tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64187027622748301292024-03-12T18:39:38.000-07:00wickedwordwickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-62609951781298011022010-04-05T05:31:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:34:31.565-07:00Organic food for the Games<span class="engBodyArt"><br /><br />The Labour Party plans to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected senate. The lords can go bake. A lord originally was the man who guarded loaves of bread, and a lady was the maid who kneaded the dough. Both ‘lord’ and ‘lady’ came from the Old English word for loaf (hlaf). The humble prayer, “O Lord, give us our daily bread”, harks back to flour power.<br /><br />Hippie flower power influenced Paulo Coelho, whose first ‘drink’ was lethal. His authorised biography, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Warrior’s Life</span> by Fernando Morais, says Paulo “swallowed a fatal mixture of meconium—that is, his own faeces—and the amniotic fluid.” The doctor thought the baby was dead, and pulled him out with forceps. It broke his collarbone. In desperation, his mother prayed to the hospital’s patron saint: ”Please bring back my son! Save him, St Joseph!” Just as a nun was about to give him the last rites, the baby stirred.<br /><br />Meconium is a baby’s first stools. The word means opium juice. The stuff is as black as opium. There is a lot dark about the writer, who wears black clothes. The name of his best-known book, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Alchemist</span>, comes from the Arabic word al-kimiya. Kimiya was Khemia, the land of black earth, an old name of Egypt.<br /><br />The biography does not powder Paulo’s profile. No hiding the demented man who dabbled in the dark arts, or the liar who grabbed authorship of a book he did not write. In sex he had peculiar tastes. One of his flings was with an aspiring actress in the one-room apartment of her great-aunt, “before the astonished eyes of the old woman who was deaf, dumb and senile.”<br /><br />More palatable is the cookery contest called Great British Menu on BBC2. Prince Charles is going to host its final. But the French would say there is nothing great about the British cuisine. Much of British food is bland. The rest look like Madame Tussaud’s inventions.<br /><br />One of the British delicacies is the black pudding, a sausage made from pork fat and animal blood. Another is the original humble pie, concocted from entrails—umbles—that only the lowly and the starving had the stomach to eat.<br /><br />“My love is like a red, red rose,” sang the poet Robert Burns. His love for meat was redder. Burns wrote an ode to haggis, a dish that can make vegetarians faint. The Scots made haggis with the sheep’s liver, lungs and heart, which they boiled and minced and mixed with onions, oatmeal and spices. Then they cleaned the sheep’s stomach and filled it with the mixture, sewed up the stomach, and boiled and devoured it. Doctors doing autopsies should make excellent Scottish cooks.<br /><br />Dr Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic psychiatrist in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Silence of the Lambs</span>, has a more human taste. The movie ends with him telephoning the heroine, Clarice Starling. “I do wish we could chat longer,” he says, “but I am having an old friend for dinner.”<br /><br />The British cannot resist beef. They even have Beefeaters to guard the Tower of London. These fat men in crimson and orange uniform got their name from the generous portions of beef they ate. Many people confuse them with the Buckingham Palace guards, who look like Russians in their bearskin caps. Beefeaters must be disappointed that Delhi will not serve beef at the Commonwealth Games.<br /><br />Certain dishes can win medals. Chinese athletes gorged on bull’s pizzles imported from Scotland during the Beijing Olympics. Their medal tally swelled up like the animal organ after the consumption. The Korean soccer star Ji-sung Park, who plays for Manchester United, says he drank frog’s juice for strength.<br /><br />Canadians love prairie oysters. These are bull’s bollocks. Camel’s feet are cooked and eaten in many countries. But camel’s toe is a visual feast—it is the outline of female genitals seen through tight pants.<br /><b>wickedword09@gmail.com<br /><br /></b>*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in April 2010.<b><br /></b></span>wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-82036527016434532722010-03-20T01:41:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:35:08.478-07:00Grace under pressure<span class="engBodyArt"><br />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".<br /><br />The British claim monopoly over stiff upper lip. But the phrase first appeared in American magazines. The novel <span style="font-style: italic;">Uncle Tom’s Cabin</span> 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.”<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />W.B. Yeats writes about stiff upper lip in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Celtic Twiligh</span>t. 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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The movie <span style="font-style: italic;">Carry on Up the Khyber</span> 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Intellectuals</span>. Hemingway rejected everything she valued—even her God and her writing style—and treated her as an enemy.<br /><br />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”.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />Keep the pecker up, Zeb!<br /><br /><b>wickedword09@gmail.com<br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in March 2010.<br /></b></span>wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-59825188182709720152010-03-06T08:41:00.000-08:002010-04-22T07:35:59.473-07:00Cheese and sandwich<span class="engBodyArt"><br />Cookbook writers can whip up wacky titles. Tushita Patel has named her book Flash in the Pan. Though clever, it smells of gunpowder.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />‘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.<br /><b>wickedword09@gmail.com<br /><br /></b>*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in March 2010.<b><br /></b></span>wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-10897870646746174282010-02-25T09:21:00.000-08:002010-04-22T07:36:49.669-07:00Duck the dogs of war<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5"><tbody><tr><td><span class="engBodyArt"><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.”<br /><br />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. <b><br /></b></span> </td> </tr> <tr><td height="20"> wickedword09@gmail.com<br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in February 2010.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-78410784277413005892010-02-06T08:45:00.000-08:002010-04-22T07:37:52.031-07:00The battle of bologna<span class="engBodyArt"><br />Dementors in <span style="font-style: italic;">Harry Potter</span> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Peterborough Examiner</span>. 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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Combustibles</span> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><b>wickedword09@gmail.com<br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in February 2010.<br /></b></span>wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-72903704874650186532010-01-23T00:10:00.000-08:002010-04-22T07:38:31.176-07:00Wrong side of the blanket<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5"><tbody><tr><td><span class="engBodyArt"><br />Humans hunt for a superconducting metallic rock in the movie <span style="font-style: italic;">Avatar</span>. 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.<br /><br />Unobtanium entered science fiction before the Sanskrit word avatar did. Neal Stephenson introduced avatar in his novel <span style="font-style: italic;">Snow Crash</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Avatar</span>.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />Haldane was Aldous Huxley’s model for Shearwater in the novel <span style="font-style: italic;">Antic Hay</span>. 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Daedalus</span>. Huxley borrowed it for his <span style="font-style: italic;">Brave New World</span>, where children are born without both parents. They are created in hatcheries and conditioned in sleep.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?”<br /><br />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’.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><b>wickedword09@gmail.com<br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (the-week.com) in January 2010.