Lamenting the loss of Kalami, Scramoge and Scackleton, while celebrating the triumph of Hextable, Scraptoft and Corriecravie

This blogpost started as an elegy for words from The Meaning of Liff which are no longer relevant.

Consider Kalami: The ancient Eastern art of being able to fold road maps properly.

Or Scarmoge: To cut oneself whilst licking envelopes.

Or Scackleton: horizontal avalanche of CDs that slides across the interior of a car as it goes around a sharp corner.

It’s been at least a decade since any of us were folding maps, licking envelopes, or stacking piles of CDs in a car. These things are no longer a part of our material culture.

However, it turns out that some The Meaning of Liff words have been amplified even if the material culture around them has changed.

Consider Hextable: the record you find in someone else’s collection that instantly tells you you could never go out with them. A Spotify playlist is now a perfect Hextable, even if vinyl records played on turntables are no longer a thing.

Or Scraptoft: The absurd flap of hair a vain and balding man grows over one ear to comb it plastered over the top of his head to the other ear. Who would have thought an American President would be the world’s #1 Scraptoft?

Or this set of corrie words:

Corriearklet: the moment at which two people, approaching from opposite ends of a long passageway, recognize each other and immediately pretend they haven’t. This is to avoid the ghastly embarrassment of having to continue recognizing each other the whole length of the corridor.

Corriedoo: The crucial moment of false recognition in a long passageway encounter. Though both people are perfectly aware that the other is approaching, they must eventually pretend sudden recognition. They now look up with a glassy smile, as if having spotted each other for the first time (and are particularly delighted to have done so), shouting out “Haaallooo!” as if to say “Good grief!! You!! Here!! Of all people! Well I never. Coo. Stap me vitals,” etcetera.

Corrievorrie: Corridor etiquette demands that once a corriedoo has been declared, corrievorrie must be employed. Both protagonists must now embellish their approach with an embarrassing combination of waving, grinning, making idiot faces, doing pirate impressions, and waggling the head from side to side while holding the other person’s eyes as the smile drips off their face, until, with great relief, they pass each other.

Corriecravie: To avert the horrors of corrievorrie (q.v.), the corriecravie is usually employed. This is the cowardly but highly skilled process by which both protagonists continue to approach while keeping up the pretence that they haven’t noticed each other – by staring furiously at their feet, grimacing into a notebook, or studying the walls closely as if in a mood of deep irritation.

Cellphones have made it easy for the whole world to corriecravie without being suspected of cowardice.

Moonballs from Planet Earth would like to propose that the magical powers that cellphone screens seem to have is not because of their hypnotically glowing pixels, but because they save the world from the torture of Corrievorrie.

BTW…one pleasure that I did not have when I first encountered The Meaning of Liff was googling up the places that lend their names to these words. 

The Women’s Institute of Hextable picture is especially evocative. I wonder what these WI members have in their record collections/ Spotify playlists?

Kalami Beach, Corfu

Scramogue, Ireland

Scackleton, Yorkshire. In Winter

Hextable, Kent. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Women's Institute

Corrievorrie, Scottish Highlands

Discovering the Meaning of "Aagosh"

Do we have an English word for a mother’s shadow, for her presence, for the comfort derived from a mother physically being there? 

I don’t think we do.  

Maybe we should just import aagosh from Urdu to fill this gap. That is what aagosh means. 

Its sort of surprising that English doesn't yet have a word for aagosh. It's a universal experience. I'm sure my dog understands the idea behind aagosh perfectly.

BTW, I discovered this word in Priya Malik’s poem Main 2019 Mein 1999. Click here to watch her perform this piece, and notice the way in which she introduces a maternal tone into what is otherwise a romantic line. 

The McKinsey Man plays tennis

Novak Djokovic in action

The New Yorker about Novak Djokovic:

"He was a McKinsey man, hitting his percentages. His approach was scientific. He brought to mind a diagram on the side of a workout machine, isolating the necessary muscles required for each stroke, and no more..."

So McKinsey Man is now a part of the English language. It means someone who puts in the precise amount of effort required to perform a specific task, and nothing more. Interesting. That is not quite how they describe it in books like The McKinsey Mind, though.

