Calicut gave English the word calico, and Kashmir yielded cashmere. Machilipatnam, once known as Masulipatnam, perhaps supplied the word muslin. Cambric cotton from Cambrai in France gave them stiff competition. Levi Strauss took canvas cloth from Genoa in Italy to pitch tents in America. The cloth from Genoa came to be called jeans. The cloth he took from Nimes in France, called serge de Nimes, became denims. English has hundreds of such words derived from names of places. These are called toponyms.
Michigan bankroll, a toponym, is a bundle of notes with real currency only at the top and the bottom. The CBI trapped Sarabjot Singh with such bundles. A Chinese compliment is a polite interest in others’ views when one has already made up one’s mind. Note how Beijing seeks to build strategic trust with New Delhi, when a Chinese think-tank wants India balkanised into 20 to 30 countries.
Aamir Khan is producing a loose motion picture, Delhi Belly. But it may well be a story of love in the time of cholera, not just traveller’s diarrhoea. Delhi belly initiates visitors to the capital’s culinary cruelties. Mexican two-step is another name for alimentary canal unplugged. It compels the sufferer to leap to the loo.
“I gotta go pee, I gotta go home,” whimpers Yolanda, the restaurant robbing woman, in Pulp Fiction. She is in a Mexican stand-off, an impasse of three or more people holding guns to one another’s head. The director Tarantino stages yet another Mexican stand-off in his latest film, the queerly spelt Inglourious Basterds.
A Mexican raise is a promotion with no increase in pay. An Irishman’s rise is less pay for doing the same job. Irish toothache is something swollen—either an erection or a pregnancy. Tata honcho R. Gopalakrishnan keeps a toothbrush handy. “I brush after every meal,” he said at the IIT Kharagpur convocation on August 8. He picked up the habit while working for a toothpaste company, he told a friend. “Thank God you don’t work for a condom company!” the friend exclaimed. Brushing teeth after a meal is fine, but putting on a condom after the act requires ingenuity.
Condoms were invented not to control birth, but as protection against private infections. They were made of cloth, animal skin or intestine. French letter originated from such sheath. A French tickler was of the ribbed kind. The church ripped condoms and promoted Vatican roulette. This rhythm method of contraception is a hit and miss game. If you lose it you get life. If you lose playing Russian roulette you get death.
Rome’s fears over condoms are not altogether unfounded. In 2001, doctors in Meerut found a condom in a 27-year-old schoolteacher’s lungs. After pulling it out, they wrote in a medical journal: “Retrospectively, both the husband and wife accepted to having undergone a fellatio. They could recollect that the condom had loosened during the act, and at that time the lady had also experienced an episode of sneezing and coughing.”
France boasts a village named Condom. The word does not mean contraceptive in French. The river Baise flows by it. If you say baise in French, you are asking for sex.
Condoms are taboo in the Amish commune called Intercourse in Pennsylvania. A tour of the state could be stimulating. After Zipdown, you can spend time in Ballplay or Lickdale, go for Intercourse, reach Climax and then Yocumtown. Hillary Clinton’s office is in Foggy Bottom in Washington, DC, but S.M. Krishna skipped Mount Buggery in Australia. In England, one can stroll through Butt Hole Road in South Yorkshire, and Sluts Hole Lane in Norfolk. Belgium has Labia, and Russia is proud of its Vagina in Kurgan city.
Germany has two touchy-feely towns, Petting and Titting. Near Petting is an Austrian town whose name is pronounced as Foocking but written with a ‘u’ instead of the double ‘o’. Tourists love stealing the name board.
wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in August 2009.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
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.
wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in August 2009.
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.
wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in August 2009.
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