The three-fold path

Karunanidhi is most merciful. He has demanded Indian citizenship for Sri Lankan refugees in Tamil Nadu. Jayalalithaa says he is thereby “trivialising” the Tamil struggle in Lanka. But trivia is good for Alzheimer’s. It can irrigate brain cells.

Intellectuals feign contempt for trivia. Gossips love it. In modern politics, nothing can rival Churchill trivia. The prime minister walked about naked in his room and dictated letters in his bathtub. Franklin Roosevelt invited him to the White House in 1941. Churchill was dictating to his stenographer Patrick Kinna when the president knocked on the door. Churchill said, “Come in,” and Roosevelt entered and was dazzled by the pink pendant. “As you can see, Mr President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide from you.”

In a cartoon, Abu Abraham lampooned President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signing away ordinances in his bathtub during the Emergency. If Churchill were alive, he might have sued the cartoonist for copyright. Kinna died this year at age 95.

Sri Lankans, too, treasure their political trivia. Sir John Kotelawala was the prime minister when Queen Elizabeth II visited Colombo in 1954. At a reception, her skirt flew up and mushroomed in a sudden gust, and the prime minister shouted in Sinhala to the official photographer: “Ganing, yokko, ganing (Shoot, you beggar, shoot.)” The loyal photographer did not miss Her Thighness.

Trivia wasn’t always trivial. Trivia was a junction of three paths—tri is three and via means way. It became associated with titbits because people who met at crossroads exchanged gossip. Hecate Trivia, the Greek goddess of three paths, was the protector of newborns, women and households. Male chauvinists reduced her to the patron of witches. Panchsheel was based on the Buddhist eight-fold path. It became Hindi-Chini border trivia.

Scholars in the Middle Ages were called trivialists. They studied trivium, the lower division of a university course comprising grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the basics of the seven liberal arts. The higher division, quadrivium, had mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy.

Kotelawala lost the election in 1956 to Solomon Bandaranaike thanks to Buddhist bhikkhus who supported the ‘Sinhala Only’ campaign. Bhikkhu is a Pali word related to the Sanskrit bhikshu. A bhikshu begs food (bhiksha). The Russian word for food is pischa, which is related to bhiksha and possibly to the Tamil pichai and pichaikkaran (beggar).

The Russian word for brother (Sanskrit bhrata) is brat. That is apt. Bog, the Russian word for God, could be related to Bhagwan. God help Bengal’s Buddha. He might face another Mamata-Maoist kolahal if he acquires land for a Russian nuclear plant at Haripur. He should watch Kolokol Chernobylya, the first film on the nuclear accident. Kolokol means warning bell in Russian.

Indians are suckers for nuclear deals. Sugar in Moscow is sakhar. Sanskrit sharkara khanda and Persian shakar kand became French sucre candi and English sugar candy. Actor Pia Glenn, jilted by sugar daddy Salman Rushdie, says she isn’t the kind of woman who would be his “arm candy”. She all but called him midnight baby, a euphemism for bastard. The title Midnight’s Children is subversive.

Karl Marx, the communist god, had a midnight baby. The boy’s mother, Helen Demuth, had joined Marx’s wife as a maidservant at age 8. Marx never paid the proletarian for a lifetime of slavery in his house. Helen became pregnant in 1850, two years after Marx and Engels gave the call, “Workers of the world, unite.” She gave the child—Henry Frederick Demuth—the first and middle names of Marx and Engels, and her surname. It was perhaps a three-way thing. Marx forced Engels to own up the kid, but Engels in deathbed blew the lid. “Freddy is Marx’s son,” he told Eleanor, a daughter of Marx. Labour problems never go away.

wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine the Week (www.the-week.com) in October 2009.

Going for the jugular

Elizabeth Blackburn was asleep when she got the Nobel Prize call on October 5. “I thought I was dreaming,” she said, full of joy. That was natural—the Old English word dream meant joy. The Old English word for dream was swefn, which is the same as Sanskrit swapna. Their root, swep-no, meant sleep. Greeks pronounced swep-no as hypnos, just as Iranians pronounced the Sanskrit soma as homa.

The Scottish surgeon James Braid coined the word hypnotism in 1843, long after Franz Mesmer died. Mesmerism was considered black magic until an Indian monk in Paris, Abbe Faria, published a book on lucid sleep in 1819. His native Goa has an arresting bronze sculpture of him mesmerising a woman.

Faria led a battalion in the French Revolution and spent years in jail. He used yoga in his psychological research. His father was a master of yoga and mind control. Yoga means union or yoke. Veins in the neck are called jugular because they pass under jugulum, the yoke-shaped collarbone. Yoga gets under covers in conjugal, but if you listen hard you won’t miss the “jug jug to dirty ears”.

The tele-yoga teacher Baba Ramdev boasts he will cure mankind of all diseases in 20 years. His disciples bought a Scottish island last month to build a yoga centre. Scotsmen in kilts doing the headstand will make a pretty picture. Looking up, they could go bananas. A true Scotsman wears nothing under the kilt. Sergeants in Scottish regiments enforced the no-undies rule, and checked under kilts with a long-handled mirror. Guards at hotel gates use such mirrors to check under vehicles for bombs. Terrorism can spell the end of miniskirts.

Ramdev swears by the vedas. Veda is related to the Latin videre (to see, to know). So are wit, vision, video, visa and voyeur. After a conquest in 47 BC, Julius Caesar wrote: veni, vidi, vici—I came, I saw, I conquered. Young men plagued by premature release change the word order and lament, “I saw, I came….”

The Chinese on the border are going for the jugular, but India takes reporters to task. It has denied reports of incursions with a rare vehemence. But don’t fault China for giving Kashmiris paper visa, ignoring Indian passports. Visa was originally known as charta (paper) visa (seen). America is eager to shoehorn itself into Kashmir. Bill Clinton failed to become US special envoy to Kashmir, but count on the pants dropper to use his good orifices. The Organisation of Islamic Countries has appointed a special envoy for Kashmir. In literature, envoy is a message at the end of a poem. In the envoy to ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, Chaucer advises women: “Ever wag your tongues like the windmill.” Envoys are good at it.

In The Count of Monte Cristo, Abbe Faria helps the hero discover a treasure. Alexandre Dumas did not mention his Indian origins in the novel. Dumas did odd things. One winter evening, he allowed the novelist Roger de Beauvoir to join him and his wife, Ida, in bed, just to keep warm. Writes a literary historian: “In the morning Alexandre woke up first, looked at the two traitors, and then addressed de Beauvoir, ‘Shall two old friends quarrel about a woman, even when she’s a lawful wife? That would be stupid,’ and seizing his friend’s hand across Ida’s sleeping form, he added: ‘Let us become reconciled like the ancient Romans—on this public square.’”

Sharing a bed was a fine way of courtship in Scotland. No young Scot took his girlfriend out for a date. He simply asked her parents to let him share her bed at night. They went to bed fully clothed. Parents tucked the girl in a sack, leaving only the hands and face free for exploration. This was known as bundling, which should gladden modern marketing strategists. But keep an eye on the border—the Americans and the Chinese might do some bundling to turn up the heat on Pakistan.

wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in October 2009.

Count your cash cows

Goblins in Harry Potter speak gobbledygook. Others cannot understand their lingo. India’s nuclear mandarins speak in tongues about the “failure” of Pokhran II. Nobody can make sense of their glossolalia. Bombay-born British educator Frederic Farrar coined the word glossolalia in 1879. American legislator Maury Maverick coined gobbledygook to twit bureaucratese. He did it in a wartime memo in 1944, threatening in jest to shoot anyone using words like activation and implementation.

His grandfather Samuel Maverick was more famous. His name yielded the word maverick. This Texas engineer did not brand the calves in his cattle ranch. So other ranchers called unbranded calves maverick. Later, maverick came to mean ‘masterless’ and then ‘unconventional person’.

Shashi Tharoor is a maverick calf in politics. He tweeted in jest about the government’s austerity drive. He said he would travel “cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows”. The prattle class was pleased, but hidebound Congressmen demanded his head. ‘Hidebound’ originally indicated skinny cattle with the ribs and backbones sticking out.

Cattle class is economy class for the British and coach class for Americans. Sailors called it steerage—the lowest deck, full of foul air. It was slightly better than the cargo hold. Steerage got its name from rudder ropes that veined the deck. Almost half the 2,566 passengers of the Titanic travelled cattle class.

James Cameron writes in Titanic film script: “Steerage passengers, in their coarse wool and tweeds, queue up in moveable barriers like cattle in a chute. A health officer examines their heads one by one, checking the scalp and eyelashes for lice.” Two unruly boys and their uncouth father shove past Rose’s fiancé, the uber-rich Cal. “Steerage swine!” says Cal, iceberg-cold. “Apparently he missed his annual bath.”

