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.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Friday, March 6, 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.
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.
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