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.