Grace under pressure

Some Indians associate “stiff upper lip” with snobbery. The phrase has nothing to do with snobs. To keep a stiff upper lip means "to remain resolute and unemotional in the face of adversity".

The British claim monopoly over stiff upper lip. But the phrase first appeared in American magazines. The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin used it before Englishmen took to it. As a slave trader takes Uncle Tom away, young George Shelby ties a dollar around his neck and tells him, “Goodby Uncle Tom, keep a stiff upper lip.”

Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, complimented the novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. He said, “This is the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war.” She later said, “God wrote the book. I took His dictation.”

W.B. Yeats writes about stiff upper lip in The Celtic Twilight. The captain of a ship tells him about his prayer—“O Lord, give me a stiff upper lip.” Yeats asks him what it means. “It means,” says the captain, “that when they come to me some night and wake me up and say, ‘Captain, we’re going down,’ I wouldn’t make a fool o’ meself.”

If cameras don’t lie, godman Nithyananda made a fool of himself when he let an actress go down on him and take his dictation. He was stiff no doubt, but not stoic, during the lip service. Morals come after orals.

The movie Carry on Up the Khyber makes fun of stiff upper lip. Afghan warlords in it are in awe of the Foot and Mouth regiment because these British soldiers go bare under their kilts. When rumours of a soldier wearing underpants spread, the warlords attack the British governor’s palace. The governor and his dinner guests keep their poise even as the roof crumbles on their plates. The soldiers repel the enemy by lifting their kilts.

Hemingway would call it “grace under pressure”. This famous phrase has a curious side: he hated his mother, Grace. She wrote excellent prose and skilful verse, painted and sang well, says the historian Paul Johnson in Intellectuals. Hemingway rejected everything she valued—even her God and her writing style—and treated her as an enemy.

Grace washed his mouth with bitter soap if she caught him swearing or lying. It had no effect. Wounded in war, Hemingway lied that he had been shot in the scrotum and had to rest his testicles on a pillow. A peacetime lie was more colourful: a Sicilian woman shut him up in her hotel and “hid his clothes so he was forced to fornicate with her for a week”.

General Lanham, a friend of his, writes: “He always referred to his mother as ‘that bitch’. He must have told me a thousand times how much he hated her and in how many ways.”

Afghans love India as much. The Taliban say India’s Great Game is up. They want India to close all consulates and leave. One of these establishments may well spring up in Jaffna.

Khyber Pass is Cockney rhyming slang for ass. Elephant Pass has no such linguistic backside. The isthmus owes its name to a rare elephant that crossed into Jaffna, where the water is too salty for elephants to survive. Eating rice cooked in Jaffna is an ordeal for humans. The salty diet makes people hyper-tense. They live the phrase “to jump salty”, which means “to fly into a sudden rage”. Salt must have kept the Liberation Tigers going.

Afghanistan has no pigs. Miangul Aurangzeb, former governor of Baluchistan, claims the Pushto word for pig is Sarkozy. General Ayub Khan was his father-in-law. But he seems more proud of his nephew and son-in-law Akbar Zeb, the Pak high commissioner to Canada. Miangul says Saudi Arabia refused to accept Akbar Zeb as ambassador because Zeb in Arabic means penis. And Akbar means great. “I wonder what my nephew thinks of all this,” writes Miangul in an email to Wicked Word. “Our whole family are Zebs.”

Keep the pecker up, Zeb!

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

Cheese and sandwich

Cookbook writers can whip up wacky titles. Tushita Patel has named her book Flash in the Pan. Though clever, it smells of gunpowder.

The phrase “flash in the pan” comes from a pan in the old flintlock gun. The pan, with a lid, held a trace of gunpowder. On pulling the trigger, the flint hit the pan, causing a flash, which ignited the load of gunpowder in the barrel for the bullet to fly. Sometimes the flash did not ignite the load. Shooters called this failure a flash in the pan.

Writers used it to describe a “failure after a promising start”. Later it came to mean a “brief spurt of success”. The phrase had little to do with cooking or gold panning—or flipping one’s lid and flashing one’s privates.

Captain Cook’s name for Hawaii was Sandwich Islands. He named it after his mentor, the fourth earl of Sandwich. While gambling, the earl hated to leave for dinner, and asked for slices of bread packed with meat. People who saw him eat it named it sandwich.

Batter he may not have liked; but banter he did. He teased the actor Samuel Foote, saying he would either die of syphilis or hang from a rope. “My lord,” Foote retorted, “that will depend upon one of two contingencies—whether I embrace your lordship’s mistress or your lordship’s principles.”

Captain Gopinath declined a sandwich massage in a Phuket hotel, but ordered a masseuse each for himself and his Deccan Aviation partner, the pious K.J. Samuel. They were sharing a room. Sam spoiled the fun, says Gopinath in his autobiography, Simply Fly.

On another page, the author massages his ego and his fly. A female trekker befriends him as he explores the Grand Canyon. They swim naked in the river Colorado, pitch a tent, cook a meal and hit the bed. “I still remember the night vividly,” he writes.

The captain based his principles on the Kipling poem titled If. He memorised it at the National Defence Academy. It is framed and kept on every NDA cadet’s desk. The players’ entrance to Wimbledon’s centre court bears these lines from the poem: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same.”

But ‘if’ does not interest P. Chidambaram, who is willing to date the Maoists. “I would like no ifs, no buts and no conditions,” he said, asking them for a simple statement abjuring violence. It is no longer a class war between the bourgeoisie and the booboisie. It is danse macabre, the dance of death.

Bihar knows how to sidestep the dance. It is slipping out of the BIMARU group with a healthy economic growth rate. The legislator Shyam Bahadur Singh displayed another side of the state when he gyrated with dancing bar girls in Patna. He thrust his hips at them and wriggled like a man bitten by tarantula.

The Italian town Taranto yielded the word tarantula, though it had no such species. It harboured only the milder wolf spiders. A dance of the town, called tarantella, apparently could give relief from spider bite. Doctors thought the dance was a hysterical response to a strong urge to wriggle. The Pelvis of Patna has this urge, no doubt. He should not delay calling his voters for a lap dance.

Raveena Tandon danced into stardom with the song Tu cheez badi hai mast mast in 1994. The suggestive Persian word cheez, meaning thing, led to the English phrase big cheese. Big cheese originally meant first-rate in quality, the real thing. Later it signified an important person, a big fish.

‘Mast’ also is of Persian origin, meaning intoxicated. It is another word for the elephant’s musth. Musk is more exciting. It descended from the Sanskrit muska (testicle), as the ancients mistook the source of the aroma. But they didn’t go wrong with mushkara (bully in Sanskrit). He is one with large orchids.
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in March 2010.