Umwelt

Umwelt: this word deserves to be in more common use. It means "the world as it is experienced by a particular organism".

It comes from zoology, specifically ethology, I found it in this book on dog behaviour. Umwelt has the sense that a dog's, or any organism's, experience of the world is bounded by its range of perception. This range of perception forms a bubble the animal lives within. This perceptual bubble in turn limits (and distorts) the range of emotion and action the organism is capable of.

Human experience is equally circumscribed by perceptual bubbles (except that the more interesting perceptual bubbles are cognitive, or maybe maybe linguistic, rather than sensory). We need a word for those bubbles. Let umwelt be that word.

Let umwelt takes its rightful place in the English lexicon, alongside gestalt, zeitgeist, schadenfreude and cousin weltanschauung.

Kolaveri Di and the Eurovision Song Contest

Kolaveri Di has lived out fourteen out of its fifteen minutes of fame. So, one final thought to occupy that last minute: Kolaveri Di has what it takes to win the Eurovision song contest.

This thought comes straight from Only Mr. God Knows Why, an article by Anthony Lane (which, refreshingly, is still visible to the public on the New Yorker website). Anthony Lane's thesis is that a Eurovision contestant's main problem is reach out across a continent which doesn't know your language or culture. Consider these extracts:

“Europe has a problem...if you don’t speak English, you’re immediately at a disadvantage. The Greek guys? Good song, but it’s in Greek. Will they play that on the radio in France?"

...of the songs that have reached the finals over the years, two hundred and sixty-three have been in English, the lingua franca of pop. French, with a hundred and fifty, is the only other language in triple figures; the rest lag far behind...

On the one hand, the contest is an obvious chance for European nations, especially the less prominent ones, to flaunt their wares by singing in their native tongue. On the other hand, when you sing in English, you may be blasting through the language barrier to reach a wider audience, but are you not abasing yourself before the Anglo-American cultural hegemony...

 ...there are three well-established methods for avoiding it.

One is to be France, whose performers, as you would hope, grind away in French, year after year, repelling all intruders, giving only the barest hint that other languages, let alone other civilizations, even exist...

The second method is to be Ireland, the nation that has won the contest more often than any other. Seven times it has struck gold, and no wonder; if you can sing in English without actually being English—all the technical advantages without the shameful imperialist baggage—you’re halfway to the podium already.

The third method, which is by far the most popular, and which has brought mirthful pleasure to millions on an annual basis, is to sing in Eurovision English: an exquisite tongue, spoken nowhere else, which raises the poetry of heartfelt but absolute nonsense to a level of which Lewis Carroll could only have dreamed. The Swedes are predictably fluent in this (“Your breasts are like swallows a-nesting,” they sang in 1973), and the Finns, too, should be hailed as early masters, with their faintly troubling back-to-back efforts from the mid-seventies, “Old Man Fiddle” and “Pump-pump,”

 ...hence such gems as Austria’s “Boom Boom Boomerang,” from 1977 (not to be confused with Denmark’s “Boom Boom,” of the following year), Portugal’s “Bem-bom,” from 1982, and Sweden’s “Diggi-loo Diggi-ley,” which won in 1984. The next year’s contenders, spurred by such bravado, responded with “Magic, Oh Magic” (Italy) and “Piano Piano” (Switzerland). Not that the host nation relinquished the crown without a fight, as anyone who watched Kikki Danielsson can attest. Her song was called “Bra Vibrationer.” It was, regrettably, in Swedish.

Kolaveri Di fits this third formula perfectly. One doesn't need to really know either Tamil or English to get into the spirit of Kolaveri Di. "Distance-u la moon-u moon-u, moon-u colour-u white-u", is right up there with anything the Swedes, Finns or Portuguese can create. Please note: it is entirely conceivable that India will participate in the Eurovision song contest one day, last year's winner was Azerbaijan.

On an aside, maybe the Punjabization of India I posted about last week is because Punjabi is the most onamatopoeic of Indian languages. I don't know Punjabi, yet, I have no problem understanding "Chak de India" or "Tootak tootak tootiyan hey jamaalon". The language used by Premchand, Tagore, Bharatiyar, or for that matter, Shakespeare, is necessarily for narrower audiences.

