Saturday, January 23, 2010

Wrong side of the blanket


Humans hunt for a superconducting metallic rock in the movie Avatar. They call it unobtanium. This word mates ‘unobtainable’ and the ‘-nium’ ending of rare elements. Engineers at a warplane workshop in California found it difficult to obtain titanium from Russia in the 1950s. So they dubbed it unobtanium in jest. Today the word means anything essential that is out of reach.

Unobtanium entered science fiction before the Sanskrit word avatar did. Neal Stephenson introduced avatar in his novel Snow Crash in 1992. He also coined the word metaverse in the novel. But many readers remember the book for vagina dentata, an anti-rape device worn by the character Yours Truly. Its teeth inject a numbing drug into any invasive object to render it limpdick—another humdinger of a word heard in Avatar.

Avatars fascinated the scientist J.B.S. Haldane, who took Indian citizenship in the 1950s. He saw a parallel between Vishnu’s ten avatars and Darwin’s theory of evolution—how life began in water (Matsya avatar) and became amphibian (Kurma), animal on land (Varaha), half-man half-beast (Narasimha), proto human (Vamana), small-brained man (Parasurama) and then fully developed man (Rama, Balarama, Krishna and Kalki).

Haldane was Aldous Huxley’s model for Shearwater in the novel Antic Hay. Huxley describes Shearwater as “the biologist too absorbed in his experiments to notice his friends bedding his wife”. Haldane and Huxley were friends. Haldane conceived the idea of test-tube babies in his book Daedalus. Huxley borrowed it for his Brave New World, where children are born without both parents. They are created in hatcheries and conditioned in sleep.

Deve Gowda slept through his prime ministership. Now he has woken and spoken. He called B.S. Yeddyurappa a “bloody bastard”. But bastards in politics were not always despised. Even official documents described William the Conqueror as William the Bastard. Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, was also a love child. So was Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers.

Australians should rename their country as Hindu Kush. The name of the mountain range means Hindu killer. Numerous Indians died while crossing it in winter. But don’t call Australians bastards for the attacks on Indians. The word has no sting Down Under. An Australian cricketer used it against the Bodyline bowler Harold Larwood. When the English captain Douglas Jardine went to the Aussie camp to complain, the Aussie vice-captain Vic Richardson asked his team mates: “OK, which of you bastards called Larwood a bastard, instead of this bastard?”

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, has a celebrated foul tongue. Obama joked about it at a roast in 2005: “As a young man he had a serious accident with a meat slicing machine. He lost part of his middle finger, and this rendered him practically mute.” Obama harped on it on Mother’s Day last year: “This is a tough holiday for Rahm,” he said. “He’s not used to saying the word ‘day’ after ‘mother’.”

Obama loves the word screw-up, which is no profanity. He uses it as mea culpa. He said “screw-up” three times as president. The provocation the second time was the gatecrashing of his first state dinner for Manmohan Singh two months ago. Singh has no such gift of the gab and sticks to safe words. He described India as a slow elephant at the Pravasi Divas.

The sluggish elephant needs some gingering up. This was a treatment the horse got in the past. A piece of ginger was pushed up its rear to make it sprightly. The word ginger comes from the Sanskrit sringaveram, meaning horn-shaped body. Sringa is related to sringara—the rasa that makes you horny and tempts you to produce bastards.

wickedword09@gmail.com

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

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Lay of the land


Abhishek Bachchan, all set to anchor Bingo on boob tube, must be full of beans. Bingo developed from beano, a card game using dried beans, in which players shouted “beano” to declare a winning hand. Toy salesman Edwin Lowe popularised it in New York in 1929. He called it bingo after a player exclaimed “bingo”, instead of “beano”, in her excitement.

Bangalore got its name from beans. So did the Roman consul Fabius, whose family grew the legume. Two other consuls, Lentulus and Piso, owed their names to lentils and peas. The name of the orator Cicero came from chickpeas called cicera.

Cicera became a password in the Sicilian Vespers, an Italian insurrection against French rule in 1282. The rebels killed thousands of French residents in Sicily. The six-day massacre began at the vespers, the evening prayer, on Easter. As Frenchmen tried to pass themselves as Italians, the rebels asked them to pronounce the word cicera. The French could not get it right and were slain.

Shibboleth, a more ancient killer password, meant ear of corn as well as flowing water in Hebrew. The biblical people of Gilead conquered the neighbouring Ephraim and captured the Jordan River fords. Whenever someone wanted to cross the river the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied no, they said, “Now say shibboleth.” They killed him if he mispronounced it as sibbolleth. Ephraimites had no ‘sh’ sound. Forty-two thousand people perished for one sibilant.

Shibboleth later acquired different shades of meaning such as catchword, custom, taboo and outmoded beliefs. Wait for the HRD minister’s education reforms to throw up Kapil sibboleths.

The parsley plant came handy for Dominican president Trujillo’s soldiers in 1937. In six days they massacred 25,000 Haitians who had crossed over to the Dominican Republic. Parsley was prejil in Spanish, the local language. Haitians, whose mother tongue was not Spanish, could not pronounce it. To identify them, the soldiers held up a bunch of parsley and asked them, “What is this?” Those who answered pesi or prersil were butchered.

“Parsley is gharsley,” wrote the poet Ogden Nash about its taste. Trujillo had a ghastly end. He was assassinated in 1961. But he was a true leader who looted his country and rooted with any girl he fancied. He employed an officer in the presidential palace for an unstaunched supply of wenches. An officer on special duty in the Hyderabad Raj Bhavan most likely learnt the ropes under him.

But how I envy N.D. Tiwari! He laid down office in bed. If Gandhi intoned ‘Hey Ram’, Tiwari chanted ‘Harem’. Two girls, naked and nubile, slept on either side of Gandhi. That was the celibate’s way of testing his will-power. An unauthorised erection horrified him once in a blue moon. Tiwari is a master of three Vedas, a trivedi. Blame him not if he tested his willie power with a threesome. At 86, one needs the rope and pulley to hoist the mast.

Eighty-Sixed is a gay novel by David Feinberg, who named his hero B.J. Rosenthal. The Raj Bhavan sting had shots of BJ, which some Hindi speakers pronounce as below-job. The Japanese would mouth it as bro-job. They utter the ‘la’ sound as ‘ra’. American soldiers in the Philippines exploited this tongue trouble to catch Japanese infiltrators in World War II. They asked all suspects to say lallapalooza, which means something outstanding. While it rolled off Filipino tongues, the Japanese could only manage rarraparooza. They got shot for the blur.

Lalu Prasad says Nitish Kumar is no lallapalooza. He says Nitish wasted public money by holding a cabinet meeting on the Ratnagiri hill in Rajgir on December 29. He is right: why go for a cliff, and not a clit? After all, the word means “a little hill” in Greek.
wickedword09@gmail.com

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