Manmohan Singh saw no sting in Tharoor’s tweet. The capitalist economist knows the value of cattle. The word cattle comes from Latin capitale, meaning property. As cattle moved, it was moveable property. This meaning survives in the legal term ‘goods and chattels’. Chattel was cattle in French.

Cattle represented the wealth of ancient migrants. Romans called their domestic animals pecu. Indians called theirs pasu. Pecu produced the words pecuniary (relating to money) and peculiar. Peculiar meant private property in the form of cattle. The Jews were known as Peculiar People—God’s chosen people, who owned private property and had money. For many Jews, money-lending was heaven.

The government has asked IIMs and IITs to increase fees. This should make cattle burp in satisfaction. The word fee comes from the Old German fihu, meaning cattle. Some Harvard professors had a cattle perk—they could graze their cows on the university campus. Professor Harvey Cox, author of The Secular City, took that privilege on September 10. He took a cow to his retirement party in Harvard. The English cow is a clone of the Sanskrit gau, though gau sounds hoarse like deep-throated Tharoor.

Sonia Gandhi knows that Italy (Viteliu) means land of cattle. The Latin word for calf is vitulus. Sonia flew cattle class from Delhi to Mumbai on September 14. Don’t connect her with Tharoor’s “holy cows”—unless he had ‘sacred cows’ in mind. Holy Cow is just an interjection, a swearword like Holy Mackerel. A sacred cow is something or someone you can’t question.

The Sacred Band was an elite unit in the Theban army. Alexander annihilated them. The Sacred Band consisted of 150 pairs of gay lovers. Thebans theorised that lovers would stick by each other in crunch time and battle hard. It was like the commando buddy system. Buddy has a queer past. The word originated as butty (workmate) in coalmines, where miners worked in close proximity, butt to butt.
wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in September 2009.

A hot dog on a leash

A tin trunk held everything Nripen Chakraborty owned. He lived in a single room and was chief minister of Tripura for ten years. George Fernandes washed his own clothes in a bucket even when he was defence minister. A half-naked fakir washes a long piece of white cloth in a river in the film Gandhi. He lets the cloth slip from his fingers and float towards a woman in rags. He looks away so that she can take it without embarrassment. “Her lips almost part in a tiny smile of thanks,” reads the screenplay. Gandhi’s eyes narrow with pain.

S.M. Krishna lived for months in a Maurya Sheraton suite costing the earth. He took the trouble for his love of simplicity—sheraton is a furniture style noted for its simplicity. Pranab Mukherjee, who ejected him, hardly knows the root of austerity. The word austere, meaning dry, was originally used to describe brandy, not ‘Gandy’. Krishna said he would make “private arrangements” to continue living in luxury. He spoke like a stoic, a philosopher with the stiff upper lip. The word stoic comes from Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch in Athens where stoics taught endurance.

The Painted Porch had frescos of the battle of Marathon. More than stoics, ascetics were associated with Marathon. Ascetics were Greek athletes who trained hard for gymnastic competitions. They followed rigorous self-discipline. The word ascetic later came to mean a monk who showed such rigour. Shashi Tharoor, who camped in the Taj Mahal hotel, declined to live in the Kerala House because it offered no privacy or gym. He no doubt knows that ancients who went to gyms trained naked, showing off their privates. Gymnos means naked in Greek.

Gymnosophists were naked philosophers the Greeks sighted in India after Alexander’s invasion. These were mainly Digambara (sky-clad) Jain monks. The invaders would have paid attention to gymnosophists’ danglers. The Greeks knew how to restrain their own privates. Their athletes tied a leather strap to the foreskin to stop the penis from dangling during competitions. The other end of the strap was tied round the base. Baring the glans, even by accident, was considered inelegant.

The foreskin restraint was called kynodesme, meaning dog on a leash. Kynikos means doglike. This word evolved into English cynic. Cynics were a school of philosophers noted for their sneering sarcasm. While sneering, they tended to bare their teeth like snarling dogs. Their gymnasium in Athens was known as the Grey Dog. The anti-Naxalite Greyhounds of Andhra Pradesh are all teeth and no leash.

The cynic Diogenes, who lived in a barrel and slighted Alexander, was an exhibitionist. He fondled himself in public, saying, “If only I could soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly.” The Japanese call male masturbation senzui—it means a hundred rubs. They call the female variety manzumi, meaning ten thousand rubs. The arithmetic could be faulty, but women take a longer time than men.

The book Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod, has such words and expressions from different languages. In Japanese, Bakku-shan is a girl who looks good from behind but not so from the front. Zaftig in German is a buxom woman full of juice (zaf means sap). Don’t expect the frau to dote on die toten hosen—the dead trousers—meaning a boring place or an impotent man. She would rather chase Italians adept at carezza. Carezza is marathon sex, coitus prolongatus, avoiding emission.

Fijians call unfaithful husbands vori vori (ball ball). Large corn flour balls swim in this thick soup. Sops that German philanderers offer to pacify their suspicious wives are called dragon fodder. The dragon sniffing at the Arunachal border is itching for trouble. The best way to provoke Chinese brass hats is to send them green hats. If you tell a Chinese that he wears a green hat, you imply that his wife is cheating on him. A hard hat is a helmet. Helmet also means glans, the private red hat.
wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in September 2009

A bone of contention

Tamiflu maker Roche pays Gilead Sciences 18 per cent as royalties. Gilead holds the patent. Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of Gilead before he became US secretary of defence in 2001. He is still its major shareholder. Rumsfeld's assets zoomed when President Bush saw doom in the avian flu in 2005—he falsely predicted 2,00,000 flu cases in the US. India is now the land of opportunity for the flu gang.

Gilead is a biblical name meaning hill of testimony. The word testimony shares its Latin root, testis, with testicle. Not all etymologists agree that witnesses in ancient Rome put their hands on their testicles while testifying in court. But a testicle touch indicated trust. Abraham asked his servant to put his hand “under my thigh” and swear that he would bring a god-fearing bride for Isaac.

Judges in India agonised over their own assets in August. They behaved like bikinis on the beach: ready to reveal, but denying a closer look. Manmohan Singh worried about pendency. It is an old infirmity. He offered to “walk the extra mile” to level the pile of pending cases. The phrase “go the extra mile” is from the Bible. A Roman soldier on the march carried heavy arms and other stuff. Law allowed him to collar a passerby to carry his load for a mile. The carriers hated it. Jesus preached them love: “Whoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” That is the extra mile.

The Swiss Banks Association has lent Indian fat cats an extra smile. It says it will not allow any fishing expedition by India. A fishing expedition is a legal investigation with the idea of discovering something that can be used for later proceedings. A fishing story is an exaggerated account. You lay it thick.

A whaling expedition epic, Moby Dick, has the best opening line in American literature. “Call me Ishmael,” it goes. The Bulwer Lytton Prize, a mock award, is given for worst opening lines. Lytton's novel Paul Clifford opens thus: “It was a dark and stormy night.” The silly prize this year went to a man who wrote a paragraph about a night on a whaler ship.

Arabs trace their roots to the biblical Ishmael. They call him Ismail. He was born when his father, Abraham, was 86 years old. Yet, Abraham fell to the ground, rolling in laughter, when God said he would have another son, Isaac. Abraham was then 99. All God wanted in return was a circumcision treaty. Abraham and Ishmael obliged with their foreskin.

Ishmael is a telepathic gorilla in David Quinn's book Ishmael. Quinn says the rib that God took from Adam to create Eve was actually a bone in the penis. Man lacks this bone, which most other mammals have. Man's evolutionary cousins the gorilla and the chimpanzee are equipped with it. The Hebrew word for rib was a euphemism for the bone. Quinn traces the seam on the scrotum and on the underside of the shaft as telltale proof of the divine surgery.

Scientists call the bone baculum. Arun Shourie, who often quotes from Alice in Wonderland, might hit the roof if told that the rabbit does not have it. But the walrus, which sings of cabbages and kings, has an impressive one. It could be even 2.5 metres long.

Scientist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, is a staunch evolutionist. He says, while evolving from apes, females found baculum-less males healthier, and so more interesting in bed. This sexual selection led to “boneless” babies and eventual extinction of human baculum. Sufferers of erectile dysfunction can forgive neither the women nor God.

Horses and hyenas have no baculum. Nor do whales and dolphins, though the latter have quickies many times a day. They have enormous desire and can romance human beings. Next time a dolphin tries to save you from drowning in the sea, take care to cover your base.
wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in September 2009.

Go on a leather hunt

Calicut gave English the word calico, and Kashmir yielded cashmere. Machilipatnam, once known as Masulipatnam, perhaps supplied the word muslin. Cambric cotton from Cambrai in France gave them stiff competition. Levi Strauss took canvas cloth from Genoa in Italy to pitch tents in America. The cloth from Genoa came to be called jeans. The cloth he took from Nimes in France, called serge de Nimes, became denims. English has hundreds of such words derived from names of places. These are called toponyms.