<br /></b></span> </td> </tr> <tr><td height="20"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-48910119070381109102010-01-10T01:01:00.000-08:002010-04-22T07:39:51.326-07:00Lay of the land<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5"><tbody><tr><td><span class="engBodyArt"><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Eighty-Sixed</span> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><b>wickedword09@gmail.com<br /><br /></b>*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in January 2010.<b><br /></b></span> </td> </tr> <tr><td height="20"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-12865991107404405932009-12-25T21:35:00.000-08:002010-04-22T07:41:29.255-07:00Climax in Copenhagen<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5"><tbody><tr><td><span class="engBodyArt"><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />Big emitters like the Indians cannot aspire to be like Louis. They are passionate like the couple in the 17th century poem <span style="font-style: italic;">Walking in a Meadow Greene:</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">They lay soe close together, they made me much to wonder;</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I knew not which was wether, until I saw her under.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Then off he came, and blusht for shame soe soon that he had endit,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yet she still lies, and to him cryes, “one more and none can mend it”.</span><br /><br />Emote, by all means, but don’t emit. Let the world not end with a bang.<br /><br /><b>wickedword09@gmail.com<br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in December 2009.<br /></b></span> </td> </tr> <tr><td height="20"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-86375502014933232432009-12-12T09:14:00.001-08:002010-04-22T07:42:32.008-07:00Brown for the bidet<span class="engBodyArt"><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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’.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br />wickedword09@gmail.com<br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in December 2009.<b><br /></b></span>wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-48343372819034615422009-11-27T09:45:00.000-08:002010-04-22T07:43:47.096-07:00Devil take the printerCaptain Bertie Clay developed a soft-nosed bullet at Dum Dum arsenal in Calcutta in the 1890s. Such bullets expanded on impact, and inflicted ghastly wounds. These came to be called dumdum bullets. The Hague convention of 1899 banned their use in “civilised warfare”. But the word dumdum means dumb-dumb.<br /><br />Gordon Brown looks dumdum. He sent a handwritten condolence letter to a dead soldier’s mother, but got the surname wrong. “Dear Mrs James,” he began the letter to Mrs Janes, whose son Jamie Janes died young fighting somebody else’s uncivilised war in Afghanistan. The mother called it “a hastily scrawled insult”. Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan’s father felt the same way when he saw his son’s name misspelt as Unnikrishan at a war memorial.<br /><br />Most Indians don’t mind misspellings. The old Dum Dum airport now preens as Subhash Chandra Bose airport. The final ‘h’ in Subhash is an insult to Subhas Bose. But the Fuhrer admired his surname, no doubt. Bose in German means evil. Bose onkel (evil uncles) is a German euphemism for child molesters.<br /><br />Morarji Desai declared Jayaprakash Narayan dead seven months early, in 1979. India commemorates JP by mangling his name. JP is Jai Prakash for the government-run Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in Delhi. Its website swears by Jai Prakash. The Lok Nayak hospital in Patna is called Jai Prabha Hospital. It tries to mate JP with his wife, Prabhavati, who was a lifelong celibate.<br /><br />Gandhi was Ghandy to many Englishmen. Feroze Gandy styled himself as Feroze Gandhi for political gain. Congress baiters would love to link him with Kobad Ghandy. Of all freedom fighters, Abul Kalam Azad’s name is the most abused. Even textbooks called him Abdul. Journalists were enamoured of A.B. Vajpayee. They spelt his middle name as Behari. It sounded grand and expansive like the man, unlike the actual name, the earthy Bihari.<br /><br />To err is human; to forgive you need the wine. Ruth in the Bible lay with the merry Boaz to give him warmth at night, after he had eaten and drunk. Pleased, he gave her six measures of barley, and “then she went into the city”. In many copies of the King James Bible of 1611 “she went into the city” was misprinted as “he went into the city.”<br /><br />The King James Bible of 1631 is called the Wicked Bible. Its printers forgot to put the word ‘not’ in one of the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt commit adultery,” it urged the faithful. The first Bible printed in Ireland, in 1716, offered similar advice. It encouraged the flock to “sin on more” instead of finger-wagging them to “sin no more”.<br /><br />A printing error made Queen Victoria’s maiden visit to Ireland memorable. She enchanted the people while passing a bridge. A newspaper reported the spectacle: “The crowd broke into tumultuous applause as the Queen pissed over the bridge.” It was an Irish rebel in the newsroom who made the queen gush. He lost his job for the gumption.<br /><br />Gum became an orgasmic discharge in <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> in 2004 when Singapore lifted the famous ban on chewing gum sale. The paper clarified: “It was never illegal to bring come into the country for personal use.”<br /><br /><em>The Hindu</em> recorded inadequacies at the Madras General Hospital in 1995: “Another coin-box telephone near the trauma ward is defunct and yet another fucked away near the male medical ward.” The paper meant ‘tucked away’. But if gum can be come, coin-box phones can be amorously active. If in doubt, note their slit, and the penny drops.<br /><br />Robert Browning would tip his hat to them. He used the word twat in the poem <em>Pippa Passes</em> without knowing its meaning: “Then owls and bats/ Cowls and twats/ Monks and nuns/ In a cloister’s mood/ Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry.” He thought twat meant hat. Both must have welcomed his head.<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">www.the-week.com</a>) in November 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-88414456408126871132009-11-14T19:29:00.000-08:002010-04-22T07:44:57.868-07:00Angels, warts and allThe clerics at Deoband who banned Vande Mataram and television missed <em>The Lost Symbol</em>. The book opens with the villain, Mal’akh, drinking wine from a skull. He is tattooed all over, even on his massive sex organ. Dan Brown says Mal’akh is named after the fallen angel Moloch, whom Milton mentions in Paradise Lost. In Arabic and Hebrew, all angels are called mal’akh. The word means God’s messenger.<br /><br />Another Dan Brown baddie also has an Arab name: the Hassassin is the assassin in <em>Angels and Demons</em>. Hassassin were followers of Hassan, the Nizari Ismaili leader. The Crusaders who fought them attributed their ferocity to hashish. The Arabic word for hashish eaters was hashishiyyin. The word assassin came out of the confusion. Hassan was no hashish eater. He was a learned man who led an austere life.<br /><br />Puritan Christians emulated Islamic austerity in Cromwell’s England. Cromwell banned all merrymaking. He shut the inns where liquor flowed and the theatres where bawdy bards warbled. Black burqa was thrust upon women, and makeup went out the window.<br /><br />When Cromwell died, fun returned with knobs on. The king Charles II wrote naughty verse, like his Restoration poets. One of them, John Wilmot, lampooned the royal organ. Here is a printable part of the poem: “This you’d believe, had I but time to tell ye/ The pains it cost to poor, laborious Nellie/ Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth and thighs/ Ere she can raise the member she enjoys.”<br /><br />In austerity, Cromwell had Indian mind. He broke his own rules, and made merry at his daughter’s wedding. But he was not vain, and told Sir Peter Lely, the portrait artist: “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.” Lely painted him as ordered, warts and all. The expression warts and all, meaning ‘even with all faults’, is now a cliché. But Mayawati, who is building a Stonehenge in Uttar Pradesh, could still use it.<br /><br />Ancient Romans accepted General Fabius Maximus warts and all. They elected him consul while fighting Hannibal. Fabius had a wart on his upper lip, so they called him Warty (Verrucosus). But he was better known as the Cunctator (delayer) as he preferred attrition, slowly rubbing away, to full frontal attack. Cunctation in bed can prolong pleasure. The Fabian Society is named after him. Fabians like Bernard Shaw influenced Nehru, who chose the slow socialist path for India.