“It’s like being slapped in the dark”

Yesterday, during a physically-distanced chat with friends, one of them used an idiom.  "Who creates all these?" I said.  Like "pushing the envelope."

Of course, there are experts in the field who know the answers to such questions.

When we were kids, we had a rudimentary English-Tamil dictionary--the same dictionary that gave me the correct spelling for bougainvillea.  It also included equivalents of  few English and Tamil idioms.  I was glad that we had such a dictionary because the meaning of the words that are strung together in an idiom do not by any means add up to what the idiom means.  "Pushing the envelope" does not mean pushing the envelope, right?  Or, even better is this one where the words have nothing to do with that the phrase means: "It rained cats and dogs."

Every language/culture has its own sets of idioms.  In the culture we grow up with, we don't think twice about the usage until it comes to explaining it to a non-native.  Like how difficult it is to explain what "it warmed the cockles of my heart" means!

Today I came across an idiom.  In Italian.  È come essere schiaffeggiato nel buio.

It means “It’s like being slapped in the dark.”

But, it is not about the slap or darkness.  There is a deeper meaning behind those words: "You don’t know where it’s coming from, and you don’t know why it’s happening to you."  When you are slapped in the dark, you have no idea where it came from.  And if it is in a quiet room where you thought you were alone, you have no idea why you were slapped either.

I suppose if there were an Italian-American dictionary, comparable to the English-Tamil dictionary, then the equivalent of È come essere schiaffeggiato nel buio might be "it came out of left field."

Even more fascinating that the person who used that Italian expression was no Italian.  It was an Indian-American!  Padma Lakshmi, the model-turned-chef-turned-celebrity uses that Italian expression in an interview.  She is able to toss an Italian idiom into the conversation because, according to Wikipedia, "Lakshmi speaks English, Italian, Spanish, Tamil and Hindi."

We live in such a fascinating world.  Instead of appreciating the beauty in all these, we have a demented demagogue who can barely speak in sentences that are at a second-grader's level, and who probably thinks that somebody like a Padma Lakshmi is from a shithole!

The election of tRump is certainly one of those that is best described as È come essere schiaffeggiato nel buio.

I don't dream in Tamil though

While I hadn't planned on it, this post is in a way a continuation of the previous post.  It is also about the role that language plays in our life.  Especially the first language.  The mother tongue, as we referred to in the old country.

In the town where I grew up, and the school that I went to, we were all kids of people who had come to the town because of the jobs at the mining-industrial complex.  So, there were kids in my class whose "mother tongues" were not Tamil.  There were a number of Telugus. Quite a few, like Vijay and Srikumar, who spoke Malayalam at home.  Kannada. Bengali. Konkani. Gujarati. Marathi. Even Saurashtra, which was that girl's language!  I think there was one guy--Sanjay?--whose parents were from Bihar (?) and spoke Hindi at home.

Which is why in one class during the elementary years, our math teacher--PK Master--asked one girl what her mother tongue was.  Madhulika's reply was hilarious.  "Pink," she said. It is funny as hell now.  But, if you had been in PK Master's class, you too would have blurted out even worse things, I tell ya!  We were all stressed that PK Master would turn to us and ask us whatever.

Anyway, in an European context, such a school would be referred to as an international school.  For us, well, we did not know any better or worse.  It was normal, the way things were.

Most Americans who grow up monolingual, and remain so throughout their lives, cannot possibly relate to all these.  Nor can they begin to begin to appreciate the deep emotions that are stirred when the first language looms in the background.

After having moved far away from her native land, in this author's case, she realizes that "my native language has been sitting quietly in my soul’s vault all this time."  An accomplished linguist and writer, she writes:

But embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention. When a bilingual person tries to articulate a thought in one language, words and grammatical structures from the other language often clamor in the background, jostling for attention. The subconscious effort of suppressing this competition can slow the retrieval of words—and if the background language elbows its way to the forefront, the speaker may resort to code-switching, plunking down a word from one language into the sentence frame of another.

The author then notes:

When a childhood language decays, so does the ability to reach far back into your own private history. Language is memory’s receptacle. It has Proustian powers. Just as smells are known to trigger vivid memories of past experiences, language is so entangled with our experiences that inhabiting a specific language helps surface submerged events or interactions that are associated with it.

I urge you to read the entire essay, which is wonderfully autoethnographic, and which will particularly appeal to the reader who left this comment here.

The great danger in our age is nationalism

One of my early memories of Hindi, from my early years deep in peninsular India, was from when mother asked the gurkha why he was coming by way early in the night to check on the property, when he should be coming much later.

As a kid, I was shocked.  Mother knew Hindi?  And, like most kids, I was impressed.  Mothers do know everything!

I never bothered to learn the language, other than during the mandatory couple of years of Hindi language in school.  The older I grew, the more I hated the very thought of learning Hindi--because, by then I had learnt a little bit about the long and rich history of Tamil, and about the politics of imposing Hindi upon us non-Hindi people.