Michigan bankroll, a toponym, is a bundle of notes with real currency only at the top and the bottom. The CBI trapped Sarabjot Singh with such bundles. A Chinese compliment is a polite interest in others’ views when one has already made up one’s mind. Note how Beijing seeks to build strategic trust with New Delhi, when a Chinese think-tank wants India balkanised into 20 to 30 countries.

Aamir Khan is producing a loose motion picture, Delhi Belly. But it may well be a story of love in the time of cholera, not just traveller’s diarrhoea. Delhi belly initiates visitors to the capital’s culinary cruelties. Mexican two-step is another name for alimentary canal unplugged. It compels the sufferer to leap to the loo.

“I gotta go pee, I gotta go home,” whimpers Yolanda, the restaurant robbing woman, in Pulp Fiction. She is in a Mexican stand-off, an impasse of three or more people holding guns to one another’s head. The director Tarantino stages yet another Mexican stand-off in his latest film, the queerly spelt Inglourious Basterds.

A Mexican raise is a promotion with no increase in pay. An Irishman’s rise is less pay for doing the same job. Irish toothache is something swollen—either an erection or a pregnancy. Tata honcho R. Gopalakrishnan keeps a toothbrush handy. “I brush after every meal,” he said at the IIT Kharagpur convocation on August 8. He picked up the habit while working for a toothpaste company, he told a friend. “Thank God you don’t work for a condom company!” the friend exclaimed. Brushing teeth after a meal is fine, but putting on a condom after the act requires ingenuity.

Condoms were invented not to control birth, but as protection against private infections. They were made of cloth, animal skin or intestine. French letter originated from such sheath. A French tickler was of the ribbed kind. The church ripped condoms and promoted Vatican roulette. This rhythm method of contraception is a hit and miss game. If you lose it you get life. If you lose playing Russian roulette you get death.

Rome’s fears over condoms are not altogether unfounded. In 2001, doctors in Meerut found a condom in a 27-year-old schoolteacher’s lungs. After pulling it out, they wrote in a medical journal: “Retrospectively, both the husband and wife accepted to having undergone a fellatio. They could recollect that the condom had loosened during the act, and at that time the lady had also experienced an episode of sneezing and coughing.”

France boasts a village named Condom. The word does not mean contraceptive in French. The river Baise flows by it. If you say baise in French, you are asking for sex.

Condoms are taboo in the Amish commune called Intercourse in Pennsylvania. A tour of the state could be stimulating. After Zipdown, you can spend time in Ballplay or Lickdale, go for Intercourse, reach Climax and then Yocumtown. Hillary Clinton’s office is in Foggy Bottom in Washington, DC, but S.M. Krishna skipped Mount Buggery in Australia. In England, one can stroll through Butt Hole Road in South Yorkshire, and Sluts Hole Lane in Norfolk. Belgium has Labia, and Russia is proud of its Vagina in Kurgan city.

Germany has two touchy-feely towns, Petting and Titting. Near Petting is an Austrian town whose name is pronounced as Foocking but written with a ‘u’ instead of the double ‘o’. Tourists love stealing the name board.

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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in August 2009.

Trainspotting at Ghoti

Comic actor Julie Walters, who plays Molly Weasley in Harry Potter movies, has published her autobiography, That’s Another Story. “I love playing old ladies because of my maternal grandmother,” she says. “She was completely doolally.” To go doolally is to go bonkers. The word comes from the cantonment town Deolali, near Nasik.

Deolali was a transit camp for British soldiers waiting to sail back home. It was often a long wait, with nothing to do but whore around and catch the clap. If a soldier went crazy, it was said he got the doolally tap. Doolally tap meant Deolali fever. Tap is a Marathi word for high temperature. It came from Sanskrit taapa.

An hour by train from Deolali (Devlali) lies Igatpuri. The Igatpuri station is also called Ghoti. One saw a yellow board with the name Ghoti there three years ago. The board would have delighted Bernard Shaw, who hated the complexity of English spellings. He used a meaningless word, ghoti, to show their absurdity. He said ghoti was fish because ‘gh’ is ‘f’ in laugh, ‘o’ is ‘i’ in women, and ‘ti’ is ‘sh’ in attention.

Shaw did not invent the word. A boy called William Ollier had done it. His father, the publisher Charles Ollier, mentioned it in a letter he wrote to the poet Leigh Hunt in 1853, the year the first train ran from Bombay to Thane. Shaw was born three years later.

Mughalsarai railway junction near Varanasi got its name from an inn (sarai) Sher Shah Suri built on the Grand Trunk Road there. The word sarai meant royal court as well as harem. Italians borrowed it as seraglio, which later shaped up as a whorehouse. Many Indians wrongly pronounce whore as ‘wore’. It should be ‘hoar’. But hour and whore were pronounced as ‘oar’ in Shakespeare’s time, says David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Theatregoers cocked their ears for such cheek.

An hour/whore pun made the melancholy Jacques roar in laughter in As You Like It: “It is but an hour ago since it was nine/ And after one hour more it will be eleven/ And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe/ And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot/ And thereby hangs a tale.” To paraphrase the last two lines: Going from whore to whore, men get the clap, and the tail (penis) hangs limp. Unlike Crystal, most college professors keep such pearls from their students.

English spellings were wayward till Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) standardised them. Americans simplified spelling, taking the ‘u’ out of words like humour, and docking the tail of words like catalogue. They don’t savour the ‘a’ in aesthetics, nor feel the urge to prefix an orgasmic ‘o’ to estrous.

St James School in Kolkata, founded by Bishop Cotton in 1864, now allows American spelling. That is natural: the name James itself has come a long way. James is related to Jacques and Iago. Iago comes from Yakov in Hebrew, which became Iacobus in Latin, and Jago and Jacob in English. The letters Y, I and J were once interchangeable, which is why Yesu became Isa and Jesus. Yakov also evolved into Jacome and James. St James died in Spain. Spaniards call him Santiago (Sant Iago). He is their patron saint.

Student houses at St James School compete for the Cockhouse cup. The cup has nothing to do with the bird or the beast below the belt. Cock means God, says the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. “Cock’s bodikins!” swears Constable Turfe in Ben Jonson’s Tale of a Tub, taking God’s name in vain.

The expression ‘a tale of a tub’ was slang for ‘cock and bull’. Sabina Bulla pleasured Constable Turfe’s gods in her Srinagar seraglio. She is the madam in the sex scandal that got Omar Abdullah’s goat. His resignation distracted attention from the end use agreement. But try shifting the focus from rear-end use.
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in August 2009.

Off with his head

Woman Hitler is an anagram of mother-in-law. But there is a little Hitler in every male. The little Hitler in Praful Patel burst forth in a television interview on July 7. “Heads will roll,” he roared, announcing his ambition to straighten out Air India within 30 days. The murderous expression is a Hitlerism. Germans screamed ‘Vote Ja’ when Hitler said during an election in 1930, “If our movement is victorious, there will be a revolutionary tribunal which will punish the crimes of 1918. The decapitated heads will roll in the sand.”

A roll in the sand is far less pleasurable than a roll in the hay, which means to make love. Lovemaking can be more satisfying, especially for the female, if you give head. Civilisation is on your side. The sexologist Havelock Ellis says the act of going down on a woman “was a very familiar manifestation in classical times; …it tends to be especially prevalent at all periods of high civilisation.” Such scholarship is lost on Ghulam Nabi Azad. He wants Indians to make love less often and make babies only in their thirties. Recreation, he believes, can prevent procreation.

Ancient Greeks would have applauded Azad. They segregated men from women till men reached age 30. Boys left home for military camps at age seven, and men courted them in their adolescence with the consent of their fathers. The state controlled population by encouraging men to take boys as lovers, but sodomy was taboo. Those who did not have a boy lover ran the risk of being called eccentric or even unpatriotic. Many men never married. But if they felt the temptation to pass on their genes, they could borrow a friend’s wife who already had produced children for him.

Socrates had pederastic relationships with several of his students, who trained naked in gymnasiums. The word gymnast comes from gymnos, meaning naked. One of his favourites, Alcibiades, became a great Athenian general. The historian Xenophon says Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe, was jealous of Alcibiades. The jealousy might have aggravated her ill temper. Her name means yellow mare; a grey mare is a woman who governs her husband. Socrates said he married the shrew to practise his patience. A student sought his advice on marriage. “Marry, by all means,” Socrates said. “If you get a good wife, you will be happy. If you get a bad wife, you will become a philosopher.”

Socrates never wrote any book. He followed the oral tradition. Oscar Wilde restricted the tradition to his sexuality. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and gays may love Uranus. Wilde swore that he never loved it. He sued the Marquis of Queensberry for calling him a sodomite. In court he argued that his love for the marquis’s son, Arthur Douglas, was pure and sublime in the Greek pederastic tradition. Douglas in a poem had described it as “the love that dare not speak its name”.