<br /><br />Pratibha Patil prefers supersonic speed. The President plans to fly on a Sukhoi-30 fighter jet. Her spunk should shame the Services into playing Ranji cricket in Kashmir. She was seen as a supermom when her son became an MLA. Flying Sukhoi in the G-suit, she would look like the Supergirl.<br /><br />Shaw would have been thrilled to meet her. He coined the word superman in 1903 to translate ubermensch from German. Nietzsche, in <em>Thus Spake Zarathustra</em>, had defined ubermensch as a “highly evolved human being that transcends good and evil”. Before Shaw wrote the play <em>Man and Superman</em>, others had translated ubermensch as ‘overman’ and ‘beyond-man’. Both these words found few takers. But uber has flourished as a vogue word for ‘superlative’.<br /><br />The German uber means 'above', like the Urdu uper. The Latin uber is altogether different. It means udder or breast. This uber is seen in exuberance, which originally meant copious flow of milk from the udder (ex uber). An exuberant person is effusive and full of sap. When the stock market is exuberant, the bulls slurp. Indians are exuberant after the Reserve Bank bought 200 tonnes of gold for $6.7 billion in November. But the economy, up against the wall, may not be getting the golden showers. The liking for such showers is called urolagnia.<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week in November 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-32395016449330751702009-10-31T10:11:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:46:07.066-07:00The three-fold path<p>Karunanidhi is most merciful. He has demanded Indian citizenship for Sri Lankan refugees in Tamil Nadu. Jayalalithaa says he is thereby “trivialising” the Tamil struggle in Lanka. But trivia is good for Alzheimer’s. It can irrigate brain cells.</p><p>Intellectuals feign contempt for trivia. Gossips love it. In modern politics, nothing can rival Churchill trivia. The prime minister walked about naked in his room and dictated letters in his bathtub. Franklin Roosevelt invited him to the White House in 1941. Churchill was dictating to his stenographer Patrick Kinna when the president knocked on the door. Churchill said, “Come in,” and Roosevelt entered and was dazzled by the pink pendant. “As you can see, Mr President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide from you.”</p><p>In a cartoon, Abu Abraham lampooned President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signing away ordinances in his bathtub during the Emergency. If Churchill were alive, he might have sued the cartoonist for copyright. Kinna died this year at age 95.</p><p>Sri Lankans, too, treasure their political trivia. Sir John Kotelawala was the prime minister when Queen Elizabeth II visited Colombo in 1954. At a reception, her skirt flew up and mushroomed in a sudden gust, and the prime minister shouted in Sinhala to the official photographer: “Ganing, yokko, ganing (Shoot, you beggar, shoot.)” The loyal photographer did not miss Her Thighness.</p><p>Trivia wasn’t always trivial. Trivia was a junction of three paths—tri is three and via means way. It became associated with titbits because people who met at crossroads exchanged gossip. Hecate Trivia, the Greek goddess of three paths, was the protector of newborns, women and households. Male chauvinists reduced her to the patron of witches. Panchsheel was based on the Buddhist eight-fold path. It became Hindi-Chini border trivia.</p><p>Scholars in the Middle Ages were called trivialists. They studied trivium, the lower division of a university course comprising grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the basics of the seven liberal arts. The higher division, quadrivium, had mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy.</p><p>Kotelawala lost the election in 1956 to Solomon Bandaranaike thanks to Buddhist bhikkhus who supported the ‘Sinhala Only’ campaign. Bhikkhu is a Pali word related to the Sanskrit bhikshu. A bhikshu begs food (bhiksha). The Russian word for food is pischa, which is related to bhiksha and possibly to the Tamil pichai and pichaikkaran (beggar).</p><p>The Russian word for brother (Sanskrit bhrata) is brat. That is apt. Bog, the Russian word for God, could be related to Bhagwan. God help Bengal’s Buddha. He might face another Mamata-Maoist kolahal if he acquires land for a Russian nuclear plant at Haripur. He should watch <em>Kolokol Chernobylya,</em> the first film on the nuclear accident. Kolokol means warning bell in Russian.</p><p>Indians are suckers for nuclear deals. Sugar in Moscow is sakhar. Sanskrit sharkara khanda and Persian shakar kand became French sucre candi and English sugar candy. Actor Pia Glenn, jilted by sugar daddy Salman Rushdie, says she isn’t the kind of woman who would be his “arm candy”. She all but called him midnight baby, a euphemism for bastard. The title Midnight’s Children is subversive.</p><p>Karl Marx, the communist god, had a midnight baby. The boy’s mother, Helen Demuth, had joined Marx’s wife as a maidservant at age 8. Marx never paid the proletarian for a lifetime of slavery in his house. Helen became pregnant in 1850, two years after Marx and Engels gave the call, “Workers of the world, unite.” She gave the child—Henry Frederick Demuth—the first and middle names of Marx and Engels, and her surname. It was perhaps a three-way thing. Marx forced Engels to own up the kid, but Engels in deathbed blew the lid. “Freddy is Marx’s son,” he told Eleanor, a daughter of Marx. Labour problems never go away.</p><p><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a> </p><p>*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine the Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">www.the-week.com</a>) in October 2009.</p>wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-11411590770996442882009-10-16T11:43:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:47:11.621-07:00Going for the jugularElizabeth Blackburn was asleep when she got the Nobel Prize call on October 5. “I thought I was dreaming,” she said, full of joy. That was natural—the Old English word dream meant joy. The Old English word for dream was swefn, which is the same as Sanskrit swapna. Their root, swep-no, meant sleep. Greeks pronounced swep-no as hypnos, just as Iranians pronounced the Sanskrit soma as homa.<br /><br />The Scottish surgeon James Braid coined the word hypnotism in 1843, long after Franz Mesmer died. Mesmerism was considered black magic until an Indian monk in Paris, Abbe Faria, published a book on lucid sleep in 1819. His native Goa has an arresting bronze sculpture of him mesmerising a woman.<br /><br />Faria led a battalion in the French Revolution and spent years in jail. He used yoga in his psychological research. His father was a master of yoga and mind control. Yoga means union or yoke. Veins in the neck are called jugular because they pass under jugulum, the yoke-shaped collarbone. Yoga gets under covers in conjugal, but if you listen hard you won’t miss the “jug jug to dirty ears”.<br /><br />The tele-yoga teacher Baba Ramdev boasts he will cure mankind of all diseases in 20 years. His disciples bought a Scottish island last month to build a yoga centre. Scotsmen in kilts doing the headstand will make a pretty picture. Looking up, they could go bananas. A true Scotsman wears nothing under the kilt. Sergeants in Scottish regiments enforced the no-undies rule, and checked under kilts with a long-handled mirror. Guards at hotel gates use such mirrors to check under vehicles for bombs. Terrorism can spell the end of miniskirts.<br /><br />Ramdev swears by the vedas. Veda is related to the Latin videre (to see, to know). So are wit, vision, video, visa and voyeur. After a conquest in 47 BC, Julius Caesar wrote: veni, vidi, vici—I came, I saw, I conquered. Young men plagued by premature release change the word order and lament, “I saw, I came….”<br /><br />The Chinese on the border are going for the jugular, but India takes reporters to task. It has denied reports of incursions with a rare vehemence. But don’t fault China for giving Kashmiris paper visa, ignoring Indian passports. Visa was originally known as charta (paper) visa (seen). America is eager to shoehorn itself into Kashmir. Bill Clinton failed to become US special envoy to Kashmir, but count on the pants dropper to use his good orifices. The Organisation of Islamic Countries has appointed a special envoy for Kashmir. In literature, envoy is a message at the end of a poem. In the envoy to ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, Chaucer advises women: “Ever wag your tongues like the windmill.” Envoys are good at it.