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.