Haimish, Gezellig and the Great Pumpkin

English is the world's most successful language because it is so rich, it has many more words than any comparable language. Yet, frustratingly, English still doesn't have words for so many useful, everyday concepts. Consider, for instance, haimish: a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality.

I was looking up the meaning because it is in this (excellent) New Yorker article about IKEA: "IKEA believes that it can make your sleep better and enhance your family life...IKEA's vision of life in its environs is a safe and haimish one. In its rooms, people don't run late, the don't bicker; the have children, but they don't have sex."

The most interesting definition of haimish I found was by David Brooks, the NY Times conservative columnist, talking about why simple, wholesome, communal safari camps are more rewarding than elegant, luxurious camps that lack the haimish spirit. Understood this way, haimish feels a lot like another word I've blogged about before: gezellig, space and people coming together in harmony, that special spirit of cosy fellowship that animates Dutch life.

This sentiment is not unfamiliar to Anglophone cultures. For instance, I've long loved Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics for their haimish or gezellig character. Linus van Pelt lives in the hope that the Great Pumpkin will grace his pumpkin patch on Halloween night for being the most "sincere". I suspect the notion Linus and the Great Pumpkin are searching for is closer to haimish or gezellig than just sincere. Haimish and gezellig include sincere, and a whole lot else besides, except that it would be so ongezellig to use a foreign word like gezellig in Linus' pumpkin patch.

Is it just a matter of time before English co-opts haimish? The casual way in which the New Yorker used the word suggests that that is already happening. My wife and I couldn't find plausible Hindi or Tamil equivalents for haimish or gezellig either. Any suggestions?

Hindi: Turkish :: Turkey : English?

I had been in Istanbul for a couple of days, gamely drinking Turkish coffee to keep my clients company. Now, my soul craved the familiar comfort of a Tall Skinny Hazelnut Latte. I spotted a Starbucks - on Istiklal Caddessi, in the Beyoglu district - and homed in.

The Starbucks had a mix of wooden chairs and cushy sofas, posters promising schools in coffee growing areas, a display of coffee beans in various stages of roasting, chocolate muffins, cinnamon swirls, an easy listening jazz sound, the Beyoglu Starbucks had it all. If a brand manager had dropped in as a mystery shopper, she would have glowed with pride. This Starbucks could have been in London, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Vienna, Athens, or at the Sainsbury’s next to my office. With one exception: they had something on the counter labelled “hindi sandwiches”.

I asked my Turkish colleague what hindi sandwiches were. He explained that the Turkish word for turkey is hindi, so hindi sandwiches are turkey sandwiches. I may have looked a little quizzical, so he continued, “Turkeys are oriental birds. They come from the East. So in English they are called Turkey, because Turkey is to the east of England, and in Turkish they are called Hindi, because India is to the east of Turkey, and Hindi means Indian in Turkish”. I checked with a couple of other Turkish friends, and they confirmed that this turkeys/ hindis-come-from-the-east theory has widespread currency among young Turks. It makes some sense.

I couldn’t buy this theory, because I just happen to know that turkeys don’t come from India. They are not called “chini” in India, either, in the belief that they come from China. There is no native Indian word for turkey. Even after decades of globalization, turkey is still almost unknown in India.

A more plausible explanation is that hindi came to mean turkey in Turkish for the same reason that native Americans were called Red Indians.

Turkeys are American birds. They were first domesticated by the Aztecs. The conquistadors introduced them to Spain, from where they came to Europe through Turkish merchants in Ottoman North Africa. The Turkish merchants called the birds hindi because they thought Columbus had discovered a route to India. Europeans called the bird turkey, because of the Turkish merchants who sold them.

Incidentally, the Portuguese word for turkey is "peru", which may be more accurate than either hindi or turkey.

Gamla Stan, Stockholm, and proto Indo-European

My flight had started boarding. I was gathering up my laptop, iPod, magazine and assorted paraphernalia to head to the gate when my cell phone rang. It was my wife. I told her I'd reached Istanbul airport, was heading to my flight, and that I'd be home soon.