<br /><br />In The Count of Monte Cristo, Abbe Faria helps the hero discover a treasure. Alexandre Dumas did not mention his Indian origins in the novel. Dumas did odd things. One winter evening, he allowed the novelist Roger de Beauvoir to join him and his wife, Ida, in bed, just to keep warm. Writes a literary historian: “In the morning Alexandre woke up first, looked at the two traitors, and then addressed de Beauvoir, ‘Shall two old friends quarrel about a woman, even when she’s a lawful wife? That would be stupid,’ and seizing his friend’s hand across Ida’s sleeping form, he added: ‘Let us become reconciled like the ancient Romans—on this public square.’”<br /><br />Sharing a bed was a fine way of courtship in Scotland. No young Scot took his girlfriend out for a date. He simply asked her parents to let him share her bed at night. They went to bed fully clothed. Parents tucked the girl in a sack, leaving only the hands and face free for exploration. This was known as bundling, which should gladden modern marketing strategists. But keep an eye on the border—the Americans and the Chinese might do some bundling to turn up the heat on Pakistan.<br /><br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">www.the-week.com</a>) in October 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-14509884055698665422009-10-04T07:11:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:48:10.502-07:00Count your cash cowsGoblins in Harry Potter speak gobbledygook. Others cannot understand their lingo. India’s nuclear mandarins speak in tongues about the “failure” of Pokhran II. Nobody can make sense of their glossolalia. Bombay-born British educator Frederic Farrar coined the word glossolalia in 1879. American legislator Maury Maverick coined gobbledygook to twit bureaucratese. He did it in a wartime memo in 1944, threatening in jest to shoot anyone using words like activation and implementation.<br /><br />His grandfather Samuel Maverick was more famous. His name yielded the word maverick. This Texas engineer did not brand the calves in his cattle ranch. So other ranchers called unbranded calves maverick. Later, maverick came to mean ‘masterless’ and then ‘unconventional person’.<br /><br />Shashi Tharoor is a maverick calf in politics. He tweeted in jest about the government’s austerity drive. He said he would travel “cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows”. The prattle class was pleased, but hidebound Congressmen demanded his head. ‘Hidebound’ originally indicated skinny cattle with the ribs and backbones sticking out.<br /><br />Cattle class is economy class for the British and coach class for Americans. Sailors called it steerage—the lowest deck, full of foul air. It was slightly better than the cargo hold. Steerage got its name from rudder ropes that veined the deck. Almost half the 2,566 passengers of the Titanic travelled cattle class.<br /><br />James Cameron writes in Titanic film script: “Steerage passengers, in their coarse wool and tweeds, queue up in moveable barriers like cattle in a chute. A health officer examines their heads one by one, checking the scalp and eyelashes for lice.” Two unruly boys and their uncouth father shove past Rose’s fiancé, the uber-rich Cal. “Steerage swine!” says Cal, iceberg-cold. “Apparently he missed his annual bath.”<br /><br />Manmohan Singh saw no sting in Tharoor’s tweet. The capitalist economist knows the value of cattle. The word cattle comes from Latin capitale, meaning property. As cattle moved, it was moveable property. This meaning survives in the legal term ‘goods and chattels’. Chattel was cattle in French.<br /><br />Cattle represented the wealth of ancient migrants. Romans called their domestic animals pecu. Indians called theirs pasu. Pecu produced the words pecuniary (relating to money) and peculiar. Peculiar meant private property in the form of cattle. The Jews were known as Peculiar People—God’s chosen people, who owned private property and had money. For many Jews, money-lending was heaven.<br /><br />The government has asked IIMs and IITs to increase fees. This should make cattle burp in satisfaction. The word fee comes from the Old German fihu, meaning cattle. Some Harvard professors had a cattle perk—they could graze their cows on the university campus. Professor Harvey Cox, author of <em>The Secular City</em>, took that privilege on September 10. He took a cow to his retirement party in Harvard. The English cow is a clone of the Sanskrit gau, though gau sounds hoarse like deep-throated Tharoor.<br /><br />Sonia Gandhi knows that Italy (Viteliu) means land of cattle. The Latin word for calf is vitulus. Sonia flew cattle class from Delhi to Mumbai on September 14. Don’t connect her with Tharoor’s “holy cows”—unless he had ‘sacred cows’ in mind. Holy Cow is just an interjection, a swearword like Holy Mackerel. A sacred cow is something or someone you can’t question.<br /><br />The Sacred Band was an elite unit in the Theban army. Alexander annihilated them. The Sacred Band consisted of 150 pairs of gay lovers. Thebans theorised that lovers would stick by each other in crunch time and battle hard. It was like the commando buddy system. Buddy has a queer past. The word originated as butty (workmate) in coalmines, where miners worked in close proximity, butt to butt.<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">http://www.the-week.com/</a>) in September 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-14828812905035143172009-09-18T07:10:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:49:42.099-07:00A hot dog on a leashA tin trunk held everything Nripen Chakraborty owned. He lived in a single room and was chief minister of Tripura for ten years. George Fernandes washed his own clothes in a bucket even when he was defence minister. A half-naked fakir washes a long piece of white cloth in a river in the film <em>Gandhi</em>. He lets the cloth slip from his fingers and float towards a woman in rags. He looks away so that she can take it without embarrassment. “Her lips almost part in a tiny smile of thanks,” reads the screenplay. Gandhi’s eyes narrow with pain.<br /><br />S.M. Krishna lived for months in a Maurya Sheraton suite costing the earth. He took the trouble for his love of simplicity—sheraton is a furniture style noted for its simplicity. Pranab Mukherjee, who ejected him, hardly knows the root of austerity. The word austere, meaning dry, was originally used to describe brandy, not ‘Gandy’. Krishna said he would make “private arrangements” to continue living in luxury. He spoke like a stoic, a philosopher with the stiff upper lip. The word stoic comes from Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch in Athens where stoics taught endurance.<br /><br />The Painted Porch had frescos of the battle of Marathon. More than stoics, ascetics were associated with Marathon. Ascetics were Greek athletes who trained hard for gymnastic competitions. They followed rigorous self-discipline. The word ascetic later came to mean a monk who showed such rigour. Shashi Tharoor, who camped in the Taj Mahal hotel, declined to live in the Kerala House because it offered no privacy or gym. He no doubt knows that ancients who went to gyms trained naked, showing off their privates. Gymnos means naked in Greek.<br /><br />Gymnosophists were naked philosophers the Greeks sighted in India after Alexander’s invasion. These were mainly Digambara (sky-clad) Jain monks. The invaders would have paid attention to gymnosophists’ danglers. The Greeks knew how to restrain their own privates. Their athletes tied a leather strap to the foreskin to stop the penis from dangling during competitions. The other end of the strap was tied round the base. Baring the glans, even by accident, was considered inelegant.<br /><br />The foreskin restraint was called kynodesme, meaning dog on a leash. Kynikos means doglike. This word evolved into English cynic. Cynics were a school of philosophers noted for their sneering sarcasm. While sneering, they tended to bare their teeth like snarling dogs. Their gymnasium in Athens was known as the Grey Dog. The anti-Naxalite Greyhounds of Andhra Pradesh are all teeth and no leash.<br /><br />The cynic Diogenes, who lived in a barrel and slighted Alexander, was an exhibitionist. He fondled himself in public, saying, “If only I could soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly.” The Japanese call male masturbation senzui—it means a hundred rubs. They call the female variety manzumi, meaning ten thousand rubs. The arithmetic could be faulty, but women take a longer time than men.<br /><br />The book <em>Tingo</em>, by Adam Jacot de Boinod, has such words and expressions from different languages. In Japanese, Bakku-shan is a girl who looks good from behind but not so from the front. Zaftig in German is a buxom woman full of juice (zaf means sap). Don’t expect the frau to dote on die toten hosen—the dead trousers—meaning a boring place or an impotent man. She would rather chase Italians adept at carezza. Carezza is marathon sex, coitus prolongatus, avoiding emission.