Duck the dogs of war

Romans were keen bird watchers. They had priests, called augurs, who studied vultures and other birds of omen. Augurs watched the flight of birds, their feeding and their singing, and predicted auspicious times for inaugurations. The words augur, inauguration, auspicious and auspices all come from the Latin avis, meaning bird. The biologist Thomas Huxley loved birds, but didn’t care two hoots about omens. The rationalist was neither a believer nor an atheist. He called himself an agnostic—a word he invented in 1870 by prefixing ‘a-’ to Gnostic. A Gnostic is one who knows. Huxley was better known as the defender of evolution who called himself “Darwin’s bulldog”. He asserted that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Scientists last month proved him right, after studying a fossil found in China. Canary evolved from canines. The bird was native to the Canary Islands, which got its name from the large dogs (canis in Latin) that roamed the islands. The place, in turn, lent its name to the bird. But some Canarians growl that it is all a canard. They say Romans named the place after seals called sea dogs. Frenchmen eat canard. It is their word for duck. The English word canard, meaning false report, came from the French saying vendre un canard à moitié—that is, to half-sell a duck. If you half-sell a duck, you are playing a hoax on the buyer. The forces fighting the Maoists dismiss reports of state terror as canards. There is no collateral damage, says P. Chidambaram. But officers on the Maoist hunt would like some airborne action and have asked for helicopters. If Indians could strafe Nagaland and Mizoram in the past, why deny them the pleasure in the drone age. Germans chanted Gott strafe England during World War I. It meant God punish England, a pun on the anthem God Save the King. They printed the phrase on buttons, badges and wedding rings. It became a greeting that rivalled Guten Tag. But they admired Roland Garros, the French aviator who found a way to fire through the propeller blades of his plane in dogfights. They copied his technique. An American newspaper called him ‘ace’ when he shot down five German planes. Tennis ace Andre Agassi loved to give the bird—a gesture with the middle finger. He writes about four dogs in his autobiography, Open, and senses ill omens in two of them. One is a dog that his first wife, Brooke Shields, tattooed on her hip without telling him. Another, her albino pit bull called Sam, eyeballs him all the time. The marriage goes to the dogs. The presence of dogs in a Paris restaurant unsettles him at the Roland Garros in 1988. He writes: “The first time I walk into a café, on the Champs-Elysees, a dog raises its leg and unleashes a stream of pee against the table next to mine.” Agassi is all praise for the fourth dog, which appears at a match in Indianapolis in 1996. He is well ahead of his opponent, Daniel Nestor, who breaks his serve. In a fit of anger, Agassi whacks the ball out of the stadium and abuses the umpire and referee with a word that rhymes with duck. They stop the match and declare Nestor winner. “The fans start a riot,” Agassi writes. “...They are booing, firing seat cushions and water bottles into the court.” The tournament mascot, a dog, trots onto the court. “He reaches the middle of the net, lifts his hind leg and pees. I couldn’t agree more. He makes a jaunty exit. I’m right behind him, ducking my head, dragging my tennis bag.” The words tennis, tenure and lieutenant descended from the Latin word tenir, meaning to hold. Lieutenant was one who held tenure in place of another person. Its American pronunciation, lieu tenant, reveals the root. Lieutenant generals facing court martial in the Sukhna case should court the bawdy poet Martial. He can teach them how to give everyone the bird.

wickedword09@gmail.com *This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in February 2010.

The battle of bologna

Dementors in Harry Potter suck the soul out of people. Ron Weasley is terrified of them. Weasel words in English act like Dementors. They suck the life out of sentences, like the weasel sucking the yolk out of an egg without breaking the shell.

Weasel words are misleading or evasive words. “Interestingly” at the beginning of a sentence can be a weasel word. What follows often is uninteresting. “Downsizing” is another kind of weasel word, a favourite of management morons. It bandages the wounds of job loss and masks the pain. “Collateral damage” was a more cruel one. For the Iraqi people, it was nothing short of genocide.

An obscure writer, Stewart Chaplin, coined the term weasel words in a short story he wrote in The Century Magazine in 1900. Theodore Roosevelt stole it a decade later to slam Woodrow Wilson’s writings. When accused of plagiarism, Roosevelt said he had learnt the term from a hunting guide years before Chaplin wrote the short story. Erudite hunting guides must be a species unique to America.

Union Minister Krishna Tirath weaseled out of a tight spot after printing a wrong photograph in a newspaper ad against female foeticide. The goof-up elevated a former Pakistani air chief marshal to an Indian icon. But Tirath quibbled that the “message is more important than the image”. Quibbling is a common definition of weasel words.

The goof-up gave the ad an extended life in the media. It would have got more attention if the ministry had emulated the Canadian newspaper Peterborough Examiner. The paper recently published a photograph of students at a Santa Claus parade. It showed a hunk of a boy from St Peter’s School, surrounded by buxom girls, exulting with his arms up in the air and his peter peeking out of his shorts. The editors noticed the quiet intruder only the morning after.

Mountweazel is no sexually active weasel. The New Yorker magazine found the profile of a Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of The New Columbia Encyclopedia in 2005. It said she was a designer and photographer who was born in 1942 and killed at age 31 “in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.” No such person ever existed. Columbia had created her as a decoy to catch copycats. If some other encyclopedia mentioned Mountweazel as a person, Columbia could confront it for plagiarism. Mountweazel now means a fictitious entry.

Germans have created several fictitious people, as if to atone for the disappearances Hitler ordered. One of them is a diplomat called Edmund Draecke, who “was vice-consul in Bombay in 1911”. Jakob Maria Mierscheid has been a fictitious member of the German parliament since 1979. The parliament web site features him as if he were a real MP, and presents his writings and speeches. It says he breeds stone-eating lice and dome-ringed doves. Both creatures are nonexistent like him.

The Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf boasts a fictitious professor, Ernst Doelle. Deemed universities in India would say this is no big deal. Many of them have fictional campuses. A school campus at Sukhna has held a fascination for General Deepak Kapoor, who likes to fantasise about war on “two fronts”, taking on Pakistan and China simultaneously. Brass hats have a tendency to deteriorate from mentors to tormentors to Dementors.

Kapoor perhaps meant bone china. Englishmen made bone china to compete with imported porcelain. The word porcelain comes from porcellana, the Italian word for cowrie shell which is smooth like china. Porcella in Italian is female piglet. The shells were called porcellana because they resembled the sow’s genitals. This should add to the allure of Bollywood’s porcelain beauties. But think of bologna, the pork sausage, when generals shoot their mouths off—for bologna is also called baloney.
wickedword09@gmail.com

*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in February 2010.