So much was the anti-Hindi sentiment inside me that even in graduate school, if a couple of Indian students spoke in Hindi when I was also with them, I would remind them that I didn't know Hindi.  The assumption that anybody from India knows Hindi--and should know the language--has always pissed me off to no end.

Decades have gone by since those years in Neyveli.  And I have become more fanatical about this issue.  Because, understanding the world a lot more has also made me realize that forcing a new language upon people is one of the oldest successful strategies that bastards have always employed.  The stories echo all over the world--from the native peoples in the Americas who were systematically forced to learn alien European languages and, in the process, render dead their own languages, to the Russification in the old Soviet bloc, to the Uighurs, to ...

Six years ago, almost to the very date, I quoted this:

A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots

Forcing a language upon people is one of the easiest ways to erase history and tradition.

I have ranted about this issue for a long time.  Perhaps all the easier for me, not because I have been an American for a long time, but because I have always believed that "Indian" is an artificial construct.  I even go to other blogs and write about this!

Thus, I am not surprised at the intense opposition that continues to grow against the Hindu Raj's Home Minister and his push for Hindi.

Speaking at a public meeting organised by ally MDMK on the 111th birth anniversary of former Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai in Chennai, Mr Stalin said, “If we close our eyes for a second, they will impose Hindi and completely discard Tamil. We have been protesting against this since 1938. We protested in 1949, 1950, 1953, 1963 and 1965. We have once again arrived at a stage where we have to protest.”

Nationalism is a danger, especially when coming from the likes of politicians "ruling"* governing India now.  I will quote, again, Mario Vargas Llosa:

I believe that the great danger in our age is nationalism, it’s no longer fascism, nor communism. These ideologies have become completely outdated. But in contrast, nationalism is a defect that is always there under the surface and above all, at moments of crisis, can be very easily exploited by demagogues and power-hungry leaders. Nationalism is the great tradition of humankind; unfortunately it’s always present in history.
And so, I believe that it’s the great enemy of democracy. It’s the great enemy of freedom and a terrible source of racism. If one believes that being born into or forming part of a particular community is a privilege, then that is racism. I believe that one must fight nationalism energetically if one believes in democracy, in freedom, especially in this age of mixing and the building of great blocks.

If only the ill-informed and malicious Hindians will spend a few hours reading about Tamil, for instance.  If only they even half-understood that "to know Tamil" can also mean "to be a civilized human being."

* A few years ago, Vijay Nambisan wrote about how Indians continue to think of parties in power as "rulers" when they are merely elected to govern.  It is more than mere semantics.  I am not able to track down his commentary.

Click here for the backstory about this

What a fucking effluvia this is!

I am a very mild-mannered person, really.  But, every time I see the name trump, I fucking want to swear!  It is not me then, right?  The cause of my behavior is clearly this fucking president!

If you have been a reader for long, then by now you know that those previous sentences were a set up to talk about ... why we use those swear words.  After all, I am a dull boring college professor! ;)

This is not really a new topic here.  Remember this post about "piss pot" and "piss proud," for instance?  Or about "assholes"?

I tell ya, there is a lot we need to understand why we use such fucking language.  I suppose my reputation in this has been established, which is why the friend got me a book titled, "What the F"

Source

So, why do we use such shitty language anyway?

Philosopher Rebecca Roache says that as well as the ingredient of offence, swear words tend to have a cluster of other characteristics. We will often use swear words "to vent some emotion", she says. "If you're angry or particularly happy, swearing is a catharsis. Swearing also centres on taboos. Around the world swear words will tend to cluster around certain topics: lavatorial matters, sex, religion."

Ah, crap! ;)

So, the swear words are work with a fucking trinity: "lavatorial matters, sex, religion."

The Times leader writer, Oliver Kamm, author of Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English, says that the swearing lexicon now draws less from religion and more from body effluvia. "There's a hierarchy of effluvia, according to how disgusting we find them in public. 'Shit' is worse than 'piss' which is worse than 'fart' which is worse than 'spit' which is not a taboo word at all. It's an interesting linguistic hypothesis that the taboos relate to how disease-ridden or dangerous or disgusting we find the effluvia themselves."

 Are you thinking what I am thinking?  What the hell is "effluvia", and who in this fucking world uses that?  Google says it means "an unpleasant or harmful odor, secretion, or discharge"  I get it--like what comes out of this fucking president's mouth! ;)

Ni Hao!

I was perhaps eight years old, when I visited Trivandrum for the first time.  Or at least, that is my earliest memory of that city.  The buses had a red/yellow color scheme, and the lettering on them about the places seemed like art work.  I wondered how people read and wrote such stuff.

If the Malayalam script stumped me that much, you can imagine how much at a loss I was about the strange designs that were the script in the Far East.  I could not even begin to imagine how kids learnt those difficult languages.

