The three-fold path

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 Kolokol Chernobylya, the first film on the nuclear accident. Kolokol means warning bell in Russian.

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.

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.

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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine the Week (www.the-week.com) in October 2009.

Going for the jugular

Elizabeth 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.

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.

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”.

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.

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….”

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.

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.’”

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.

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

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

A bone of contention

Tamiflu 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.

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.

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.

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.

A whaling expedition epic, Moby Dick, 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.

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.

Ishmael is a telepathic gorilla in David Quinn's book Ishmael. 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.

Scientists call the bone baculum. Arun Shourie, who often quotes from Alice in Wonderland, 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.

Scientist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, 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.

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.
wickedword09@gmail.com

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

Go on a leather hunt

Calicut 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.

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.

Aamir Khan is producing a loose motion picture, Delhi Belly. 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.

“I gotta go pee, I gotta go home,” whimpers Yolanda, the restaurant robbing woman, in Pulp Fiction. 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 Inglourious Basterds.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

Trainspotting at Ghoti

Comic actor Julie Walters, who plays Molly Weasley in Harry Potter movies, has published her autobiography, That’s Another Story. “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.

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.

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.

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.

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 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Theatregoers cocked their ears for such cheek.

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.

English spellings were wayward till Johnson’s Dictionary (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.

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.

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 Shorter Oxford Dictionary. “Cock’s bodikins!” swears Constable Turfe in Ben Jonson’s Tale of a Tub, taking God’s name in vain.

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.
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*This article appeared in the Indian news magazine The Week (www.the-week.com) in August 2009.