Wilde lost the case and was sent to Reading Prison. Apparently he lost no time seducing the jailor. He became a number, C 3.3., which stood for his jail block, floor and cell. The number three, like thirty, has become hot. Pranab Mukherjee heads the latest GoM, on 3G spectrum. The Supreme Court is examining the rights of the third gender. Hillary Clinton says India and the US are “at the beginning of a third era. I’ll call it US-India 3.0.” The real American intention is to upgrade Af-Pak to a more terrifying threesome, Af-Pak-In.

Elizabethan dramatists loved to pun on the number three. It meant the male genitals. Curtis, a minor character in The Taming of the Shrew, tells Grumio, the hero’s attendant: “Away, you three-inch fool! I am no beast.” Grumio retorts, calling him a cuckold: “Am I but three inches? Why thy horn is a foot; and so long am I at the least.”
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in July 2009

Gone with the wind

Columbus gave the Caniba a bad name. He called them canibales, invented stories of their eating human flesh and hunted them without compunction. Carib, another name of the Caniba, yielded the word Caribbean. They were a seafaring tribe, with slanted eyes and yellowish skin, and both names meant 'valiant warriors'. But white men fatted the cannibal myth. They said the Carib tasted all nationalities, and found Frenchmen the most delicious and Spaniards the hardest to digest.

A more authentic Caribbean delicacy, cou-cou soup, is a magic potion that women ladle out to make men fall in love with them. Girls lace it with their own intimate juices and feed their boyfriends. Ganga channa, another West Indian preparation, serves the same purpose. While cooking it, the woman squats naked over the steaming pot of chickpeas to infuse it with her enchanting pheromones.

West Indians call a new boyfriend juvi. Girls at Sabina Park cheered Yuvi as he scored a century on June 26. It was a breezy knock all right, but cricket writers went overboard. A Caribbean paper online ran this headline: "Yuvraj ton too much for feisty Windies."'Feisty Windies' is a curious combination. Feisty means aggressive, but the word has a troublesome wind behind it. Feisty comes from Middle English fisten, meaning to fart without sound. Though not noisy, it can be noisome. Feist was "a small wind, escaping backward, more obvious to the nose than ears." Fizzle is another word for this strong, silent type. Fizzle blows no whistle, nor sounds any trumpet.

Feisty old ladies in the 17th century, on emitting foul smells, blamed it on their lapdogs. "These feisting curs!" they cursed, to save face. Before long, feist came to mean the innocent beast itself. The smell became dog. The Old French noun 'pet' meant fart. Its verb, peter, is still intact. Shakespeare punned on petar (a small bomb) and peter (penis). Hamlet tells his mother: "For it is the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petar."

Some say Shakespeare is a pen name. They name Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as the real author. John Aubrey celebrated the earl in Brief Lives: "This Earle of Oxford, making his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to travel, 7 years. On his returne, the Queen welcomed him home and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the fart."

This anecdote could have inspired Mark Twain's 1601 -- a fireside conversation in the time of the Tudors. Someone breaks wind while the Queen is chatting with luminaries like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and Walter Raleigh. Investigating the blast, the Queen says: "Prithee, let the author confess the offspring. Will my Lady Alice testify?"

Lady Alice protests there is "no room for such a thundergust within my ancient bowels." The kind Queen absolves the young Helen saying she would have to tickle her "tender maidenhedde with many a mousie-squeak" before she learnt "to blow a hurricane like this. Was it you, my learned and ingenious Jonson?"

Jonson disowns it, and so do Bacon and Shakespeare, in their distinct literary styles. All look towards Raleigh, who then rises and says: "Most gracious maisty, it was I that did it, but indeed it was so poor and frail a note, compared with such as I am wont to furnish, that in sooth I was ashamed to call the weakling mine."

The move to amend Section 377 of the IPC had fizzled out, before the Delhi High Court struck a blow for the gays on July 2. The judgment encourages Indians to go back from Jai ho to Jai 'hind'. And cannibals -- gay or not -- can now perform 69 without fear of arrest. But Othello did not mean it when he tempted Desdemona with tales of hair-breadth escapes and "Cannibals that each other eat".
wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in July 2009.

Party going to seed

Rousseau did not read any erotic book until he was 30. "These books can only be read with one hand," he wrote in Confessions. Yashwant Sinha's Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer offered no such one-liners. But he attempted one when he quit as BJP vice-president on June 12. "I am getting a sinking feeling that once again there is a conspiracy of silence," he said in the resignation letter.

'Conspiracy of silence' is vintage Victorian. It entered the English language in 1865. John Stuart Mill introduced it in his book on Auguste Comte, the French philosopher. 'Sinking feeling', though as old, is more colourful. It first appeared in ads for an energy drink called Bovril. One ad showed a boy sitting astride a huge bottle of Bovril bobbing in the sea and saying, "Bovril prevents that sinking feeling." Flaccid old men drank more Bovril than boys willingly did.

Jaswant Singh says the BJP is a "party of yesterday". Its leaders are looking sad and droopy after losing the elections. A swig of Bovril can help them perk up. It is a beef extract, but the cow lovers should look at the brighter side: beef is slang for sex. The name Bovril is a mix of bovine and Vril. Vril comes from The Coming Race, a novel by Edward Bulwer Lytton, who is better known for The Last Days of Pompeii. It is an all-conquering magic fluid. Lytton coined the word from Old French viril, meaning virile.

Vir in Latin means man. The Sanskrit vira has the same root. The Old English word for man was 'wer', which has survived in werewolf. The Sanskrit veerya, meaning semen, is related to virile. Semen has a close kinship with seminary. Don't think that sex-starved Christian priests flooded the place with some sticky fluid. Semen means seed, and seminary was a plot -- a nursery -- where people planted seed. It later became a school for training priests. But the next time you attend a seminar, wipe the seat before you sit.

The BJP president issued a gag order after Sinha sent his letter. Bulwer Lytton's son, the viceroy Lord Lytton, imposed the Vernacular Press Act in 1878 to tame the Indian press. To escape the Act, the Amrita Bazar Patrika of Calcutta became an entirely English paper overnight. It was bilingual until then. Many Indian papers proudly call themselves vernacular. The word vernacular means 'home-born slave'. The press, of course, tells truth.

Men in Kenya are on a month-long sex boycott to protest against fanatic feminism. Their women staged a week-long sex boycott last month, demanding an end to violent political clashes. The prime minister's wife joined the strike. In the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, by Aristophanes, women go on a sex strike to force their men to stop a long war between Athens and Sparta. The leader of the strike tells her friends: "If we sit indoors dressed in our transparent silks, with our pubis nicely plucked, their tools will become so hard that they won't be able to deny us anything." The strategy is to tease, torture and tame.

Aristophanes savaged Socrates in the play The Clouds. He opposed the philosopher's liberal views on youth and women. Sharad Yadav of the Janata Dal says he likes Socrates and is ready to take poison if Parliament passes the women's reservation bill. In The Assembly of Women, another play by Aristophanes, women disguised as men take over the legislature and pass feminist laws. One law grants the ugliest women the right to drag any man to bed. Praxagora, the feminist leader in the play, tells her friends: "It would be a fine thing if one of us, in the midst of discussion, rushed on to the Speaker's platform and, flinging her cloak aside, showed her hairy privates." Were he in ancient Greece, Yadav would have recorded if she wore lipstick and where.
wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian newsmagazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in June 2009.

I am what I am

Hemingway took a ten-dollar bet and wrote a short story in six words: "For sale: Baby shoes, not used." Samuel Beckett wrote a half-minute play, Breath, which was wordless. All it had was two identical cries, one of birth and the other of death. Victor Hugo was on vacation when Les Miserables was published. He sent the publisher a telegram which had just one character, '?'. The publisher cabled back an ecstatic exclamation mark. King Philip of Macedon wrote a threatening letter to Spartans: "If I enter Laconia, I will raze the city of Sparta." The Spartans sent a one-word retort: "If."

Laconic means using very few words. The word comes from Laconia. President Pratibha Patil used half the laconic 'If' to swear in the new ministers. All she had to say was "I". She uttered it 158 times without a stutter. "After us, the deluge," said Madame De Pompadour, a mistress of Louis XV. Likewise, fools thought, after Kalam, calamity. Patil proved them wrong no doubt.

Patil was an infant -- the word infant means one without speech -- when Haile Selassie addressed the League of Nations in June 1936. It was about mustard bombing by Italy. "I, Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, am here today…," he began. The I after the name Selassie is neither a numeral nor an initial. It is Patil's well-practised word, I.

I is central to spiritualists. A spiritualist, Baba Lekhraj, spoke with the Rashtrapati after his death. The Rastafari believe Selassie is alive; he is God's incarnation. The Christian cult, popular in Jamaica, is named after him: he was Ras Tafari (Prince Tafari) before he became emperor. The Rastafari say "I and I" to link the individual I with the cosmic I. Iyaric, their English lingo, is replete with I. Creator is irator in Iyaric; creation is iration. God is Jah, as seen in hallelujah. They swear by ganja, reggae and dreadlocks.