I am now supposedly older and wiser.  But, only you blog readers know well that that the only thing that is true is that I am older.  To the rest, I pretend that I know shit.

Languages stump me all the time.  In graduate school, a new faculty member joined the same year that got there as a student.  He was a red-haired, balding, bearded white guy.  And he spoke Chinese with the students from China.  It was surreal to me.

In the life after graduate school, I interacted for a few years with another white guy, who was a few years older than me, who taught himself a few languages.  Including Swedish!  He would chat with the visiting Swedes in their language.  On every occasion, I always asked the visitors if his Swedish was ok.  They always said he was fluent, though his accent came across to them.

This Swedish-speaking white American was married to an immigrant from Hong Kong.  No, not an British immigrant, but a Chinese.  I asked the friend whether he learnt Chinese from his wife.  He said he tried, but it was too damn difficult for him.  Difficult for a guy who had taught himself a few languages!

Thus, when the NY Times reports about the passing away of the man who "made writing Chinese as simple as ABC," it more than intrigued me--despite that other news--to read that report.

Zhou Youguang, known as the father of Pinyin for creating the system of Romanized Chinese writing that has become the international standard since its introduction some 60 years ago, died on Saturday in Beijing, Chinese state media reported. He was 111.

I have no idea what Pinyin means, or what Romanized Chinese writing means either.  Ignorant I am, and shall always be.

Adopted by China in 1958, Pinyin was designed not to replace the tens of thousands of traditional characters with which Chinese is written, but as an orthographic pry bar to afford passage into the labyrinthine world of those characters.
Since then, Pinyin (the name can be translated as “spelled sounds”) has vastly increased literacy throughout the country; eased the classroom agonies of foreigners studying Chinese; afforded the blind a way to read the language in Braille; and, in a development Mr. Zhou could scarcely have foreseen, facilitated the rapid entry of Chinese on computer keyboards and cellphones.

I see Chinese students typing a gazillion words a second on their smartphones.  Would not have been possible without Zhou Youguang's contributions.

It took Mr. Zhou and his colleagues three years to develop Pinyin, but the most striking thing about his involvement was that he was neither a linguist nor a lexicographer but an economist, recently returned to China from Wall Street.
But because of a fortuitous meeting at midcentury, and a lifetime love of language, he was conscripted by the Chinese government to develop an accessible alphabetic writing system.

How interesting!  The crazy, twisted, path that life is, eh!

Knowing that linguistics was a hobby of Mr. Zhou’s, Zhou Enlai drafted him to come to Beijing and lead the committee. Mr. Zhou’s protests that he was a mere amateur were to no avail.
“Everyone is an amateur,” he was told.

That was Chou Enlai, when I was growing up, in the pre-Pinyin era.

“Pinyin is not to replace Chinese characters; it is a help to Chinese characters,” Mr. Zhou explained in the interview with The Guardian. “Without an alphabet you had to learn mouth to mouth, ear to ear.”
As a result, illiteracy remained rampant throughout China well into the 20th century — affecting, by some estimates, as much as 85 percent of the population.

What a wonderful contribution to humanity!  And to think that I never knew about Zhou Youguang until today; as the demagogue would tweet, "sad!"

Oh, and Trivandrum is now Thiruvananthapuram.

Up Yours

It was a charming sight of a father with his two young boys with closely cropped blond hair.  The older one looked about 8 or 9, and his brother looked two years his junior.  Interestingly enough, the older one was crying as the three walked towards me and then past me.

The father was wearing cargo shorts, which reminded me of this WSJ piece, and sported a well-trimmed beard.  He looked like he, too, might have been blond when young but the hair had turned a light shade of brown with age.

As they passed me, I noticed that the father's tshirt had in big, bold, uppercase:

  UP
YOURS

A father wearing that tshirt while walking with his sons in a public space.  I imagined his sons asking him: "Dad, what does 'up yours' mean?"  Does that father want his young boys to learn such phrases?  I suppose the father responds to their questions with "shut your f-king mouth!"

Or, imagine a young girl holding her father's hand spotting this tshirt and then asking her father what "up yours" means.  I feel sorry for that father who has to figure out how to dodge that question.

We live in strange times.  But then, a presidential candidate has said and done so many awful things that the latest count here is at 183 reasons why he is unfit to be president.  Between the father and this candidate, the two boys are getting quite some lessons on how to grow up to be horrible adults :(

It is not that swear words are new, or that they are not uttered.  I imagine every language has a colorful vocabulary of swear words.  However:

If we keep the obscenity stream going at our current levels, we may possibly wear the sheen right off what have been sturdy favourites for a long time, from centuries to well-nigh forever. And that would be mind-boggling. 

Makes sense, right?  If swear words are used all the time, then where in lies its power to shock us?

