Grace under pressure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep the pecker up, Zeb!

wickedword09@gmail.com

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

A bend and a scent

Narendra 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.

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.

The Old Man and the Sea is the best of Hemingway. He pruned its length by half. The length of a penis in Paris figures in his memoirs, A Moveable Feast. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote The Great Gatsby, 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.

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.'"

Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 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.

"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.

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.

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.

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 In Cold Blood. His novella Breakfast at Tiffany's 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.

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.

wickedword09@gmail.com
*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (http://www.the-week.com/) in April 2009.