Elvis Presley had pompadour hair. M.S. Dhoni wore long locks like Kalam when he first caught the public eye. "My hair and beard have turned grey" in the last two years, says the cricketer. Hair has the same root as hoary and horror. Hoary means grey with age, hence venerable. Hair stands on end (Latin horrere) when you feel horror. Dhoni can cause horripilation, or goose bumps, when he hits the ball over the top. To go 'over the top' means to take risks. It also means to have an orgasm.

Sir Toby tells Sir Andrew in Twelfth Night that his hair hangs like flax on a distaff; "and I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs and spin it off." Dishevelled is hair (French chevel) in disarray. Ophelia tells her father how Hamlet, looking dishevelled, held her hard while she was sewing in her closet, and how she broke free and denied him access. Shakespeare scholars claim the word access here means intercourse. 'Accessory' in the 19th century meant smaller articles of a woman's dress.

Merkin, an old accessory, was the female beard. Prostitutes wore this pubic wig over shaven genitals to hide scars or for aesthetic effect. Fashionable young men in Elizabethan England wore a codpiece over their trousers. This pouch held the genitals and exaggerated the bulge. Like Elvis the Pelvis, young men everywhere like to swagger as Bulgarians.

Many ministers gagged on the word 'conscientiously' while swearing "I will faithfully and conscientiously discharge my duties…" Conscientiously is a mouthful, with a foul link. Like science, it shares its root -- skei -- with the word shit. Doing one's duty is a euphemism for defecation. Pistol, a character in Henry IV, is quick to discharge. Sir John Falstaff tells him: "Here, Pistol, I charge you with a cup of sack: do you discharge upon mine hostess." Pistol replies: "I will discharge upon her, Sir John, with two bullets." His bullets are his testicles. Discharge your duty, by all means, but keep the oath of secrecy.
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in June 2009.

Time for introspection

Voters can be cruel and fickle. They have rejected the hammer and sickle. The communists are aghast at the Trinamool Congress assault. They can't stop saying 'Oh! Kolkata' under their breath. The French will be pleased to hear their whimper.

Oh! Calcutta was a musical comedy of the sexy sixties. A number of people like John Lennon and Samuel Beckett were associated with it. It revelled in frontal nudity, male as well as female. The play opened in New York in 1969 and had 5,959 shows over the next 20 years. It had nothing to do with Calcutta. The title was a pun on the French words o quel cul t'as, meaning "what a nice ass you have".

The voters have knocked the pants off the comrades. But it looks like an act of sacrilege. Hammer is the weapon of the Norse god Thor, who makes thunder. The expression 'to hammer away', however, means to copulate. The Greek god Priapus wields a sickle, but uses his organ as the main weapon. He is the god of erections. Greeks have a god for everything, but elections are godless and secular like the comrades. Priapus watches over flowers and fruits, his meaty member never droops. He tried to possess the nymph Lotis in her sleep, but the braying of an ass halted the assault. Lotis woke and fled, and became a lotus fruit tree. Priapus slew the whistleblower.

The BJP's lotus is a different species, but linguists have tried to link Priapus with Priyapati, also known as Prajapati. The Hindu god lusted after the nubile goddess Ushas and chased her around the world. He lost a head for the audacity. Physicians know Priapus better. They use the word priapism to describe a state of never flagging erection. Priapic men retain elevation even after ejaculation. This may sound like penile paradise, but priapism is painful and tragic. Leukaemia can trigger it. Another trigger is sickle cell disease.

Prakash Karat went into "serious introspection" after the elections. L.K. Advani contemplated retirement and disappointed. "This is the time not for jubilation, but for sober introspection," said Sonia Gandhi. Navel-gazing is one form of introspection. It can yield oracular insights. Greeks considered Delphi the navel of the universe. The word navel comes from Old Norse nafi, which is the same as Sanskrit naphi. The Greek word for it is omphalos. Oomph, meaning sexual energy, is related to it. Oomph girls simply cannot help showing off their navels. That is in their instincts.

To introspect is to look inward. No one allows you to do it better than Annie Sprinkle, a feminist performance artiste who wrote the book Post-Porn Modernist. She claims to be the first porn star to take a Ph.D. Sprinkle demystifies the female genitalia in her one-woman shows in the United States. In a show called 'Public Cervix Announcement', she encourages the spectators to peep into her cervix, using a speculum and a flashlight. Can you see any teeth inside, she asks, mocking old Freud. Freud dealt with a morbid male fear of vagina dentata, the mythical cervical teeth. Men apparently feared that man-eaters would dismember them out of penis envy.

Sprinkle was a grande horizontale, a French term for whore. Whoroscope should make an apt name for her speculum. Beckett started his literary career with a poem titled Whoroscope. The two tramps in his absurdist play Waiting for Godot call each other Didi and Gogo. The Didi in Kolkata has put the fear of God in the communists. But the go-go girls with pom-poms could not elevate the performance of the Kolkata Knight Riders.

Beckett loved cricket. He is the only first class cricketer to win a Nobel Prize. He had a 'fail better' philosophy. He said: "Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better." The Knight Riders can take heart. But comrades, look inside for insights.
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in May 2009.

A fetish for the foot

Priyanka Vadra adores her mother. Sonia Gandhi, she says, can be "completely surrounded by praise and sycophancy and be untouched by it". Sycophancy isn't an adorable word. It comes from sykon (fig) and phanein (to show) in Greek. Showing the fig was a gesture of insult in Grecian courts. One made the gesture by sticking the thumb between two fingers. A split fig looks like female genitals-sykon means vulva as well. Politicians rarely made the gesture themselves. Instead, they goaded their toadies to taunt their opponents with it. The toadies came to be known as sycophants.

The Indian fig tree is called banyan. It sprouted from the Sanskrit word vanija, which evolved into bania, meaning merchant. Indian merchants on Persian shores built wayside temples under fig trees. So the Persians called them vanija trees. The infant god Krishna floated on a fig leaf in the primeval flood, contemplating the next cycle of creation. He lay sucking his toes.

Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, author of Phantoms in the Brain, explains "why we like to have our toes sucked". The part of the brain controlling the foot lies right next to the part controlling the genitals. This proximity makes the foot erogenous. People who have lost a limb can still feel sensations in the nonexistent limb because of overlapping neural wiring. Ramachandran calls it the phantom limb.

An engineer from Arkansas, who lost a leg, telephoned him for advice: "Doctor, every time I have sexual intercourse, I experience sensations in my phantom foot. How do you explain that?" The scientist told him about the wiring. "All that's fine, doctor," said the engineer. "But you still don't understand. You see, I actually experience my orgasm in my foot. And therefore it's much bigger than it used to be because it's no longer just confined to my genitals."

Prakash Karat plays footsie with the Congress though he says, "We don't want to be its palanquin bearers." Litter is a more common word for palanquin. Litter also means offspring of an animal at one birth. The smallest pig of a litter is called tantony pig, a corruption of St Anthony's pig. Anthony is the patron saint of swineherds, not the defence minister. The latter spells his name without the 'h', but the press often forgets it.

The press cares more for the pig. It is not just because of the swine flu. Two little pigs ran away while being taken to a slaughterhouse in England in 1998. Someone claimed they had swum across a river and escaped into a thicket. Newspapers put dozens of journalists on the pigs' trail. They lionised the pigs, and named them Butch and Sundance, comparing them to the famous fugitives.

Television crews surveyed the thicket from a news helicopter, with a camera mounted on its nose. One juicy story was about how a female pig, at her oestrous best, was unleashed to tempt Sundance back into his sty. "The seductress did not succeed," the journalist reported. When the pigs were finally captured, the Daily Mail hogged the show: it bought the pigs for 15,000 pounds and sent them to an animal care home for life.

Breathless journalism has no full stops. Cardiologist Bernard Lown, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, missed a full stop for five years. He writes in his book The Lost Art of Healing:

When I questioned one man about sex, he promptly responded, "Sex no problem." At each yearly visit, we went through the same exchange. "Sex?" I would ask. "Sex no problem," he replied instantly.After he had been my patient for about five years, his wife came along for the first time. During interval history-taking, when I posed the same old question about sex, he gave the same answer. His wife appeared startled and looked quizzically at him.I asked, "How, exactly, do you punctuate the sentence?" He answered with some embarrassment, "Sex, no. Problem."

wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in May 2009.

A bend and a scent

Narendra Modi says, "The Congress is like an old woman, a burden on the country." He would sound more abusive if he used anus, the Latin word for old woman. But the word has no link with any ass, the seat or the beast of burden. It comes from annosa, which means many years old.

Old man is senex in Latin, but can be penis in English. Senior and senate are related to senex. The senate was for the elders. So is the Rajya Sabha, though the senile run for it. The more penile aim for the lower house.