“Profanity is socially useful because it is socially risky,” says Adams. We need linguistic boundaries to transgress in order to register objection, pain and social solidarity, and it’s precisely the transgression, not the words, that matters. Consider five words for sexual intercourse: “copulate,” “f–k,” “screw,” “swive,” “boink.” Only one is partially blanked out because only one is socially agreed to be profanity. On the flip side, “f–k off” has no sexual meaning at all.

No f–king way! ;)

Why is "f–k" so attractive to use?

its combination of explosive consonantal start, short vowel and hard ending—all coloured by the emotional flavour of a sexual term—made it just right for an expletive. When you spill coffee on your new white shirt, yelling “swive!” doesn’t cut it. From expletive to intensifer—“you f–king idiot!”—to literally every other syntactical niche, “f–k” took over.

It is f–king crazy that there are people who do research on these topics! ;)

A name as old and common as Tom and Harry, “dick” went the way of “cock” by 1900—but only in an underground fashion at first, and right up to the 1960s hundreds of newborn Americans annually were given the name. An early election ad for Richard Nixon, “Tricky Dick” himself, reads, astonishingly to contemporary eyes: “They can’t lick our Dick.”

Holy shit; they had such an ad?

Academics, and wannabe-intellectuals like me, write such things because of the importance of understanding even these aspects of life; after all, our lives are not always sugar and spice and everything nice.  But, I would not want that father lecturing his sons about how "up yours" is an awesome f-king swear.  I would like to, however, tell that father that he is one f-king asshole of an example of humanity!      

All languages are created equal. Some are more equal than others?

I grew up in a Tamil household, in a predominantly Tamil speaking state.  In addition to Tamil being the "mother tongue," as they say in the old country, for the first few years I formally learnt the Tamil language in school.  To use the new country's lingo, Tamil was my second language at school because, like here, English was the language of instruction.  And then from the middle school on, Sanskrit was the second language and Hindi was the third language.

All those worked out well for me.  Knowing Tamil, I read quite a few novels and short stories in the language.  Many of those novels were often in an historic context, which then made me long for the good old days of the glorious Tamil past of the Sangam literature.  Sanskrit gave me a taste of the rich history and literature that was also tied to the religion in which I grew up.

Much later in life, as an adult living in the United States, I attempted to learn Spanish.  It was an epic fail, as much as my attempt to learn German did not work out back in India.

Language is not merely about the language.  It is a portal into a culture that is different from the one in which we breathe a completely different language.  Through the language we get to know a people's history, their values, their ways of thinking about all things trivial and profound.  Thus, even a word like maidan then shows how wonderfully interconnected we are.  We can even chuckle at how an ambassador's name could make a difference enough for a country to reject him.

We get an idea of those differences--and similarities too--between people when we read translated works of literature.  All those Russian novels that I have read were not in the Russian language, of course, but were in English and I can only imagine how much more enriching it would be if I could have read them in the original.

If we truly want to understand our fellow humans, which is a critical piece of understanding the human condition and our own existence, then the more languages we know the better off we will be. Thus, if we want to understand China or the Middle East, then I would think that we would be encouraging more of our students to learn Chinese (even if it means excluding Cantonese!) and Arabic.

Let us suppose you are in agreement with me until now.  (And I hope you are; if not, we are in deep trouble!)  Then, you will be shocked at this news from last spring:

At least four states -- including Washington, home of Microsoft Corp. -- have either passed or considered measures that would delight high school students who have trouble rolling their r's. Rather than taking Spanish to satisfy their foreign language requirement, they could take a computer language.
Chris Reykdal, a Washington state legislator, said many  students are more passionate about learning code than conjugating verbs.

Pause. Think about it.  Is learning a computer language the same as learning a language that humans use to communicate in a different part of the world?  Are you happy with this development?  I hope you are not; else, we are in deep trouble!

You need not have kept up with my rants about the deterioration in education in order to figure out what the rationale is, right?

Proponents say such an approach will help students get jobs and businesses compete internationally.

Yep, who cares about understanding fellow humans.  Who cares whether or not children develop an understanding of how to deal with differences.  As long as they can learn how to communicate with machines and earn money in the process!

A couple of days ago, a friend from the old school days had posted on his Facebook wall this news item about a survey in the island that is increasingly irrelevant in the world:

Six out of ten parents said they want their primary school age children to learn the coding language over French. And 75% of primary school children said they would rather learn how to programme a robot than learn a modern foreign language.

It is not merely an American madness but a global mania!

That news item there included the following image:

What is so special about this image?  Perhaps the editors did not realize the irony in using such an image to promote teaching a computer language.  The way the numbers keep scrolling down the screen is the motif in The Matrix --it was not a movie that favored a future world of smart computers with humans as the slaves ;)

Source

I suppose if  all we want is for children to interact with machines and not with people, and if we want to design machines that can soon learn to think for themselves, then we should certainly get rid of teaching human languages in schools.  Perhaps soon there will even be a campaign to make Emoji a language!  It is one mad, mad, mad world out there :(

So, finally India exports to the US ... a bad word?