My wife was surprised. She thought I was in Stockholm, Sweden, not in Istanbul, Turkey. As always, my wife was right. I was, in fact, in Stockholm.

In my defence, I had had a long day. And, the part of Stockholm I'd just walked through was called Gamla Stan, which sounds like it could be in Istanbul. How did the heart of the capital of Scandinavia wind up with such an oriental sounding name?

It turns out that Gamla Stan, which means Old Town in Swedish, has familiar Indo-European roots. Stan is a contraction of the Swedish "staden" (sta'n), meaning "the town". This derives from the proto Indo European root sta - to stand, set down or be firm- ; the same root as English words like stand, stance, status or stadium and Sanskrit/ Indian words like sthal, stapit, stupa or Hindustan.

The origins of Gamla are a bit more tricky. Gamla meant camel in ancient Aramaic or Syrian. Gamla morphed into the Hebrew kamal which led to camel. It is tempting to think of Gamla Stan as Camel Town; perhaps ancient caravans from the Sahara trekked right across Europe to do business with the Norsemen of Scandinavia. Unfortunately, linguists seem to think there is no link between camels and Gamla Stan.

Gamla comes from the old Norse gammel, which means old. I find it easier to recognize the comparative forms of gammel: alder and aldest which lead to the modern English elder and eldest . Wikitionary tells me that gammel might be from the proto Indo European word for winter. If so, Gamla Stan could be understood as Winter Town, or perhaps even the Town Nourished Through Many Winters, which would be more evocative of the heart of the Scandinavian capital than just Old Town.

It also turns out that Turkish is not a part of the Indo-European language family at all. While Turkish has borrowed through the Ottoman years from Persian, Arabic and possibly even Sanskrit, it is from a completely distinct family of Turkic central Asian languages.

Hindi and Swedish, however, are cousins. Locating Gamla Stan in Delhi rather than in Istanbul may have made more sense. Gamla Stan sounds like a natural fit in old Delhi...Gamla Stan could roughly translate to Garden City...maybe a few miles past Hazrat Nizamuddin...

Colombo Moment?

"Are you having a Colombo moment?".

I'd heard this question a few times at my new job, and I just couldn't figure out what it meant.

The context is usually as follows: We are in a day-long strategy meeting. We are running behind schedule. The presenter has walked through forty odd dense Powerpoint slides. The audience has mostly stopped paying attention, and is ready for a coffee-break. The presenter finally beams up the slide entitled Next Steps, to collective relief. Right then, a bright young spark sitting in the corner of the room is struck by a really important thought, and pipes up with "Just one more thing...". The senior pro running the meeting turns to the bright young spark, and gently asks "So, are you having a Colombo moment?"

Why Colombo? Surely the Sri Lankan capital is a laid-back sort of place, where bright young sparks are more given to bowling doosras than to being struck by really important thoughts just before coffee breaks.

I finally cornered the senior pro during the coffee break and asked him what a Colombo moment really is. It turns out that the reference has nothing at all to do with the Sri Lankan capital. The reference is to Frank Columbo, a detective from a 1970s American TV series.

Lieutenant Columbo is a brilliant detective who lulls the murder suspect into a false sense of security with his dishevelled look and his overly polite manner. His signature technique is to conduct a friendly and seemingly innocuous interview, politely conclude it and exit the scene, only to stop in the doorway and ask, "Just one more thing...". This one more thing is invariably an inconsistency in the suspect's alibi, or in the crime scene, which ultimately nails the murderer.

So a Columbo moment is a thought, delivered to a comfortably jaded audience, in a "just one more thing" format, which is so insightful that it cracks the entire case open on the spot.

Columbo moment clearly is a useful phrase. I wonder if it is destined to become a permanent part of the English language. Like "star crossed lovers", "go ahead, make my day", "security blanket", or "she's your lobster".

Rapidex goes to Paris

One of the highlights of our family's trip to Paris this spring was this poster:



It is prominently displayed all around the Paris metro network.

It reminds me of one of my favourite brands, Rapidex English Speaking Courses, which is right up there along with Palmolive and Boost as great Indian brands endorsed by Kapil Dev. Different cultures, exactly the same consumer need.

