Count your cash cows

Goblins 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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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 The Secular City, 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.

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.

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.
wickedword09@gmail.com

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

A hot dog on a leash

A 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 Gandhi. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The book Tingo, 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.

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.
wickedword09@gmail.com

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