<br /><br />Fijians call unfaithful husbands vori vori (ball ball). Large corn flour balls swim in this thick soup. Sops that German philanderers offer to pacify their suspicious wives are called dragon fodder. The dragon sniffing at the Arunachal border is itching for trouble. The best way to provoke Chinese brass hats is to send them green hats. If you tell a Chinese that he wears a green hat, you imply that his wife is cheating on him. A hard hat is a helmet. Helmet also means glans, the private red hat.<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">http://www.the-week.com/</a>) in September 2009wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-63278952885983576532009-09-05T05:05:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:51:05.966-07:00A bone of contentionTamiflu maker Roche pays Gilead Sciences 18 per cent as royalties. Gilead holds the patent. Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of Gilead before he became US secretary of defence in 2001. He is still its major shareholder. Rumsfeld's assets zoomed when President Bush saw doom in the avian flu in 2005—he falsely predicted 2,00,000 flu cases in the US. India is now the land of opportunity for the flu gang.<br /><br />Gilead is a biblical name meaning hill of testimony. The word testimony shares its Latin root, testis, with testicle. Not all etymologists agree that witnesses in ancient Rome put their hands on their testicles while testifying in court. But a testicle touch indicated trust. Abraham asked his servant to put his hand “under my thigh” and swear that he would bring a god-fearing bride for Isaac.<br /><br />Judges in India agonised over their own assets in August. They behaved like bikinis on the beach: ready to reveal, but denying a closer look. Manmohan Singh worried about pendency. It is an old infirmity. He offered to “walk the extra mile” to level the pile of pending cases. The phrase “go the extra mile” is from the Bible. A Roman soldier on the march carried heavy arms and other stuff. Law allowed him to collar a passerby to carry his load for a mile. The carriers hated it. Jesus preached them love: “Whoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” That is the extra mile.<br /><br />The Swiss Banks Association has lent Indian fat cats an extra smile. It says it will not allow any fishing expedition by India. A fishing expedition is a legal investigation with the idea of discovering something that can be used for later proceedings. A fishing story is an exaggerated account. You lay it thick.<br /><br />A whaling expedition epic, <em>Moby Dick</em>, has the best opening line in American literature. “Call me Ishmael,” it goes. The Bulwer Lytton Prize, a mock award, is given for worst opening lines. Lytton's novel Paul Clifford opens thus: “It was a dark and stormy night.” The silly prize this year went to a man who wrote a paragraph about a night on a whaler ship.<br /><br />Arabs trace their roots to the biblical Ishmael. They call him Ismail. He was born when his father, Abraham, was 86 years old. Yet, Abraham fell to the ground, rolling in laughter, when God said he would have another son, Isaac. Abraham was then 99. All God wanted in return was a circumcision treaty. Abraham and Ishmael obliged with their foreskin.<br /><br />Ishmael is a telepathic gorilla in David Quinn's book <em>Ishmael</em>. Quinn says the rib that God took from Adam to create Eve was actually a bone in the penis. Man lacks this bone, which most other mammals have. Man's evolutionary cousins the gorilla and the chimpanzee are equipped with it. The Hebrew word for rib was a euphemism for the bone. Quinn traces the seam on the scrotum and on the underside of the shaft as telltale proof of the divine surgery.<br /><br />Scientists call the bone baculum. Arun Shourie, who often quotes from <em>Alice in Wonderland</em>, might hit the roof if told that the rabbit does not have it. But the walrus, which sings of cabbages and kings, has an impressive one. It could be even 2.5 metres long.<br /><br />Scientist Richard Dawkins, author of <em>The God Delusion</em>, is a staunch evolutionist. He says, while evolving from apes, females found baculum-less males healthier, and so more interesting in bed. This sexual selection led to “boneless” babies and eventual extinction of human baculum. Sufferers of erectile dysfunction can forgive neither the women nor God.<br /><br />Horses and hyenas have no baculum. Nor do whales and dolphins, though the latter have quickies many times a day. They have enormous desire and can romance human beings. Next time a dolphin tries to save you from drowning in the sea, take care to cover your base.<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">www.the-week.com</a>) in September 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-54380606866897686572009-08-21T00:05:00.000-07:002010-04-22T08:12:34.729-07:00Go on a leather huntCalicut 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Aamir Khan is producing a loose motion picture, <em>Delhi Belly</em>. 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.<br /><br />“I gotta go pee, I gotta go home,” whimpers Yolanda, the restaurant robbing woman, in <em>Pulp Fiction</em>. 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 <em>Inglourious Basterds</em>.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">http://www.the-week.com/</a>) in August 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-31166649957297189582009-08-09T06:49:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:52:38.133-07:00Trainspotting at GhotiComic actor Julie Walters, who plays Molly Weasley in Harry Potter movies, has published her autobiography, <em>That’s Another Story</em>. “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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language</em>. Theatregoers cocked their ears for such cheek.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />English spellings were wayward till <em>Johnson’s Dictionary</em> (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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>Shorter Oxford Dictionary</em>. “Cock’s bodikins!” swears Constable Turfe in Ben Jonson’s <em>Tale of a Tub</em>, taking God’s name in vain.<br /><br />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.<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">www.the-week.com</a>) in August 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-65457137221373641752009-07-26T10:04:00.000-07:002010-04-22T08:14:50.005-07:00Off with his headWoman Hitler is an anagram of mother-in-law. But there is a little Hitler in every male. The little Hitler in Praful Patel burst forth in a television interview on July 7. “Heads will roll,” he roared, announcing his ambition to straighten out Air India within 30 days. The murderous expression is a Hitlerism. Germans screamed ‘Vote Ja’ when Hitler said during an election in 1930, “If our movement is victorious, there will be a revolutionary tribunal which will punish the crimes of 1918. The decapitated heads will roll in the sand.”<br /><br />A roll in the sand is far less pleasurable than a roll in the hay, which means to make love. Lovemaking can be more satisfying, especially for the female, if you give head. Civilisation is on your side. The sexologist Havelock Ellis says the act of going down on a woman “was a very familiar manifestation in classical times; …it tends to be especially prevalent at all periods of high civilisation.” Such scholarship is lost on Ghulam Nabi Azad. He wants Indians to make love less often and make babies only in their thirties. Recreation, he believes, can prevent procreation.<br /><br />Ancient Greeks would have applauded Azad. They segregated men from women till men reached age 30. Boys left home for military camps at age seven, and men courted them in their adolescence with the consent of their fathers. The state controlled population by encouraging men to take boys as lovers, but sodomy was taboo. Those who did not have a boy lover ran the risk of being called eccentric or even unpatriotic. Many men never married. But if they felt the temptation to pass on their genes, they could borrow a friend’s wife who already had produced children for him.<br /><br />Socrates had pederastic relationships with several of his students, who trained naked in gymnasiums. The word gymnast comes from gymnos, meaning naked. One of his favourites, Alcibiades, became a great Athenian general. The historian Xenophon says Socrates’s wife, Xanthippe, was jealous of Alcibiades. The jealousy might have aggravated her ill temper. Her name means yellow mare; a grey mare is a woman who governs her husband. Socrates said he married the shrew to practise his patience. A student sought his advice on marriage. “Marry, by all means,” Socrates said. “If you get a good wife, you will be happy. If you get a bad wife, you will become a philosopher.”