The market clearly knows that the "right" English is no longer the Queen's English. In case the current turmoil on Wall Street does not abate, we can always look forward to a brand relaunch as Main Street English:



Thanks to Polly-vous Francais for the Main Street English poster.

Wicked

"That's wicked! Really wicked! Thank you man. Thank you. Wicked!"

Thus spake a man-on-the-street. He wore workman's overalls. He spoke into his cell phone, excitedly, animatedly. I overheard him as I walked to Pret to pick up lunch, and thought it odd that a word that once meant bad has come to mean good. Ours is a topsy-turvy world, a world without roots or moral anchors. A sign, perhaps, that the common people can no longer tell good from bad? A sign, perhaps, of civilizational decline?

It turns out that the word wicked is derived from wicca, or witchcraft. Wicked came to mean evil in a specific medieval context, when witches were burnt at the stake for pagan or occult spiritual practices, even in supposedly secular America, which must count as one of the most horrifying traditions of religious persecution in history.

My Enid Blyton reading daughter instinctively knew this etymology. When I asked her what exactly wicked meant, the first word she associated with it was wizard. Wicked, wizard and smashing can be used interchangably to describe The Famous Five's sumptuous teas.

Wicked's reinstatement into modern English as a stylish, ironic synonym for very good has impeccable antecedents. F Scott Fitzgerald was the first modern writer to use the word in this context. This has since become common usage in both New England and Old England. Though if the global appeal of the Twilight movies, Harry Potter and even classic pop hits like "You can do magic" are anything to go by, understanding the roots of wicked will actually give the word more currency. Go wicked.

Going Dutch...the gezellig way

Gezellig: a useful new word to import into the English language. Or, more importantly, into Anglo-Saxon (or Tamil Brahmin) culture.

Gezellig, pronounced heh-SELL-ick, is apparently at the heart of Dutch culture. It is the spirit which animates Dutch life. It has this sense of people and space coming together in harmony. It can't be translated. It can't be defined. You know it when you see it.

Friends enjoying a picnic on a canal bank, laughing fondly, sharing a bottle of red wine - clearly gezellig. A slob wolfing down fast food as he sprints to a meeting - not so gezellig. A brown cafe in Amsterdam, panelled in wood that has been darkened by generations of smokers - clearly gezellig. A formica-themed dentist's office - not so gezellig. A ramble in the woods with a big shaggy dog - clearly gezellig. Competitive rock-climbling - not un-worthy, but not so gezellig.
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Disclaimer: My knowledge of gezellig is not through first-hand exposure to Dutch culture. I found the word in this free magazine I picked up at the Paris airport.

Have you ever thunk about thoughting?

Management is justly famous for doing strange things to the English language. Consider: option value, hedge, synergy, self-actualization, kaizen, off-shoring, intrapreneurism, portfolio, fudge, strategize, ideate, projectize, functionality, robustify, core competencies...

Plus two great new words to add to that lexicon. Both are creative conjugations of that ancient and innocent verb, to think, which can be morphed with modern technology into “thoughting” and “thunk”. I learnt both these words at a recent (and very good) seminar with Jack and Carol Weber at Darden.

“Thoughting” actually is a useful word; I believe it was coined by Jack and Carol. It is meant to describe the unsolicited thoughts that endlessly stream through every consciousness. This unsolicited stream is completely different from the disciplined, structured, methodical thinking needed to, say, prove a mathematical theorem. Or to professionally evaluate a business partner’s performance. Yet, this unsolicited stream often intrudes on formal, methodical thought, and sometimes subverts it.

Giving this formless stream of thought a distinct name, thoughting, to distinguish it from formal thought, thinking, is quite useful. A distinct name helps the mind switch out of the thoughting-mode into the thinking-mode as needed.

Maybe when Krishna told Arjuna to free his mind from the shackles of माया (maya) he was telling Arjuna to stop the thoughting and start thinking. माया is often translated as illusion. Maybe thoughting, the mindless chatter that clutters the consciousness, would be a better translation.