The Old Man and the Sea is the best of Hemingway. He pruned its length by half. The length of a penis in Paris figures in his memoirs, A Moveable Feast. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote The Great Gatsby, felt inadequate after his wife said that the way he was built, he could "never make any woman happy". He consulted Hemingway, his friend and literary rival. First they went to the loo and then to the Louvre, for comparisons.

Hemingway recalls: "Still he was doubtful about himself. 'It is not basically a question of the size in repose,' I said. 'It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.'"

Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 39 times. This novel gave English the Italian word ciao (pronounced chau). Ciao serves as both hello and farewell, but it actually means 'I am your slave'. Sonia Gandhi says Advani is an RSS slave who panders to its wishes. Can he take a step without touching its feet, she asks. To pander is to pimp. English procured the word from Pandarus, who bent over backwards to hook his niece Cressida for his friend Troilus, the prince of Troy.

"Asked to bend, they crawled," Advani said of the press during the Emergency. Election Commission observer P.L. Darbar is in a bind after ordering a bend. A polling officer in Kerala interrupted him during a pre-election briefing. Irritated, Darbar made him bow, holding his ears and bending his knees. The press called the act a half-squat. The right word is genuflection. Half-squat is for bodybuilders. Genuflection involves submission.

Knights genuflected before kings, with one knee bent. Believers bent both knees before bishops to kiss the ring. Arabs sat on bended knees and touched the floor with their foreheads. The sight of elevated bottoms perhaps inspired the invention of domes -- a roofing revolution in an age of steeples and spires. Hindus genuflect best: they prostrate, with not a care about the prostate.

To genuflect is to bend (flect) the knee (genu). The word genuine is born of genu. Romans had a knee ceremony at birth. The father placed the newborn upon his knee if he felt the baby was genuinely his. A knee-trembler is more exciting: it is intercourse in the standing position.

Hemingway wrote standing up. Truman Capote did it lying down. "I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I am lying down," he said. He wrote In Cold Blood. His novella Breakfast at Tiffany's explores a woman, Holiday Golightly. She talks about a vacation: "We had an irresistible guide, most of him Negro and the rest of him Chinese, and while I don't go much for one or the other, the combination was fairly riveting; so I let him play kneesie under the table." Kneesie takes footsie to another level.

Ingenuity drives politics. Mulayam Singh professes a dislike of English and computers. English is also a question of angle, Hemingway would remind him. The verb English means to angle, or spin, the ball in billiards. Mulayam would like the French, who no longer use the word computer. They call it ordinateur. Con-puteur, a French pun on computer, alludes to not-so-fragrant female genitals. God bless Mulayam. He means well: the scent might blunt the urge to french.

wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in April 2009.

Pleasures of pollution

Harry Mathews is a literary oddball. People in Laos mistook the American novelist for a CIA agent. Later, in Paris, he pretended to be a spy. He ran a travel agency for imaginary cloak-and-dagger intrigue, and wrote the 'autobiographical' book My Life In CIA. One of his novels is mysteriously titled Tlooth. Another, Singular Pleasures, is a book of hand-jobs. It describes 61 variations of solitary sex.

Solitary sex is known as onanism, even though Onan had no such obsession. He was the second son of Judah in the Old Testament. When God killed his first-born, Judah said to Onan: "Lie with your brother's wife, and fulfil your duty to her as a brother-in-law to produce offspring for your brother." Onan knew his onions: he didn't want his kids to be credited to his brother. He lay with her, but spilled the seed on the ground. God killed the strategic spill-joy.

The Election Commission loves to play God. It has issued ironclad commandments to candidates, and banned the use of loudspeakers at night. The commission dislikes noise pollution. Its order wouldn't have worked in the distant past, when pollution meant emission of seed in ways other than sexual intercourse. Nocturnal emission was a clear case of pollution, but pardonable. Self-pollution was sinful, an act of onanism.

Linguists pleasure themselves in singular ways. They erupt with joy when they sight frequently abused words correctly used. Offspring, progeny and issue serve as singular as well as plural. Offsprings, progenies and issues - meaning descendants - are for the ignorant. Biceps, kudos and summons are singular nouns that look like plural. Aircrafts and equipments often stray into the papers; these words don't exist. Be mighty pleased if your partner compliments you on your equipment.

People confuse criteria and phenomena with the singular criterion and phenomenon. No such problem with penis. The plural is penes in Latin and penises in English: this vital knowledge remains etched in stone. The plural of the female organ resembling it is clitorides in Latin; the English are content adding -es. Cristoforo Colombo discovered America; another Italian, Renaldo Colombo, discovered the hidden tickler 67 years later. He was an anatomy professor in Padua, a city of plural pleasures. The bachelor Petruchio sings in The Taming of the Shrew: "I have come to wive it wealthily in Padua/ If wealthily, then happily in Padua."

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter of Italian stock, translated François Villon, a French felon who wrote poetry by day and thieved at night. Villon, who served time for murder, was brilliant. He wrote, "But where are the snows of yesteryear?" Yesteryear is time past; 'yesteryears' is illiteracy. Those who write 'heydays' deserve a life sentence. Heyday was a celebratory shout like hurrah or a cry for attention, 'hey there'. It has nothing do with any day, but means the stage of greatest vigour.

IIT and IIM alumni dance with democracy during poll time. A number of them have entered the elections, hoping to expand freedoms. That is a natural urge: alumni in ancient Rome were foster children born of slaves. Alumnus is the male singular. Mallika Sarabhai, a candidate in Gandhinagar, is an IIM-A alumna. The female plural is alumnae.

Don't for a moment think enemy's plural is enema, though their common intention is invasion. That reminds me of terminus, whose Latin plural is termini. Terminus was the Roman god of boundaries, and termini were stones marking the limits. Romans worshipped the stones during Terminalia, a festival in February. For Persians, Terminus was the god Baga, who, like the early Hindu god Bhaga, was a distributor of good fortune. Bhagwan is related to Bhaga, a Sanskrit word that also means vagina. Baghdad was baga-data, meaning god-given. The world has seen what American terminators have done to the god-given land. And the world waits to see what they will do to the land of Bhagwan.

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in April 2009.
wickedword09@gmail.com

Stroke for a holy alliance

Pranab Mukherjee says the Third Front is like the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Though political hot air, the quip is vintage Voltaire.

The philosopher was a philanderer: he wrote satire and played the satyr. One of his amorous alliances was with his niece. Her first name, Marie, was his middle name, too, so either could pant, "Marie, Marie, hold on tight," as Eliot chanted in The Waste Land.

Voltaire flirted with Catherine the Great, who knew his works by heart. "Every writer in Europe ought to be at your feet," he flattered the holy Romanov empress. They never met, but kept up an intellectual discourse. For physical intercourse, the empress had an impressive number of lovers in St Petersburg. She bore their brats before and after dethroning her husband, Peter, who was no saint. The liberated woman denied that her son Paul, who resembled Peter, sprang from his loins. There was never a stranger alliance.

Paul ordered his army to march on India in 1801. Luckily, his courtiers killed him in no time. His son Alexander had an alliance with Napoleon, who suggested a joint invasion of India in 1808. Alexander was keener on impregnation of his mistresses while his wife, the tsarina, produced babies of her paramours. After Napoleon's fall, Alexander signed an agreement with Prussia and Austria to save Europe from revolution. It is called the Holy Alliance.

Modern politicians prefer unholy alliance. Theodore Roosevelt mentioned an "unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics" during the presidential election in 1912. He lost. A folded copy of a 50-page election speech in his pocket saved his life when a bartender, John Schrank, shot him in the chest. Schrank knew how to mix a tipple, but he missed the former presidential nipple. The speech cushioned the bullet, which settled in a rib.

The Communist Manifesto opens with an unholy ghost and a holy alliance: "A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre." Marx and Engels wrote their first book, The Holy Family, four years earlier. The words 'communism' and 'communist' appear only half a dozen times in it.

These words were coined by John Barmby at age 20 in 1841. He founded the Communist Church in London, mixing Christianity with pantheism. Another 'communist', John Humphrey Noyes, coined the term 'free love'. In 1848, he founded the Oneida commune in New York, where any woman could mate with any man, and vice versa. For birth control, his Central Committee enforced coitus reservatus -- intercourse without ejaculation.

Stalin, the man of steel, frowned on rubber and founded motherhood medals -- a mighty stroke for the proletariat. This word comes from Latin proletarius, meaning the lowest class, who served the state only by producing children. 'Proles' means progeny. If you produce a lot, you are prolific.

Stalin controlled population by other means. He purged thousands to kingdom come. As Khrushchev confessed, Stalin killed 98 of 139 Central Committee members who were elected at the 17th party congress. The word congress once meant 'to walk together'. Later it signified sitting together for a meeting. Then it acquired the additional meaning 'sexual union', which is to lie together.