<br /><br />Socrates never wrote any book. He followed the oral tradition. Oscar Wilde restricted the tradition to his sexuality. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and gays may love Uranus. Wilde swore that he never loved it. He sued the Marquis of Queensberry for calling him a sodomite. In court he argued that his love for the marquis’s son, Arthur Douglas, was pure and sublime in the Greek pederastic tradition. Douglas in a poem had described it as “the love that dare not speak its name”.<br /><br />Wilde lost the case and was sent to Reading Prison. Apparently he lost no time seducing the jailor. He became a number, C 3.3., which stood for his jail block, floor and cell. The number three, like thirty, has become hot. Pranab Mukherjee heads the latest GoM, on 3G spectrum. The Supreme Court is examining the rights of the third gender. Hillary Clinton says India and the US are “at the beginning of a third era. I’ll call it US-India 3.0.” The real American intention is to upgrade Af-Pak to a more terrifying threesome, Af-Pak-In.<br /><br />Elizabethan dramatists loved to pun on the number three. It meant the male genitals. Curtis, a minor character in <em>The Taming of the Shrew</em>, tells Grumio, the hero’s attendant: “Away, you three-inch fool! I am no beast.” Grumio retorts, calling him a cuckold: “Am I but three inches? Why thy horn is a foot; and so long am I at the least.”<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">http://www.the-week.com/</a>) in July 2009wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-88152067552827749212009-07-12T06:08:00.000-07:002010-04-22T08:18:38.411-07:00Gone with the windColumbus gave the Caniba a bad name. He called them canibales, invented stories of their eating human flesh and hunted them without compunction. Carib, another name of the Caniba, yielded the word Caribbean. They were a seafaring tribe, with slanted eyes and yellowish skin, and both names meant 'valiant warriors'. But white men fatted the cannibal myth. They said the Carib tasted all nationalities, and found Frenchmen the most delicious and Spaniards the hardest to digest.<br /><br />A more authentic Caribbean delicacy, cou-cou soup, is a magic potion that women ladle out to make men fall in love with them. Girls lace it with their own intimate juices and feed their boyfriends. Ganga channa, another West Indian preparation, serves the same purpose. While cooking it, the woman squats naked over the steaming pot of chickpeas to infuse it with her enchanting pheromones.<br /><br />West Indians call a new boyfriend juvi. Girls at Sabina Park cheered Yuvi as he scored a century on June 26. It was a breezy knock all right, but cricket writers went overboard. A Caribbean paper online ran this headline: "Yuvraj ton too much for feisty Windies."'Feisty Windies' is a curious combination. Feisty means aggressive, but the word has a troublesome wind behind it. Feisty comes from Middle English fisten, meaning to fart without sound. Though not noisy, it can be noisome. Feist was "a small wind, escaping backward, more obvious to the nose than ears." Fizzle is another word for this strong, silent type. Fizzle blows no whistle, nor sounds any trumpet.<br /><br />Feisty old ladies in the 17th century, on emitting foul smells, blamed it on their lapdogs. "These feisting curs!" they cursed, to save face. Before long, feist came to mean the innocent beast itself. The smell became dog. The Old French noun 'pet' meant fart. Its verb, peter, is still intact. Shakespeare punned on petar (a small bomb) and peter (penis). Hamlet tells his mother: "For it is the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petar."<br /><br />Some say Shakespeare is a pen name. They name Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as the real author. John Aubrey celebrated the earl in Brief Lives: "This Earle of Oxford, making his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to travel, 7 years. On his returne, the Queen welcomed him home and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the fart."<br /><br />This anecdote could have inspired Mark Twain's 1601 -- a fireside conversation in the time of the Tudors. Someone breaks wind while the Queen is chatting with luminaries like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and Walter Raleigh. Investigating the blast, the Queen says: "Prithee, let the author confess the offspring. Will my Lady Alice testify?"<br /><br />Lady Alice protests there is "no room for such a thundergust within my ancient bowels." The kind Queen absolves the young Helen saying she would have to tickle her "tender maidenhedde with many a mousie-squeak" before she learnt "to blow a hurricane like this. Was it you, my learned and ingenious Jonson?"<br /><br />Jonson disowns it, and so do Bacon and Shakespeare, in their distinct literary styles. All look towards Raleigh, who then rises and says: "Most gracious maisty, it was I that did it, but indeed it was so poor and frail a note, compared with such as I am wont to furnish, that in sooth I was ashamed to call the weakling mine."<br /><br />The move to amend Section 377 of the IPC had fizzled out, before the Delhi High Court struck a blow for the gays on July 2. The judgment encourages Indians to go back from Jai ho to Jai 'hind'. And cannibals -- gay or not -- can now perform 69 without fear of arrest. But Othello did not mean it when he tempted Desdemona with tales of hair-breadth escapes and "Cannibals that each other eat".<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">http://www.the-week.com/</a>) in July 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-81906958653874620402009-06-26T19:50:00.000-07:002010-04-22T08:17:26.008-07:00Party going to seedRousseau did not read any erotic book until he was 30. "These books can only be read with one hand," he wrote in <em>Confessions</em>. Yashwant Sinha's <em>Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer</em> offered no such one-liners. But he attempted one when he quit as BJP vice-president on June 12. "I am getting a sinking feeling that once again there is a conspiracy of silence," he said in the resignation letter.<br /><br />'Conspiracy of silence' is vintage Victorian. It entered the English language in 1865. John Stuart Mill introduced it in his book on Auguste Comte, the French philosopher. 'Sinking feeling', though as old, is more colourful. It first appeared in ads for an energy drink called Bovril. One ad showed a boy sitting astride a huge bottle of Bovril bobbing in the sea and saying, "Bovril prevents that sinking feeling." Flaccid old men drank more Bovril than boys willingly did.<br /><br />Jaswant Singh says the BJP is a "party of yesterday". Its leaders are looking sad and droopy after losing the elections. A swig of Bovril can help them perk up. It is a beef extract, but the cow lovers should look at the brighter side: beef is slang for sex. The name Bovril is a mix of bovine and Vril. Vril comes from <em>The Coming Race</em>, a novel by Edward Bulwer Lytton, who is better known for <em>The Last Days of Pompeii</em>. It is an all-conquering magic fluid. Lytton coined the word from Old French viril, meaning virile.<br /><br />Vir in Latin means man. The Sanskrit vira has the same root. The Old English word for man was 'wer', which has survived in werewolf. The Sanskrit veerya, meaning semen, is related to virile. Semen has a close kinship with seminary. Don't think that sex-starved Christian priests flooded the place with some sticky fluid. Semen means seed, and seminary was a plot -- a nursery -- where people planted seed. It later became a school for training priests. But the next time you attend a seminar, wipe the seat before you sit.<br /><br />The BJP president issued a gag order after Sinha sent his letter. Bulwer Lytton's son, the viceroy Lord Lytton, imposed the Vernacular Press Act in 1878 to tame the Indian press. To escape the Act, the <em>Amrita Bazar Patrika</em> of Calcutta became an entirely English paper overnight. It was bilingual until then. Many Indian papers proudly call themselves vernacular. The word vernacular means 'home-born slave'. The press, of course, tells truth.<br /><br />Men in Kenya are on a month-long sex boycott to protest against fanatic feminism. Their women staged a week-long sex boycott last month, demanding an end to violent political clashes. The prime minister's wife joined the strike. In the ancient Greek comedy <em>Lysistrata</em>, by Aristophanes, women go on a sex strike to force their men to stop a long war between Athens and Sparta. The leader of the strike tells her friends: "If we sit indoors dressed in our transparent silks, with our pubis nicely plucked, their tools will become so hard that they won't be able to deny us anything." The strategy is to tease, torture and tame.