Mohan Sivanand remembers the English he heard and spoke down South

Back home in Kerala recently, I put on my sunglasses before stepping out one hot afternoon. “Cool glasses!” a female relative complimented me.
“Cooling glass,” I shot back cheekily, pretending to correct her.
What she meant was that my sunglasses looked stylish. But my response was a nod to the fact that people don’t say sunglasses (or glares or shades) in the South; cooling glass (usually singular) is the preferred term. And I think it’s a sensible word coinage—because those glasses cool our eyes rather than warm or “sun” them. Much like cooling towers or cool drinks. Imagine calling Coca-Cola a sun drink.
Says Wikipedia: “Cooling glasses is a term used all across India and the Middle East for sunglasses.” Middle East, I agree. Because Keralites, a major community there, need to stay cool in every sense of the word. I never hear “cooling glass” used in Mumbai, except from some visiting relatives and friends.
Speaking of Mumbai, the city’s old name survives in a few phrases, like Bombay duck and Bombay gin.
Or, in the South, Bombay toast, a staple at the Indian Coffee House and some other restaurants all over Kerala. I used to wonder what people in Bombay called those slices of bread soaked in a sweetened eggs-and-milk batter and fried. Just toast? Our toast? No, I learnt after I moved here. It’s called French toast, much like in the rest of the world.
So what, I wondered, do they call it in France? Just toast? No, again. It’s actually pain perdu (translation: lost bread), because French toast is best made from old bread that may otherwise have been thrown away. It was known as pain perdu even
in medieval England. But since that was a fanciful French name, ordinary people simply started thinking of it as the toast with the French name... French toast!
Anyhow, after so much food history, I still haven’t cracked the riddle of why we call that eggy bread Bombay toast down South. The phrase wasn’t included in Hobson-Jobson, that comprehensive dictionary-like glossary of Anglo-Indian terms, first published in 1903. Could someone please explain?

One word that gets about two pages in Hobson-Jobson is tiffin. It was a word widely used in English households in India during the Raj. Today, however, its usage is predominantly South Indian. In Chennai, for instance, it usually means any light snack, or a mid-afternoon snack. In Kerala, I’ve heard it used mostly in tiffin-carrier, which is a lunch container... Read More...

Type and ye shall find typos

Printer's Debil

Don’t be surprised at the red word glaring out from above. I was simply typing “Devil” but v is next to b on the keyboard. So my fat finger accidentally brushed both keys, and perhaps because I’m right-handed, it landed a nanosecond earlier on b. I let the b be, to demonstrate at the start how risky our business can be.
 Three months ago, two other neighbours of b to the right (n and m) got me in a spot. I was writing, of all things, How to Sound Smarter, an article about English usage. I typed n instead m and got nust instead of must. And despite the proofreader (human) and the spell-checker (electronic), nust slipped through the cracks and got published. “Glaring mistake,” wrote reader Harshini. “It’s an article that talks of correct English.”
I thanked Harshini and the others who wrote to me. But in my replies, I also told them the “meaning” of nust in a cool, composed and editorial way—just a linguistic trial of their gullibility. But more of that later.

It isn’t just journalists who risk making typos (typographical errors). Stock market traders are responsible for the term “fat finger syndrome.” Fast paced and stressed, they may click at “sell” instead of “buy,” key in an extra zero, or press b instead of the nearby m. In May this year, such a typo by a trader reportedly made $16 million into $16 billion. It caused panic as the New York Stock Exchange’s index fell a record 998 points in 15 minutes.
Many modern spellings of English words are the result of typos. In a paper on the popular search engine they created, Google Inc founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote: “We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol… and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.” In mathematics a googol is a big number, 1 followed by a hundred zeroes. Brin and Page meant that people were already misspelling it as “google.”
Typos can make fairy tales more romantic. Dancing till midnight in glass slippers must be painful, so there’s a doubt whether Cinderella’s were really made of glass. The original French story said vair (a kind of fur), and in further retellings and reprints it got spelt as verre (glass).
Typos can mean bargains. On the website eBay.com, where you can put anything you own on auction, they don’t correct fat fingers. So when somebody wants, for instance, to sell his Playstation, he may... Read More...

Are you article-challenged?

 Why is it that millions of people can never get the right?
 “The what?” you might ask.
 “The the.”
 Take this last bit from a covering letter sent to me, with her résumé, by a young journalist.
 “… I will be really gratified if you give me an opportunity to work with organization. Thanking you.”
 Who wouldn’t want work done with organization and efficiency? But that’s not what she meant.
 The in English is known as the definite article. Used before nouns, it’s described as “definite” because it implies something specific or already known. There’s also the indefinite article (a or an). The use of these articles is so important, one grammarian calls them “precision tools,” because they contribute immensely to the accuracy of what you’re trying to express. (Compare What is the time? with the more philosophical What is time?)
 But many of us (let me try sounding authentic) have serious problem with definite article. We murder the English with misuse of indefinite article. (Thankfully, no Brit died as a result.)
 Infinitely more Indians speak English today when compared to my schooldays in the 1960s. Since then, English-medium schools have multiplied, but they often give more importance to the sciences. Very practical, but language got a backbench and became unmanageable, with too many English teachers who are not sure when to use their articles, or when not to use any article at all. Two real recent examples:
1. The one thing that all the teachers detest most: the parents who deride or put down the teachers in front of the students.
2. AIDS has now become curse for world.

Article use follows certain rules, but with several exceptions that ought to come as naturally as breathing. “Indian writers have the bad habit of using ‘the’ before proper nouns,” a young Mumbai journalist recently wrote to me. “For example, the Congress, the BJP, and so on.”
 The journalist didn’t know how off the mark he was. You can’t imagine even the BBC doing anything else: “Ed Miliband is elected leader of the Labour Party” [Headline at bbc.co.uk].
 With proper nouns, you also use the before names of structures (the Taj Mahal) or hotels (the Oberoi), mountains (the Himalayas), deserts, seas, tribes, rivers, etc, and even countries that have plural names (the Philippines; the USA, where States is plural). Or large areas taken together (the Middle East). But why “the Punjab”? Because it’s a plural name, meaning “five rivers.”
 For more, read “A Short Article on Articles” at DavidAppleyard.com (click on the Article Usage link). You’ll learn there that... Read More...