Voltaire inspired French revolutionaries. The handsome poet Byron fought alongside Greek revolutionaries in 1821. He worked on Don Juan while in alliance with Contessa Teresa Guiccioli in Venice. It was Italian custom for a young woman to take a lover with her husband's knowledge. The lover was called cavaliere servente, or cicisbeo. He escorted the lady to the theatre, read books to her and made love to her, to free the husband for his more pressing concerns. It was delightful division of labour. Byron, who bedded numerous women, was the contessa's cicisbeo for two years. May God guide our politicians to make holier alliances.

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in March 2009.

A well-hung parliament

India trembled with emotions when Nehru spoke of "a tryst with destiny". The expression, though poetic, wasn’t entirely original. Franklin Roosevelt had made his finest speech, A Rendezvous With Destiny, eleven years earlier during the Great Depression. Tryst is a shorter word for rendezvous.

Englishmen pronounce the longer word as rondeivoo. Americans drawl randavoo or randy woo, which trysting lovers do. In 1991, CNN asked Bush the Father about "a sexual tryst" he allegedly had with a female assistant in Geneva in 1984. Bush said the question, though outrageous, could be expected "in this kind of screwy climate".

An imaginary tryst between Bush the Son and the media queen Martha Stewart is the story of an anti-Iraq war play, George & Martha, by New York University professor Karen Finley. Both characters appeared unclothed on the stage, unlike their namesakes in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Finley, playing Martha, shaved George’s genitals in a pun on the word bush.

Tryst is a lovers’ meeting, an affair. Another word for affair is thing. Thing is also a euphemism for genitals. Shakespeare felt no shame when he put thing into young Romeo’s mouth. "Is love a tender thing? It is too rough/ Too rude, too boisterous and it pricks like thorn," protests the lover boy. His friend Mercutio, who started the thing thing in the previous line, puns back: "If love be rough with you, be rough with love/ Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down." Poetry beats the meat.

Like rendezvous, thing originally meant assembly. That meaning survives in Althing, the parliament of Iceland, which is the first country to go limp in the current recession. Storting, the parliament of Norway, another cold country, has also preserved thing. Thing stirs unseen in hustings, a combination of hus (house) and thing (assembly) from the virile Viking tongue that licked the Anglo-Saxon lingo into shape. Hustings later became election platform.

Election is to pick the eligible, but poll is related to Finley’s curly bush. Polle, in Dutch, meant hair of the head. Counting heads was a pioneering polling method. Going by roots, ballot should favour the Congress party: it evolved from Italian pallotte, small balls used to count votes in Venice.

Candidates also come from Italy—office seekers in Rome were called candidatus because they wore white robes known as dandidus. The word candid is a relative, though not of cunning politicians even if they wear virgin white. Nehru wore colourful jackets with a rosebud in his buttonhole. His election to Parliament from Phulpur (flower town) would have gladdened Roosevelt in his grave. The name Roosevelt means rose field.

Parliament is a gathering of owls, just as murder is a group of crows. Parliamentarians have got away with murder. Cromwell culled the king Charles I, and made and unmade parliaments. He sounded like Somnath Chatterjee, sententious and hoarse with disgust. "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say," he told the ‘Rump’ Parliament in 1653. Unlike Chatterjee, he called the members "cheats and whore-masters". God bless him: no one spoke a truer word.

Assembly, far from the braying kind, is a place where members can safely dissemble: they lie through their seat – and make a rumpus. Assemblies may go into suspended animation, which in science is near-death life. Suspended is another word for hung. A well-hung man is hardly dead: he is actually endowed with a large penis. Dryden drooled about "well-hung Balaam" in Absalom and Achitophel. Auden, who was gay, wrote: "As the poets have mournfully sung/ Death takes the innocent young/ The rolling-in-money/ The screamingly-funny/ And those who are very well-hung."

India has had several hung parliaments. The elections next month, for a change, may throw up a well-hung house. Cast your vote for the real thing.

*This article appeared in the Indian newsmagazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in March 2009.

A nibble for the caterpillar

Liberia, the land of freed slaves, is battling leaf eaters. Caterpillars have overrun the republic, eating up crops and foliage, and forcing President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to declare a national emergency. It looks like personal vendetta if you look at the president's last name. An FAO emissary, Tim Vaessen, flew in. Part of his name, essen, means 'to eat' in German.

Names like Sirleaf, which are apt, are called aptronyms. American columnist Franklin Adams (1881-1960) coined the word. Wordsworth is a perfect aptronym; the poet was worth every word he wrote. The Wordsworths did odd things. His sister Dorothy, also a poet, wore his wedding ring the night before he married her friend. Dorothy returned it in the morning, but he put it on her finger to "bless it" and took it back. She did not attend the wedding. "I could stand it no longer and threw myself on the bed, where I lay in stillness, neither hearing nor seeing anything," she wrote in her diary. The siblings were lovers, critics say with envy.

Henry Head had poetry in his heart. Head was in medicine. The neurologist edited the medical journal Brain. The next editor also wrote poems. This neurologist had an even more apt name: Russell Brain.
Fiction has numerous aptronyms. A comical one appears in Catch-22. The US Army Air Force promotes a private to the rank of major because Major is his first name and middle name, as well as surname. He thus becomes Major Major Major Major. He keeps himself busy signing his name as Washington Irving. Indian Air Chief Marshal F.H. Major would have made a dashing young Major Major had he joined the Army.

Washington Irving wrote the funny History of New York under the name Diedrich Knickerbocker. Knickers, pubs and pubes interest the pink chuddies man who heads the hindustaliban in Mangalore. Muttalik, the local Muttawakil, might be tempted to taste chuddy if he goes Down Under. Chuddy is chewing gum in the Antipodes.

Many surnames, like Smith and Mason, were aptronyms. A name indicated the work a person did. Saikia commanded 100 soldiers, Hazarika 1,000 soldiers. Jarnail was aspirational: the parent wished the child to become a general. Chawla who sold rice was grocer; the chief election commissioner is grosser. Daruwala no longer sells liquor, but Screwvala hasn't really called it a day.

God help those who think the name Ramalinga means Rama's phallus. It means “merged in Rama”. But Ramalinga Raju made it an aptronym when he exposed himself. The financial flasher became a rick with a capital p. Don't call his 13,000 phantom hirelings Bhootalingam—the name does not mean ghost of a phallus.

From cyberia, Satyam slunk off to ‘lieberia’. S. Nijalingappa stuck to truth (nija in Kannada). He was Congress president, chief minister and Constituent Assembly member. He honours his own member in his autobiography: "It was pleasurable," he writes about fellatio, one of his first intimations of sexuality. Later, a girl tried to seduce the teenager. She "made me lie beside her and went on pressing my penis against her. I was paralysed and could not respond in any way. She squeezed my penis again four or five times and as I did nothing she slapped me on the face and threw me out. After a few months, her younger sister started visiting our house…. One evening, at seven she came and we were alone and I coaxed her to do the right thing and we were actually at it when Daffedar Rangappa, a retired security man, came in and we were disturbed."

Nijalingappa, who wrote the book at age 97, was a lawyer. Lawyers do have balls. They had the gall to burn a police station in Chennai on February 20. The Spanish word for advocate is avocado. In etymology, the fruit descended from aguacate, meaning testicle. The thought of caterpillars nibbling at avocado might trouble neo-Nazis. Apparently, the Fuhrer had worried over his undescended berry.

*This article appeared in the Indian newsmagazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in March 2009.

Comings and groins

Noam Chomsky teaches universal grammar when he isn’t hitting the White House with a sledgehammer. Very few people understand him. He says babies are born with grammar in their brains. I think they are born with the grammar of the groins. We struggle with grammar because grammarians are frigid and testy. They need spectacles to find their testicles. People will embrace grammar and take it to bed if they get language lubricants.

Glance at the old-fashioned Parts of Speech. A most interesting noun is ‘intercourse’, but no grammar book uses it as an example. ‘Intercourse’ is more exciting as a proper noun: it is the name of a town in Pennsylvania. The Amish Christians there do not drive cars or allow any form of birth control, including withdrawal. They do it good and proper.

‘Groin’, another noun, is worth caressing if you are female. It means testicles, as well. Groins you see on the beach are bigger—these are walls built into the sea to break the waves. Carousal has little to do with arousal. It is revelry. You see carousel at the airport—it’s the belt that goes round with other people’s luggage.

Verbs never cease to arouse interest: these are action words, like ‘fornicate’. To fornicate is to have sex that is not adulterous. In the Bible, adultery is a sin you commit; there is no commandment against fornication. You don’t commit it—it is no crime; you just do it with delight. Do not mix it with formication, which is a neurological feeling of insects crawling all over the body: just ensure the partner is not a creep. Architects can fornicate at work: the adjective ‘fornicate’ means ‘shaped like an arch’. The word comes from Latin fornix, an arch under which harlots stood tempting the horny. When you arch your back, you have a hunch or a hump.