Maybe the meditative practice of emptying the mind is about stopping the thoughting. ध्यान (dhyana), the Sanskrit root of the word Zen, could be understood as freedom from thoughting. So the consciousness is released to prove the theorem, or evaluate the business partner. A mind that is full of thoughting will struggle to hit that little red ball hurtling towards the soft tissues at ninety miles per hour, with just a hint of reverse swing.

This famous story from Zen Flesh Zen Bones might be about thoughting:

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1869-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup", Nan-in said, "you are too full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen until you first empty your cup?"

Skilled thinking can't happen without knowledge, one has to know some math to solve the theorem. Thoughting, however, gets in the way of thinking.



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“Thunk” is not just an uncultured way of saying thought. It is typically used in the context of another management buzzword that includes the word thinking.

Let’s say you have a high-powered corporate mandate to do "customer thinking". This means building or modifying products and processes so they are easy for customers to use. Once this work has been done, the said product or process has been "customer thunk".

The same conjugation works for "possibility thinking", which means creative problem solving, understood as an attitude rather than as a technique. When this "possibility thinking" exercise has been completed, the business itself has been "possibility thunk".

What I love most about thunk are its poetic possibilities:

The CEO was in a funk
His stock options had turned to junk
So to the consultant he quietly slunk
His business processes were customer thunk
His annual bonus went up by a chunk
And he celebrated by styling his hair like a punk

Its surprisingly difficult to come up with positive words ending in unk. Sunk, bunk, dunk…. nothing uplifting or celebratory.

Fubsies skirring into the caliginosity

Harper Collins is running a campaign to save rarely used words from oblivion. Heard about it on on Radio 4. They asking influential cultural figures - humorists, poets, bloggers :) - to use these rare words so Harper Collings have a basis for including them in the next edition of the dictionary. Some of the endangered words, and their definitions on the Merriam Webster (since Harper Collins don't have a free online edition): - skirr: to leave hastily. Webster thinks the etymology may be an alteration of scour. The Radio 4 show suggested onomatopoeia, the sound a bird makes when beating its wings in flight, which sounds more plausible - fubsy: chubby and somewhat squat. I can't believe this beauty actually fell out of usage - Caliginosity: dimness or darkness. Has already vanished from the Webster's, so the link is to the free Wikipedia style dictionary. Radio 4 thinks caliginosity deserves to die. But to me, it evokes a sense of the eerie, an image of a hooded candle flickering in the nave of an enormous cathedral casting shadows into the vast stillness, that mere darkness does not convey. Gloaming feels closer to the mark Harper Collins claim that this exercise is needed because they need to drop words from the dictionary. They need to make room for terms like equity injection and credit crunch by dropping fubsy and skirr. I smell bullshit. Surely, in today's world, the real authoritative version of any dictionary is the soft copy, which is not constrained by size. A physical print edition can be cut to any arbitrary number of words. This seems to be an effort to raise the public profile of rare words. A worthy and noble effort in any circumstances. Lets just drop the bs.

Why is this post in English? Part II

My earlier post talked about English as the world's de facto lingua franca.

Is this simply because America followed Britain as the world's dominant imperial/ economic power, and by some quirk of history both happened to be English speaking? Or does this connecting power come from something intrinsic to the English language?

How to find out? Ideally, I would run a test vs. control version of history.

The test version would feature a Swahili speaking super power. The control version would feature an English speaking super power. Both super powers would rise, shine, decline and die. 250 years after the death of the empires, a statistician would measure the usage rates of both English and Swahili in the former Imperial domains/ spheres of influence and perform a test of proportions to determine if English is stickier than Swahili.

Looking around at the real world, there probably are a number of natural experiments that come interestingly close to this design.

Do Kazakhs and Estonians, once united within the mighty USSR, speak to each other in Russian or in English? And how will they speak to each other a hundred years from now? My money is on English. Or Mandarin.

How sticky was Spanish in the old American colonies? Pretty darn sticky. Did the newly independent Latin American nations try to embrace their native American-Indian languages? Were the native American languages sub-scale? Was there really a viable alternative to Spanish?

