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.