A few years ago, in a column for the local newspaper, I wrote about how the British colonization of India and the US made it possible for both countries to use the English language and how, therefore, words like pundit and bungalow are also used here.

I recall mentioning the word thug too.

The BBC notes that "In the US, "thug" is a loaded term."  "So why is thug so charged?" asked NPR's Melissa Block the other day as I was driving back home.

"Thug" as a loaded word?  Who woulda thunk that!  What's going on?

First, from the BBC:

Activists and cultural critics have pointed out the term is often used to refer to black Americans, and white Americans doing similar things would not be labelled the same way.

Aha, it is a word used to describe only a certain group of people.  It is a race-conscious usage.  But, that's not how the word was used a long time ago in the old country:

"As far as I can tell, thug goes back to the 14th Century," says Megan Garber, who traced the word's origin for a story in The Atlantic. "There was a gang of criminals known as the thuggee."
Garber says the Thugs were a huge criminal network that operated all around India's main roads.
"They would basically befriend travellers along the roads, gain the travellers' trust," she says. "And then they would murder them, usually by strangulation, and steal their valuables. It was all very violent."

From India, the word went to England, and then came to the US too.  "Mark Twain was one of the first Americans to report on the group."  Now Twain is in double-trouble, after his usage of the "N-word" in Huckleberry Finn!

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And then the transformation happened. Quite recently:

Then hip-hop took the word. Tupac had it tattooed onto his body, and Cleveland's Bone Thugs-N-Harmony sent the word into cars and living rooms across the country.
In this conception of the word, Garber writes, thugs "are both victims and agents of injustice, they are both the products and producers of violence, and mayhem, and outrage".

Such a complete transformation from that old meaning:

Well, the truth is that thug today is a nominally polite way of using the N-word. Many people suspect it, and they are correct. When somebody talks about thugs ruining a place, it is almost impossible today that they are referring to somebody with blond hair. It is a sly way of saying there go those black people ruining things again. And so anybody who wonders whether thug is becoming the new N-word doesn't need to. It's most certainly is.

"Thug" is the new "N-word."  Who woulda thunk that!

Thug in the black community, for about the past 25 to 30 years, has also meant ruffian, but there is a tinge of affection. A thug in black people's speech is somebody who is a ruffian but in being a ruffian is displaying a healthy sort of countercultural initiative, displaying a kind of resilience in the face of racism etc. Of course nobody puts it that way, but that's the feeling. And so when black people say it, they don't mean what white people mean, and that's why I think Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Barack Obama saying it means something different from the white housewife wherever who says it.

Language and the words we use are not static by any means.  The meanings and implications can change over time.

One of the things that Americans have a whole lot of trouble with - actually, that people in developed societies with written languages have trouble with - is that words never keep their meanings over time. A word is a thing on the move. A word is a process. And that's what's so confusing about the N-word. And that's what's so confusing now about this word, thug. Any discussion where we pretend that it only means one thing is just going to lead to dissension and confusion.

To borrow from the NRA, words don't kill people--we people kill people by using words.  As long as we are race-conscious in our language, then we will always find ways in which we dog-whistle words.  Stupid is as stupid does!

The dream of a post-racial world?  Still a dream, for the most part :(

An ad about a piss pot in the New Yorker? WTF!

After I reach home with the latest copy of the New Yorker in my hand, I first flip through the pages for the cartoons hoping there will be some good laughs.  And then I settle into reading the essays.  Even when reading, I scan the margins for ads--over the years, I have bought two gift items from the Museum of Contemporary Art thanks to those ads, and a book.

I chuckled quite a bit when I saw an ad for a piss-pot.  Yep, a pisspot.  Of course, it is not a piece that you would buy and pee into.  It is a collector's item--a chamber pot from decades/centuries ago.  Imagine that!  One not be bothered to step out and take a leak, and instead peed right into a pot that the chambermaid carried out.

After a few chuckles, I forgot all about that.  Until today.

It is not that I have become lazy to walk to the restroom and I want to make use of a pisspot.  Life in the old country is not all that bad ;)  It is just that a blog in my feed has a post about this very ad:

I like that blog because of its intellectual approach to expletives.  The title of the blog makes that clear: Strong Language.  Though I am not a fan of expletives, I occasionally use shit and fuck when no other word would convey that meaning.  But, Strong Language is not merely about throwing expletives into sentences.  No sir.  It is way more than that.

The "piss" in the ad is what the intellectual analysis is about:

Piss is a pretty old word in English: late 13th century, from similar words in French and Latin, according to the OED

Would you have guessed that the word is that old?  Doesn't it make you wonder how old shit and fuck are?  For now we have to stay with piss:

Some piss- compounds are almost as old as the original word. Pisspot goes back to the mid-15th century; piss-burnt (discolored by urine, which was often used in tanning and dyeing) dates to the mid-16th century; piss-prophet (one who diagnosed diseases through examination of urine) and piss-house (a privy) appeared in the 17th century; piss-proud (having or designating an erection due to a full bladder) is from the late 18th century.

