Friday, December 25, 2009

Climax in Copenhagen


Ghost story writer M.R. James, who taught at Eton, was a crossword fiend. He boasted that he could solve The Times crossword while his four-minute egg boiled. Another crossword fanatic questioned the claim in a cryptic letter to the editor. “He may have been to Eton,” punned the letter writer, “but I am sure the egg wasn’t.”

Eton fostered many intellectuals. But Henry Salt did not savour his days there. Salt, born in Nainital, stormed out of Eton in 1884, calling his fellow teachers “cannibals in cap and gown” because they ate meat. He retired to a Walden-like retreat. Gandhi, who made salt at Dandi, learnt about civil disobedience from Salt’s biography of Thoreau.

Gandhi bought Salt’s book on vegetarianism for a shilling in a London restaurant. “From the date of reading this book, I may claim to have become a vegetarian by choice,” Gandhi wrote in his autobiography. He had earlier wished that “every Indian should become a meat-eater, and had looked forward to being one myself.”

Meat and two veg is an English meal that offers meat with potatoes and another vegetable. The fare is so traditional that the phrase meat and two egg means boring. But look before you gulp—it also stands for the male danglers.

Money collected for a festival in Eton was known as salt. The price of salt has risen with vegetable prices. But it can never regain the status it had in medieval England. Only the rich could buy salt in those days. They kept the salt cellar on a high table for dinner. Their servants who ate at a low table got no salt. The expression below the salt, meaning inferior or lowly in status, arose from this division.

Roman soldiers got no pay, but only a salt allowance called salarium. This word evolved into salary. The words sauce and sausage have the same root—they were salted food. But to sauce a girl means to bed her. Sausage, the male meat, needs no pay to rise and shine. Sauce and sausage should make an ideal breakfast in bed.

Supreme Court judges are so sage. They ask why not legalise prostitution if you cannot control it. The preamble will no doubt cherish the kinship that constitution has with prostitution. Both words emerged from the Latin statuere (to stand), which also produced statue and statute, status and state. The demands of turgid manhood, like those for statehood, cannot be denied. Trust the government also to redress a grievous grouse about prostitutes—they play statue when you want to play trapeze.

Statesmen trying to reduce emissions in Copenhagen should erect a statue of Louis XVI. He controlled emissions like nobody else did. The king and Marie Antoinette took several years to consummate their marriage. As French courtiers suspected an erection problem, Marie’s brother Joseph, king of Austria, came investigating.

After questioning the couple, Joseph recorded: “In his conjugal bed he has normal erections. He introduces his member, stays there without moving for about two minutes, then withdraws without ejaculating, and still erect, bids good night. This is incomprehensible because sometimes he has nocturnal emissions, but while inside, and in the process, never. Oh, if I could only have been present once, I would have taken care of him. He should be whipped so that he would discharge semen like a donkey.”

Big emitters like the Indians cannot aspire to be like Louis. They are passionate like the couple in the 17th century poem Walking in a Meadow Greene:
They lay soe close together, they made me much to wonder;
I knew not which was wether, until I saw her under.
Then off he came, and blusht for shame soe soon that he had endit,
Yet she still lies, and to him cryes, “one more and none can mend it”.

Emote, by all means, but don’t emit. Let the world not end with a bang.

wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in December 2009.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Brown for the bidet


Spanish invaders in Mexico discovered vanilla in 1521. Its pod looked like a sheath—vaina in Spanish—so they called it vainilla. Vaina is the same Latin vagina which ejected an English word that rhymes with hunt. Eve Ensler has tried to revive the word in her Vagina Monologues, though she didn’t dare put it in the title.

Vanilla has long ceased to be the spice of life. The word vanilla now means conventional, even boring. But vagina hasn’t shed a bit of its mystique. It has become more exalted that many women wouldn’t use it for delivery.

The UNDP says one in four children born in Mumbai bypasses the birth canal. They get ripped from their mothers’ wombs, like the man who killed Macbeth. Many women who prefer caesarian section hate to lose their grip down there. In some hospitals in Brazil, all births are caesarian.

Don’t blame Julius Caesar for the fad or the word. The claim that he was born in a caesarian section is baseless. Surgical deliveries in his time were always fatal for the mother. Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, lived long enough to see him marry three times. But there was a Caesar’s law that forbade burial of pregnant women before taking the foetus out. Caesarian section probably was named after it.

The word caesar became kaiser in Germany and tsesar (later tsar) in Russia. The Old Norse word for Caesar was keisari. This could be related to the Sanskrit kesari, meaning lion.

Manmohan Singh—a lion—likes the colour blue, not kesar (saffron). He sticks to blue turbans, and uses green against the Maoists in the Operation Green Hunt. The hunted in Chhattisgarh have fled to Andhra Pradesh, where the Greyhound commandos are alert. The Greyhounds may not know that the ‘grey’ in their name came from an Old Norse word for bitch. It had nothing to do with the colour grey. Grighund (bitch-dog) became greyhound.

Some colours have humbler origins. Crimson was made from insects called kermes. Arabs had called them qirmiz, borrowing the Sanskrit krimi, meaning worm. Another worm produced vermilion, sacred for Hindus. The colour was obtained from vermiculus, which is Latin for ‘little worm’.

Magenta is more inspirational. It was named after the Battle of Magenta, which furthered Italian independence. Indigo, named after India, had a role in the Indian freedom struggle. Indigo farmers in Bengal revolted against the British in 1859, and Gandhi led their Champaran struggle in 1917.

An associate of Gandhi in the Dandi march, a young Hindu, figures in Tropic of Cancer. Henry Miller takes him to a whorehouse in Paris, where "he was like a dog with his tongue hanging out". Unfortunately, he decides to use the bidet. Writes Miller: “As I am putting on my pants suddenly I hear a commotion in the next room. The girl is bawling him out, calling him a pig, a dirty little pig.”

The madam rushes in and drags Miller to the Hindu client’s room. “The five of us are standing there looking at the bidet. There are two enormous turds floating in the water…. The Hindu boy looks at me reproachfully. ‘You should have told me!’ he says. ‘I didn’t know it wouldn’t go down.’ He is almost in tears.”

Elmer Gertz, the lawyer who fought the ban on Tropic of Cancer, shed light on the Hindu boy in his book To Life. One of his fellow students at Chicago University was “Haridas T. Mazumdar, a Hindu who had written the first book in the English language on his master Gandhi.… I did not hear the name of Haridas after I left college, until I was discussing Tropic of Cancer with Henry Miller in 1962, in Minneapolis, and learnt the amazing fact that Haridas was the model for the Hindu in some fantastic passages in that highly original work.” Part of the originality came from the liberal use of the word that vagina usurped.
wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in December 2009.