Did Urdu, the great language of the Mughal courts, survive the decline of the Mughals? Just about survived in Lucknow and Hyderabad. Did not thrive. I'm not sure if the Punjabi version spoken in modern Pakistan would be recognized as Urdu by the Lucknow cognoscenti.

How sticky was Turkish in the former Ottoman Empire? This empire extended from Hungary, through what is now called Iraq, to the Persian border. As far as I know (I don't know much about the Middle East) this swath speaks Arabic, the language of the Koran.

Did Latin survive the fall of the Roman Empire? Yes, thanks to the Catholic church. Will Latin survive the Second Vatican Council? Maybe, thanks to Pope Benedict XVI. Sanskrit survived long after classical Hindu India because of a similarly tenacious priesthood. Hebrew has done rather well in modern Israel. There is a pattern here.

Go back to the randomized test and check if either empire embedded language within a religion. The more sticky language was probably the one which was embedded in a religion.

Is modern English woven into a religion? Yes. Its called Hollywood. Maybe English will continue to thrive long after the USA ceases to be the world's only super power because the world continues to worship at the temple of Brad, Angelina and their spiritual heirs.

Why is this post in English?

An American friend observed at dinner last week that it is common for non-native English speakers, like maybe me and my wife, to speak with each other in English. Why does that happen?

The trivial argument is that my wife and I are native English speakers, as Indian-Indians. We've been educated in English in India since the age of three, like tens of millions of proud and privileged Indians. There is a case for India appropriating English and making it another Indian language, much like India has appropriated cricket and made it a very Indian game. But there is something more interesting happening here than identity politics.

English is famously weak among non-native speakers as being a poor medium for expressing emotion. But, despite that, English may lend itself to expressing precise, complex or subtle thoughts more readily than any other language.

That is an unprovable and potentially incendiary claim...but it still is worth holding that thought for a moment to see where it goes.

The strength of English is most obvious in the size of its vocabulary. English has about twice as many words as Spanish, the #2 language on the wordlists. This happens mainly because English is the default language of business, science and technology. Things that enrich people's lives, new experiences people want to talk about, happen because of business or technology and are therefore conceived in English. Translating gear, amplifier, covariance, browser or credit card out of English rarely feels natural. Hence, when Brazilians and Japanese want to talk, they talk in English. Hence Hinglish, Spanglish and Franglais.

Also, English is wonderfully assimilative. There is no language police to prevent beautiful words like gestalt, schadenfreude or zeitgeist from being imported into English words. Yin, yang, chi, karma, avatar and kismet are, or are well on their way to being, mainstream English words.

So, technically educated polyglots whose first language is Tamil, Arabic or Malay may well drift into English as they start expressing more complex ideas.

It looks like when history and custom provide a simple but robust (grammatical) framework, when nationalistic pride and the language police are kept away, when business and technology are allowed to just get on with it and do their thing, what develops is something amazingly powerful that connects a big slice of humanity. Is there is political philosophy lurking somewhere in here? Or is it just the Linux business model?

Lesbians, Scotch, Tigers and Identity

Three residents of the Greek island Lesbos moved the courts to ban the rule of the word lesbian to describe gay women. Apparently, there once was a time when lesbian used to mean someone from Lesbos.

Does capitalization - a lesbian Lesbian is a lesbian from Lesbos - sufficiently distinguish the two meanings? It does sometimes work. Someone who welshes on a deal is not necessarily Welsh. But sometimes it doesn't. JK Galbraith lamented that the word Scotch once used to describe people from Scotland.

I've personally run into a more reversible (hopefully) but more scary identity blurring: when I tell non-Indians that I am a Tamil, their first association is with the Tamil Tigers.

The greatest thing about the English language is that it has no language police, no notion of the One True English. Shape-shifting words can't be legislated out of the lexicon. Would the French language police have upheld the Lesbian's objections?


Note (following my lawyer brother-in-law's shock at some of my previous posts): I am a staunch supporter of gay and lesbian rights...and have no specific views on British sub-national identities. No offense meant to anyone

Debark?

Much better than disembark.

Found it in Isabel Allende's Zorro. Thought it was Allende's genius that had conjured up the elegant new word. But http://www.m-w.com/ assures me that the word has been in use since 1654.