We men are familiar with the full-bladder salute; but, I wonder how many of us knew about piss-proud prior to this blog-post! ;)

You are probably thinking, "I don't give a shit!"  Tell you what; in that case, you need to read this post ;)

Get to the point, will ya!

I was an atrocious writer when I entered graduate school.  In fact, I had no idea how awful a writer I was until the feedback from Martin Krieger, with a gentleman C as the grade for the work that I turned in.

Fortunately, I am a not a bad student and I quickly picked up what I should I have known even during the undergraduate education.  By the time graduate school came to a close, soon after Harry Richardson told me one day, "Sriram, I think it is about time you graduated," I knew, even without waiting for feedback from others, that my writing abilities had improved.

Now, as a faculty, and an old-fashioned one at that, I practically harass students in my classes about their writing.  Grammar issues I alert them about.  I help them understand that muddled sentences reflect muddled thinking too.  I instruct them to avoid metaphors and flowery writing and to get to the point.  "Avoid metaphors as if they are the plague" I say, pun intended, of course.

It is not that I do not enjoy reading wonderful wordplay. I do. There is a place for that, too, in my life.  Especially when I read the New Yorker.  Like the following sentence in an essay on the Greek yogurt phenomenon (sub. reqd.) in the US market:

The air was warm and moist and pungent with the scent of soured milk, like the cleavage of a nursing mother on a warm day.

What an awesome description!

My mind raced to the years in the old country, with plenty of children all around when the extended family got together at weddings and during the annual summer holidays.  The infants who were being nursed could--and would--throw up curdled milk at the most inappropriate moments (not that there is ever an appropriate moment for that!) and what an unpleasant smell that was, making one wonder how such sweet and innocent creatures could ever create awful stinks like that!

To be able to stir such imaginations is the power that well-crafted sentences, essays, and stories have.  I didn't have to be at the yogurt plant, in the separator room, to imagine what it smelt like.  In my mind, I traveled to that town of New Berlin in New York, a place I hadn't even known of until reading the essay, walked into the factory, viewed the pipes and machines, and even got a whiff of the "the cleavage of a nursing mother on a warm day."

I am reminded of a Sanskrit couplet we read in high school, about the mind being the fastest vehicle ever--it can take us to wherever we want to go, and it does not take even a second to go places.

I will now brew a fresh pot of coffee, the aroma from which will cleanse this room of the "scent of soured milk." ;)

Mind your Ps and Qs

Way back, when I was in grad school, for a year I had the responsibility of running the computer lab.  In communicating about the modifications to the lab, I wrote that I would update them again in a fortnight.

One professor found that usage of "fortnight" to be interesting.  He asked me whether I was sure that American students would know what a fortnight meant.

It was a moment of revelation that English is not English everywhere in the world.  So, when I write "mind your Ps and Qs" I have to ask myself whether the younger generation will know what that means.

Fortunately, this post is not about that meaning!

First about the P. But, P in Greek, as in Pi:

Nineteen female Dixie State University students are being forced to fight their own school for the right to use Greek letters in the name of their organization. Indigo Klabanoff and the members of Phi Beta Pi have repeatedly been denied official recognition because administrators feel that the use of Greek letters in an organization name will give Dixie State a “party school” image.
“I’ve seen a lot of campus censorship in my time, but telling students their club can’t be recognized solely because they wish to use letters from a particular alphabet is a new one to me,” said FIRE Senior Vice President Robert Shibley. “I can’t believe I actually have to say this, but as a state university, Dixie State simply does not have the power to ban or regulate the use of the Greek alphabet, the Latin alphabet, or any other system of writing.”

Seriously, this is what higher education has now come down to?  Don't administrators have better things to do?  Like raise funds for football and rock climbing walls?

A few weeks ago, I remarked to an older, retired, colleague who is a product of UC-Berkeley that colleges and universities are not anywhere near the image of free speech spaces that we think they ought to be.  Not for students, and not for faculty.  It is worse when student expression is curtailed when that is the very age when we want them to think about a great number of issues.

If that is about P, it is a very different story about Q.  Not the James Bond Q, but the letter Q.  An American university bans P(i) and Turkey legalizes Q. Go figure!

Back in 2005, a Turkish court fined 20 Kurds 100 lira (US$74) for holding up placards at a New Year's celebration containing the letters Q and W. The use of those letters—and X as well—violated the law of Nov. 1, 1928 on Adoption and Application of Turkish Letters, the purpose of which was to change the writing system of Turkish from the Arabic-based system of the Ottomans to the Roman-based system developed under the secular, modernizing regime of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

So, why was Q banned in the first place?

Now it's true that Q, W, and X aren't exactly winning popularity contests in any language, but what's so repugnant about them that a law should exist to prohibit their very existence? Well, for starters, they appear in Kurdish but not in Turkish, and restricting a minority language—Kurdish has historically been spoken by 10-25 percent of the country's population—is one way to oppress a minority.

