Cheese and sandwich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Mast’ also is of Persian origin, meaning intoxicated. It is another word for the elephant’s musth. Musk is more exciting. It descended from the Sanskrit muska (testicle), as the ancients mistook the source of the aroma. But they didn’t go wrong with mushkara (bully in Sanskrit). He is one with large orchids.
wickedword09@gmail.com

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

Duck the dogs of war

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

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