The verb ‘ejaculate’ involves an exclamation. Most men ejaculate in private. It wasn’t so in the past. In novels like Wuthering Heights and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, characters often ejaculated in public, with their astonished mouths. Female ejaculation is a hot area of research, though most people have encountered it only in fiction. Here is an example of synchronized ejaculation from the novel Being Himself by Horatio Alger, who died in 1899: “She went to the door… and, on opening it, started in surprise to see Willis Ford. ‘Mr Ford!’ she ejaculated. [Two lines later Ford joins her.] ‘Run away,’ ejaculated Ford, in dismay.”

Pronouns, though very few, are handy tools. The possessive pronoun ‘yours’ in ‘up yours’ is most expressive when accompanied by an upright middle finger. ‘Adjective’ has a bit of ‘eject’ stuck to it. It can be noisome if you don’t clean it. ‘Noisome’ means disgusting, not noisy. The word ‘fast’ is an adverb, which children scream in cars and women scream in bed. Strangle them if they say ‘fastly’. Indians are never sure of their prepositions despite the graphic 64 positions in Kamasutra: should it be in the chair or on the chair, they wonder. Plump for ‘in’ if the chair has arms.

Of all prepositions, I like cum, which also works as a conjunction. Actor-cum-politician is vogue. Cum is now better known as a variant of come. Conjunction means sexual union. After conjunction, comes the climax: it is interjection. The most satisfying interjections are ooh, aah and ummm.

Three women married the poet e.e. cummings for his name, no doubt: he was copious. He wrote in small letters, embracing quirky brackets, which I have removed from these lines: “may i feel said he/ i’ll squeal said she/ just once said he/ it’s fun said she…./ tiptop said he/ don’t stop said she/ oh no said he/ go slow said she/ cccome? said he/ ummm said she….”

Cummings was juicy. Chomsky is dry. A researcher tried teaching English to a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky. The primate met its maker before it could well mate. Thank God I heard of Chomsky long after I got laid.

*This article appeared in the Indian newsmagazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in February 2009.

The bear goes to the White House

Tall and handsome, Obama is orally awesome. He would take the world, not with the missile launcher but with the teleprompter. He holds us spellbound, but his forebears really confound. Obama mixes ‘forebears’ with ‘forbearers’ and mashes them in his mouth. Replay his inaugural address, and you still won’t know whether he uttered the first word or the second. He slurred the last syllable, leaving the word indistinct.

He meant forebears, no doubt, but forbearers barged unchallenged into many newspapers. Editors offered no resistance, even at The New York Times and The Washington Post. The campaign web site barackobama.com posted the text as prepared for delivery. It had forbearers. The White House went by forebears a full day late.

Forbearers are people who forbear; they show restraint. Forebears are ancestors. If my forebears had shown some physical restraint I wouldn’t be around. If these F words were interchangeable, ‘forgerers’ would pass off as forgers. And 'fatherers' would stomp around as fathers. Sniff at the roots: forbearer comes from Old English ‘forberan’, meaning to endure. Forebear evolved from ‘fore be-er’, one who existed before.

Everyone is familiar with the prefix fore. It occurs in foreskin and foreplay, which women complain doesn’t occur often enough. After-play never occurs at all: forspent, the male flops over and conks out. To forego is to go or come before, to forgo is to do without. One may forgo sex and be a celibate, but desire doesn’t abate even if one deigns to ‘urbate’ the mast.

Obama had mauled forebears twice in the past: first in his Audacity of Hope address in 2004, and then in his Call to Renewal address in 2006. He uttered forbearers — distinctly. There is no slurring in the videos. Fault not his speechwriter Jon Favreau: he joined Obama after 2004. Favreau is a dab hand, which was last seen fondling the right breast of a Hillary Clinton cutout. Fowler, the usage martinet, would howl fouler if he saw this slip in the presidential address: “…there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”

Bear descended from the word ‘beron’, meaning one that is brown—he now occupies 10 Downing Street. Blair has retired to his lair. Obama distrusts the Kremlin. The Russian word for bear is ‘medved’, honey-eater: ‘medu’ means honey, and ‘ed’ to eat. Medvedev, the president, is son of a bear. ‘Medu’ tastes the same in Sanskrit ‘madhu’. Ed is short for editor and erectile dysfunction, which these days are one and the same. A cure for the condition lies with Ursula Andress, whose first name means little bear, Ursa Minor. People saw stars when they saw her. Andress was more exciting than any presidential address. She played Honey Ryder in the film Dr. No in a bikini and won a Golden Globe. Unlike poles, like globes attract.


The I&B ministry repels. It released an ad in the papers on January 26: “Indian Republic Turns 60.” You turn 60 when you complete 60 years. The republic has a year more to go for that. No Hindu rate of growth for the misinformation ministry. It craves the rabbit rate.

Obama said his father might not have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago. Bearers in India would have welcomed him. Bearers work only in Indian restaurants. Others employ waiters. I am not cribbing. To crib is to copy at an exam or plagiarise somebody’s work. A baby sleeps in a crib, a cow eats from a crib, a prostitute may work in a seedy room called crib. Cribbing about others is an Indian thing. Others carp, crab, gripe, grouse or grumble. Our cribbing doesn’t exist in many English dictionaries.

India can offer the 44th American president new turns of phrases. Our cricket fans, who float ‘sixers’, would dub him Forty-Fourer. So help him God.

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in February 2009.

A feminine ending

In Tamil Nadu, people tend to pronounce 'zha' as 'la'. So God help me if M.K. Stalin's brother M.K. Azhagiri is a cousin of Dante Alighieri. I enjoy reading Dante, but comedy is more divine when I sight confidante. The press revels in describing a politician as a confidante of a more important politician. There is no problem if Ambika Soni is Sonia Gandhi's confidante. But Ahmed Patel will require sub-navel surgery to qualify as a confidante. He is her confidant, of course, without the feminine 'e'.

The feminine 'e' clings, as if estrous, to some words to make a gender conquest. Denis surrenders his masculinity at the ecstatic touch of 'e' and becomes the feminine Denise. Louis does likewise to become Louise. Most such words are borrowed from French, but you don't need to know French to tell a fiancée from her fiancé: the former looks curvy and spacey. When they get married and get divorced, she becomes a divorcée and he a divorcé, if they follow the French to the letter. But divorcee is common gender as well; it could be a male or a female.

So is protégé. You may mentor a protégée and chaperon her to a ball for her debut. She is a debutante, while a first-time performer is a debutant. Calling a new actress a debutante is no big crime, but calling a new male actor so would be questioning his cojones. Daniel Craig, the only fair-haired Bond, can never be a blonde; he is just blond. All other Bonds were brunet, not brunette.

Never say 'ne' again with doyen, if you mean the male. Doyenne is the female of that exalted species. More picky is the comedienne. Note how she twists the comedian's tail, plucking out his only 'a' and plunging in an emasculating 'enne'. Equestrienne also does it, to hapless equestrian, the male astride the mount. So I would rather horse around with the Greek bacchante, the femme fatale of the orgiastic bacchant who worships the drunken god Bacchus.

Most men prefer masseuse to masseur, hoping she will use more than her hands and feet. I sympathise with danseuse; she has long suffered abuse. She is a ballerina, and not just any female dancer. Danseur, the male, has largely kept to France, perhaps for fear of genital mutilation.

Those who misuse feminine endings deserve to be marched behind the drum majorette and thrown to the lioness or to the whip-cracking dominatrix. Or be simply neutered.


Condoleezza Rice — with a double 'e' and a double 'z' to boot — goes down as The Confidante, which is the title of her political biography by Pulitzer winner Glenn Kessler. Condi could be jaunty when dealing with Rawalpindi. She made a call to Pakistan on Dec. 28, and General Kayani cooed that there would be no war with India. As if he were the president, not Asif Zardari.

Give Zardari his due—his Ten Per Cent—for giving the phrase ‘non-state actors’ wide currency. This is not a new coinage. Even Manmohan Singh invoked it long before Zardari was implanted in Islamabad.

Singh spoke of non-state actors on five occasions in 2008, first in Beijing in January and last in New Delhi in November, three days before terrorists attacked Mumbai.

Much of the CIA document Global Trends 2015, released in 2001, is about non-state actors. Here is one of its oracles: "Continued turmoil in Afghanistan and Pakistan will spill over to Kashmir and other areas of the subcontinent, prompting Indian leaders to take more aggressive preemptive and retaliatory actions." Americans sound prophetic because they state their intentions.

Non-state actors are hardly a travelling troupe. They are a motley group of NGOs, MNCs and religious sects as well as gangsters and terrorists — any transnational who can reduce or undermine the role of the state.

Lumping them together, the phrase dumbs down terror. It gives the terrorist a facial, and beautifies his balaclava. If terrorists were non-state actors, Al Qaeda would be Al Pacino.

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in January 2009.