You see, only oppressive societies, and colleges, ban the use of certain letters!

The good news is that:

After 85 years, the letters Q, W, and X have apparently been legalized as part of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's "Democratization Package" of Sept. 30, 2013.

Let us see if Pi is allowed at Dixie State.

BTW, Dixie State is in Utah?  Not in the South?  That is a much bigger problem than the use of the Greek P!

Prepone that non-veg order. Pukka?

Odds are that if you got that, you are from India, or you are intensely familiar with India.  Let me explain.

A couple of days ago, I was cleaning up the kitchen while listening to NPR in the background (so, what's new, eh!) and I heard Robert Siegel welcoming the actress/chef/writer Madhur Jaffrey.

This was one awesome combination for me: NPR + Siegel + India + food.

I stopped cleaning and walked up closer to the radio.  Water dripped from my hand on to the wood floor. I figured the maid would clean it up later.  Who am I kidding here--I am the maid, and I later cleaned the floor, too!

In the course of the interview, this exchange happened:

SIEGEL: So the great separation in India was indeed a great mixing of cooking styles...
JAFFREY: Exactly, exactly. But it tends to be that these kind of kebabs, which are often meat, are eaten by people who obviously eat meat, and Muslims eat a lot of meat. So you find a lot of kebabs in Pakistan, and you find a lot of meat kebabs amongst the nonveg people of India, but they're exceedingly popular.

"Nonveg."

Suppose you didn't know what nonveg (also written out as non-veg) meant, then you would do a Google search, right?  Go ahead, search.  Do you see a pattern in the result?

The search pulls up a whole bunch of pages related to Indian food, restaurants, and recipes.  Right?

It is because that usage is an Indian creation.  Well, it will be correct to state that it is an Indian Subcontinent creation.

Meat eating is the default food habit in the UK or the US.  The ones who do not, have to identify themselves as vegetarians or vegans or whatever else.  When the Subcontinent absorbed the language, a new usage was created for the food habits there: non-veg.  As in not-vegetarian.

Non-veg is merely one of the many words that have resulted from the creative ways in which the English language has been adapted in the Subcontinent.  It is a fascinating land in which historically people from different cultures have come in for commerce or to conquer, and either way the Subcontinent warmly embraced many new ideas, of which words are merely one example.

Non-veg brings about a certain logic to the usage.  After all, English, being a bastard language itself, is notorious for not having any logic at all.  At the Orosi Lodge, one afternoon, as I was collecting my key from the front desk, Connie said "I have a question for you. About English grammar."

I noticed that she was working with a Tica.

"You know how we say big, bigger, biggest?" Connie asked.  I nodded my head.

"But, it is beautiful and more beautiful.  It is not beautifuller.  I just know that is the case.  But how do I teach her that it is different for different words?"

Yes, the pain of learning English as a second language.  There is no bloody logic to anything.

So, people in the Subcontinent developed a logic.  If one who doesn't eat meat is a vegetarian, then a meat-eater is a non-vegetarian.  Non-veg, for short.  It makes sense, doesn't it?  (I am hoping that there is no other story behind this non-veg usage.  Perhaps some etymologist is all set to send me a thesis on how I am bullshitting here!)

Those logical usages are the default usages in India.  Like prepone.  If postpone can exist, then surely its antonym ought to be, well, prepone, said some Indian. It was a done deal!

One more reason why Indian-Americans are pukka at Spelling Bees.  Pukka?

A non-veg dish, with chicken, I cooked a while ago

The Hindi kolaveri continues on in Tamil Nadu. No "veri" for Tamil, however.

Way, way, back when I was a kid, I thought it was exciting to hear all about how Hindi was being imposed on Dravidians and the Tamil Nadu politicians all worked up against it.  The natural inclination to join the fight against anything imposed started, as far as I can recall, from this absurd promotion of Hindi as the national language. 

As a teenager, when I was associated with a political movement about which I am not at all proud of--perhaps the worst sin I have ever committed--I asked the leader why he was often talking to us in Hindi.  He replied that English is an European language, which did not belong to this land.  I told him that Hindi did not belong in Tamil Nadu.  He did not like it.  In any case, soon I was off that political movement as well.

A lot has changed over the decades.  But, after all the travels within this country, it does seem like there is very little Hindi usage in Tamil Nadu even now.  It is not that there is a whole lot of love and affection for the Tamil language; after all, as my experiences with the Mozhi t-shirt showed, while there is a great deal of rhetoric about love for Tamizh, in reality, however, kids and teenagers in Chennai seem to converse more often in English than Tamizh, while adults don't seem to worry about the language all that much.

Walking around in the busy shopping streets of T-Nagar, very, very rarely do I hear any Hindi.  A lot of English and Tamizh, and a good smattering of Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam--all South Indian languages.

