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.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 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.
wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week in November 2009.
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.
wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week in November 2009.
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