<br /><br />Aristophanes savaged Socrates in the play <em>The Clouds</em>. He opposed the philosopher's liberal views on youth and women. Sharad Yadav of the Janata Dal says he likes Socrates and is ready to take poison if Parliament passes the women's reservation bill. In <em>The Assembly of Women</em>, another play by Aristophanes, women disguised as men take over the legislature and pass feminist laws. One law grants the ugliest women the right to drag any man to bed. Praxagora, the feminist leader in the play, tells her friends: "It would be a fine thing if one of us, in the midst of discussion, rushed on to the Speaker's platform and, flinging her cloak aside, showed her hairy privates." Were he in ancient Greece, Yadav would have recorded if she wore lipstick and where.<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br />*This article appeared in the Indian newsmagazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">www.the-week.com</a>) in June 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-25742711925079613622009-06-13T01:19:00.000-07:002010-04-22T08:00:23.497-07:00I am what I amHemingway took a ten-dollar bet and wrote a short story in six words: "For sale: Baby shoes, not used." Samuel Beckett wrote a half-minute play, <em>Breath</em>, which was wordless. All it had was two identical cries, one of birth and the other of death. Victor Hugo was on vacation when <em>Les</em> <em>Miserables</em> was published. He sent the publisher a telegram which had just one character, '?'. The publisher cabled back an ecstatic exclamation mark. King Philip of Macedon wrote a threatening letter to Spartans: "If I enter Laconia, I will raze the city of Sparta." The Spartans sent a one-word retort: "If."<br /><br />Laconic means using very few words. The word comes from Laconia. President Pratibha Patil used half the laconic 'If' to swear in the new ministers. All she had to say was "I". She uttered it 158 times without a stutter. "After us, the deluge," said Madame De Pompadour, a mistress of Louis XV. Likewise, fools thought, after Kalam, calamity. Patil proved them wrong no doubt.<br /><br />Patil was an infant -- the word infant means one without speech -- when Haile Selassie addressed the League of Nations in June 1936. It was about mustard bombing by Italy. "I, Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, am here today…," he began. The I after the name Selassie is neither a numeral nor an initial. It is Patil's well-practised word, I.<br /><br />I is central to spiritualists. A spiritualist, Baba Lekhraj, spoke with the Rashtrapati after his death. The Rastafari believe Selassie is alive; he is God's incarnation. The Christian cult, popular in Jamaica, is named after him: he was Ras Tafari (Prince Tafari) before he became emperor. The Rastafari say "I and I" to link the individual I with the cosmic I. Iyaric, their English lingo, is replete with I. Creator is irator in Iyaric; creation is iration. God is Jah, as seen in hallelujah. They swear by ganja, reggae and dreadlocks.<br /><br />Elvis Presley had pompadour hair. M.S. Dhoni wore long locks like Kalam when he first caught the public eye. "My hair and beard have turned grey" in the last two years, says the cricketer. Hair has the same root as hoary and horror. Hoary means grey with age, hence venerable. Hair stands on end (Latin horrere) when you feel horror. Dhoni can cause horripilation, or goose bumps, when he hits the ball over the top. To go 'over the top' means to take risks. It also means to have an orgasm.<br /><br />Sir Toby tells Sir Andrew in <em>Twelfth Night</em> that his hair hangs like flax on a distaff; "and I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs and spin it off." Dishevelled is hair (French chevel) in disarray. Ophelia tells her father how Hamlet, looking dishevelled, held her hard while she was sewing in her closet, and how she broke free and denied him access. Shakespeare scholars claim the word access here means intercourse. 'Accessory' in the 19th century meant smaller articles of a woman's dress.<br /><br />Merkin, an old accessory, was the female beard. Prostitutes wore this pubic wig over shaven genitals to hide scars or for aesthetic effect. Fashionable young men in Elizabethan England wore a codpiece over their trousers. This pouch held the genitals and exaggerated the bulge. Like Elvis the Pelvis, young men everywhere like to swagger as Bulgarians.<br /><br />Many ministers gagged on the word 'conscientiously' while swearing "I will faithfully and conscientiously discharge my duties…" Conscientiously is a mouthful, with a foul link. Like science, it shares its root -- skei -- with the word shit. Doing one's duty is a euphemism for defecation. Pistol, a character in <em>Henry IV</em>, is quick to discharge. Sir John Falstaff tells him: "Here, Pistol, I charge you with a cup of sack: do you discharge upon mine hostess." Pistol replies: "I will discharge upon her, Sir John, with two bullets." His bullets are his testicles. Discharge your duty, by all means, but keep the oath of secrecy.<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">http://www.the-week.com/</a>) in June 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-20518231732547269342009-05-29T12:00:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:59:40.521-07:00Time for introspectionVoters can be cruel and fickle. They have rejected the hammer and sickle. The communists are aghast at the Trinamool Congress assault. They can't stop saying 'Oh! Kolkata' under their breath. The French will be pleased to hear their whimper.<br /><br /><em>Oh! Calcutta</em> was a musical comedy of the sexy sixties. A number of people like John Lennon and Samuel Beckett were associated with it. It revelled in frontal nudity, male as well as female. The play opened in New York in 1969 and had 5,959 shows over the next 20 years. It had nothing to do with Calcutta. The title was a pun on the French words o quel cul t'as, meaning "what a nice ass you have".<br /><br />The voters have knocked the pants off the comrades. But it looks like an act of sacrilege. Hammer is the weapon of the Norse god Thor, who makes thunder. The expression 'to hammer away', however, means to copulate. The Greek god Priapus wields a sickle, but uses his organ as the main weapon. He is the god of erections. Greeks have a god for everything, but elections are godless and secular like the comrades. Priapus watches over flowers and fruits, his meaty member never droops. He tried to possess the nymph Lotis in her sleep, but the braying of an ass halted the assault. Lotis woke and fled, and became a lotus fruit tree. Priapus slew the whistleblower.<br /><br />The BJP's lotus is a different species, but linguists have tried to link Priapus with Priyapati, also known as Prajapati. The Hindu god lusted after the nubile goddess Ushas and chased her around the world. He lost a head for the audacity. Physicians know Priapus better. They use the word priapism to describe a state of never flagging erection. Priapic men retain elevation even after ejaculation. This may sound like penile paradise, but priapism is painful and tragic. Leukaemia can trigger it. Another trigger is sickle cell disease.<br /><br />Prakash Karat went into "serious introspection" after the elections. L.K. Advani contemplated retirement and disappointed. "This is the time not for jubilation, but for sober introspection," said Sonia Gandhi. Navel-gazing is one form of introspection. It can yield oracular insights. Greeks considered Delphi the navel of the universe. The word navel comes from Old Norse nafi, which is the same as Sanskrit naphi. The Greek word for it is omphalos. Oomph, meaning sexual energy, is related to it. Oomph girls simply cannot help showing off their navels. That is in their instincts.<br /><br />To introspect is to look inward. No one allows you to do it better than Annie Sprinkle, a feminist performance artiste who wrote the book <em>Post-Porn Modernist</em>. She claims to be the first porn star to take a Ph.D. Sprinkle demystifies the female genitalia in her one-woman shows in the United States. In a show called 'Public Cervix Announcement', she encourages the spectators to peep into her cervix, using a speculum and a flashlight. Can you see any teeth inside, she asks, mocking old Freud. Freud dealt with a morbid male fear of vagina dentata, the mythical cervical teeth. Men apparently feared that man-eaters would dismember them out of penis envy.<br /><br />Sprinkle was a grande horizontale, a French term for whore. Whoroscope should make an apt name for her speculum. Beckett started his literary career with a poem titled <em>Whoroscope</em>. The two tramps in his absurdist play <em>Waiting for Godot</em> call each other Didi and Gogo. The Didi in Kolkata has put the fear of God in the communists. But the go-go girls with pom-poms could not elevate the performance of the Kolkata Knight Riders.