Hindi being rare a sound is such a contrast to my experiences in the places I traveled.  Even in the busy Connaught Place in New Delhi, even youngsters were mostly talking in Hindi--though they often did say "hi" to each other.  It was quite common an experience for me when I attempted to chat with auto and taxi drivers to find out that they knew even less English compared to taxi drivers in Ecuador!

At the IIT campus in Delhi, when I asked the taxi driver to stop at a roundabout so that I could ask a gentleman who was formally attired about the directions to my friend's office, I was quite shocked that he first replied in Hindi.  When I asked him again, he decided to address the taxi driver instead--in Hindi.  Yep, that was the case even at a campus of a leading university.  Now, of course, one swallow doesn't make a summer.  But, hey, I can't discount this experience either.

In train compartments and at airports, when in Tamil Nadu, children seem to be excited to talk to their parents in English.  But, in the other places north of the state, kids and parents conversed mostly either in the local language or in Hindi.

I do not assume that there is a conscious effort to keep Hindi away from Tamil Nadu.  It is not anything like the 1960s and 1970s when there were systematic efforts to drive Hindi out because of a real worry that it was being imposed.  Personally, the kid and the teenager in me who actively sympathized with the anti-Hindi emotions continues to be happy that Hindi has not become the lingua franca.  And, the fact that the younger population gravitate towards English is also an asset when it comes to the global economic marketplace. 

But, ... if only the youngsters were equally passionate about Tamizh! 

While I may have lost the fluency I once had in the language--the fluency and interest that drove me to read a whole lot of Tamizh literature even though I did not formally study the language in school after the primary years--there is, I suppose, always an emotional attachment to the language that we first learnt.  But, more than mere emotions, I am afraid that by not having a passion for Tamizh, the youngsters deprive themselves of a phenomenal opportunity to gain a little bit of understanding of the oldest living language with a rich literature past and with a very, very long history. 

A few weeks ago, dad gave me an article to read in which the author lamented about having watched a television show in which they went around asking people who Bharathidasan was.  The author seemed to be livid with the the ignorance on display, and I agreed with his feelings.  One, he wrote there, even replied that Bharathidasan was a former governor of the state!  That is a reflection of how much there is scant interest in Tamizh.   

I hope the tide will change. Soon.

Language hurt by Twitter?

Understanding what professors mean at meetings ...

A new academic year has begun ... so, the following is worth repeating...
One of the many reasons why I attend very few meetings on campus :)

David Galef writes:

the language in departmental meetings is difficult to read, even for veterans who’ve been teaching at U of All People for decades, and the proceedings really deserve a translation. In return for a modest travel voucher, the psycholinguist Martin Baffle has provided a rough equivalency chart for all future meetings:

Utterance	Implication
Let’s come to order.	This meeting should’ve started 15 minutes ago.
Who’ll take notes?	I’m not doing it two months in a row.
We have five items on the agenda.	We’ll be lucky if we get past two.
You have the documents in front of you.	I see that none of you downloaded what I sent.
With all due respect ...	I’m about to be rude.
I have a question.	I have a comment.
I have issues with --	I can’t tell you how much this pisses me off.
Can you repeat that?	I need to buy some time.
What’s best for our students ...	What works for me ...
I’m a bit puzzled by ...	I hate ...
Do I hear a motion?	Will someone please save me?
Let’s send this back to the committee.	Let’s deep-six this baby.
Can we take this up next time?	I don’t have my minions here right now.
I have to leave early for another meeting.	I’m more important than you.
I’m sorry, but I have to pick up my son.	I have my priorities straight.
Do I see a hand?	Stop interrupting.
As a point of procedure ...	No other way I can stop this.
If I may make a comment ...	Now that everyone else has had a say, I intend to drone on for as long as I like.
Shall we call the question?	Can we for Chrissake get on with this?
Paper ballots, please.	I see we don’t trust each other.
How about just a show of hands?	We’ll smoke ’em out.
Please, this is a private matter.	Back-channel all sniping e-mail.
As I recall, we do have a precedent for that ...	As the longest-standing faculty member in the room, I can make up anything before 1970.
We can decide this next matter in a hurry.	I hope no one’s read beyond page two.
That’s not what I said.	I wish I hadn’t said that.
Correct me if I’m wrong.	I know I’m right on this one.
Here are our recommendations.	Here are our demands.
To speak anecdotally ...	I haven’t a shred of evidence to back this up.
The administration may not agree with us on this one.	The provost wishes we were dead.
I don’t believe Professor Jones has had a chance to speak.	Stop marking papers, Jonesie.
We need to set up a committee.	We don’t want to talk about it now.
I’m just the moderator.	The buck starts here.
Let me remind you ...	I know you know I know you know.
Personally ...	I love talking about myself.
The dean has asked for our opinion.	He wants a rubber-stamp approval.
You have proxies?	But aren’t Professors Winthrop and Leighton dead?
The meeting is now adjourned.	Time for a drinkie.