<br /><br />Beckett loved cricket. He is the only first class cricketer to win a Nobel Prize. He had a 'fail better' philosophy. He said: "Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better." The Knight Riders can take heart. But comrades, look inside for insights.<br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">http://www.the-week.com/</a>) in May 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-22535022319677202072009-05-16T01:28:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:58:58.053-07:00A fetish for the footPriyanka Vadra adores her mother. Sonia Gandhi, she says, can be "completely surrounded by praise and sycophancy and be untouched by it". Sycophancy isn't an adorable word. It comes from sykon (fig) and phanein (to show) in Greek. Showing the fig was a gesture of insult in Grecian courts. One made the gesture by sticking the thumb between two fingers. A split fig looks like female genitals-sykon means vulva as well. Politicians rarely made the gesture themselves. Instead, they goaded their toadies to taunt their opponents with it. The toadies came to be known as sycophants.<br /><br />The Indian fig tree is called banyan. It sprouted from the Sanskrit word vanija, which evolved into bania, meaning merchant. Indian merchants on Persian shores built wayside temples under fig trees. So the Persians called them vanija trees. The infant god Krishna floated on a fig leaf in the primeval flood, contemplating the next cycle of creation. He lay sucking his toes.<br /><br />Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, author of <em>Phantoms in the Brain</em>, explains "why we like to have our toes sucked". The part of the brain controlling the foot lies right next to the part controlling the genitals. This proximity makes the foot erogenous. People who have lost a limb can still feel sensations in the nonexistent limb because of overlapping neural wiring. Ramachandran calls it the phantom limb.<br /><br />An engineer from Arkansas, who lost a leg, telephoned him for advice: "Doctor, every time I have sexual intercourse, I experience sensations in my phantom foot. How do you explain that?" The scientist told him about the wiring. "All that's fine, doctor," said the engineer. "But you still don't understand. You see, I actually experience my orgasm in my foot. And therefore it's much bigger than it used to be because it's no longer just confined to my genitals."<br /><br />Prakash Karat plays footsie with the Congress though he says, "We don't want to be its palanquin bearers." Litter is a more common word for palanquin. Litter also means offspring of an animal at one birth. The smallest pig of a litter is called tantony pig, a corruption of St Anthony's pig. Anthony is the patron saint of swineherds, not the defence minister. The latter spells his name without the 'h', but the press often forgets it.<br /><br />The press cares more for the pig. It is not just because of the swine flu. Two little pigs ran away while being taken to a slaughterhouse in England in 1998. Someone claimed they had swum across a river and escaped into a thicket. Newspapers put dozens of journalists on the pigs' trail. They lionised the pigs, and named them Butch and Sundance, comparing them to the famous fugitives.<br /><br />Television crews surveyed the thicket from a news helicopter, with a camera mounted on its nose. One juicy story was about how a female pig, at her oestrous best, was unleashed to tempt Sundance back into his sty. "The seductress did not succeed," the journalist reported. When the pigs were finally captured, the <em>Daily Mail</em> hogged the show: it bought the pigs for 15,000 pounds and sent them to an animal care home for life.<br /><br />Breathless journalism has no full stops. Cardiologist Bernard Lown, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, missed a full stop for five years. He writes in his book <em>The Lost Art of Healing</em>:<br /><br />When I questioned one man about sex, he promptly responded, "Sex no problem." At each yearly visit, we went through the same exchange. "Sex?" I would ask. "Sex no problem," he replied instantly.After he had been my patient for about five years, his wife came along for the first time. During interval history-taking, when I posed the same old question about sex, he gave the same answer. His wife appeared startled and looked quizzically at him.I asked, "How, exactly, do you punctuate the sentence?" He answered with some embarrassment, "Sex, no. Problem."<br /><br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br /><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">www.the-week.com</a>) in May 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6418702762274830129.post-70440481882093963012009-05-02T10:13:00.000-07:002010-04-22T07:58:11.638-07:00A bend and a scentNarendra Modi says, "The Congress is like an old woman, a burden on the country." He would sound more abusive if he used anus, the Latin word for old woman. But the word has no link with any ass, the seat or the beast of burden. It comes from annosa, which means many years old.<br /><br />Old man is senex in Latin, but can be penis in English. Senior and senate are related to senex. The senate was for the elders. So is the Rajya Sabha, though the senile run for it. The more penile aim for the lower house.<br /><br /><em>The Old Man and the Sea</em> is the best of Hemingway. He pruned its length by half. The length of a penis in Paris figures in his memoirs, <em>A Moveable Feast.</em> Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote <em>The Great Gatsby</em>, felt inadequate after his wife said that the way he was built, he could "never make any woman happy". He consulted Hemingway, his friend and literary rival. First they went to the loo and then to the Louvre, for comparisons.<br /><br />Hemingway recalls: "Still he was doubtful about himself. 'It is not basically a question of the size in repose,' I said. 'It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.'"<br /><br />Hemingway rewrote the last page of <em>A Farewell to Arms</em> 39 times. This novel gave English the Italian word ciao (pronounced chau). Ciao serves as both hello and farewell, but it actually means 'I am your slave'. Sonia Gandhi says Advani is an RSS slave who panders to its wishes. Can he take a step without touching its feet, she asks. To pander is to pimp. English procured the word from Pandarus, who bent over backwards to hook his niece Cressida for his friend Troilus, the prince of Troy.<br /><br />"Asked to bend, they crawled," Advani said of the press during the Emergency. Election Commission observer P.L. Darbar is in a bind after ordering a bend. A polling officer in Kerala interrupted him during a pre-election briefing. Irritated, Darbar made him bow, holding his ears and bending his knees. The press called the act a half-squat. The right word is genuflection. Half-squat is for bodybuilders. Genuflection involves submission.<br /><br />Knights genuflected before kings, with one knee bent. Believers bent both knees before bishops to kiss the ring. Arabs sat on bended knees and touched the floor with their foreheads. The sight of elevated bottoms perhaps inspired the invention of domes -- a roofing revolution in an age of steeples and spires. Hindus genuflect best: they prostrate, with not a care about the prostate.<br /><br />To genuflect is to bend (flect) the knee (genu). The word genuine is born of genu. Romans had a knee ceremony at birth. The father placed the newborn upon his knee if he felt the baby was genuinely his. A knee-trembler is more exciting: it is intercourse in the standing position.<br /><br />Hemingway wrote standing up. Truman Capote did it lying down. "I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I am lying down," he said. He wrote <em>In Cold Blood</em>. His novella <em>Breakfast at Tiffany's</em> explores a woman, Holiday Golightly. She talks about a vacation: "We had an irresistible guide, most of him Negro and the rest of him Chinese, and while I don't go much for one or the other, the combination was fairly riveting; so I let him play kneesie under the table." Kneesie takes footsie to another level.<br /><br />Ingenuity drives politics. Mulayam Singh professes a dislike of English and computers. English is also a question of angle, Hemingway would remind him. The verb English means to angle, or spin, the ball in billiards. Mulayam would like the French, who no longer use the word computer. They call it ordinateur. Con-puteur, a French pun on computer, alludes to not-so-fragrant female genitals. God bless Mulayam. He means well: the scent might blunt the urge to french.<br /><br /><a href="mailto:wickedword09@gmail.com">wickedword09@gmail.com</a><br />*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (<a href="http://www.the-week.com/">http://www.the-week.com/</a>) in April 2009.wickedwordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01451476652378095300noreply@blogger.com0