Mid-week blahs
I've spent most of the day editing my employees' prose. "Editing" is kind. In fact, what I've been doing all day is translating Indian English into American English. I generally try to break it up so that I'm not doing this for an entire day: after two hours, I need coffee. After four, I need to scream.
And can I get a pre-digression out of the way? It may lend context to my mood, so it isn't, strictly speaking, a digression. Last night, K and I bought an assortment of snacks/tapas at the below-mentioned Swati Snacks, as carryout. I ate about two-thirds of a takeaway container of their very delicious bhel puri (a kind of soggy trailmix of dried noodle and a zillion other diced veggies and spicy sauces) straight out of the plastic tub, then re-sealed it, left it in the fridge overnight, and took it with me to work this morning. It was so good, and I am -- was -- so fond of bhel puri, that I decided to have it for breakfast. So there I was, reading my morning email while shoveling it into my mouth, when I was distracted by movement in my peripheral vision. I looked down. Yep: the little heaps of shredded vermicelli were alive with tiny, many-legged insects. Since the container was sealed right after dinner and stayed that way until breakfast, all I can think is that a whole bunch of eggs hatched. I've been having intense stomach pain all day, and keep expecting to see something burst forth from my gut, Alien-like.
Anyway.
A dissertation could be devoted to the subject and qualities of Indian English, but the broad categories I've unearthed in my editing are thus:
(1) minor consistent differences (e.g., "educationist" for "educator").
(2) more inventive use of terms that have only limited employ in American English (e.g., not only can one "offer condolences," one can also "condole." One can also "felicitate" and "gift" something to someone). In general, Indian English seems to have seized phrase-bound words like "runneth" in "my cup runneth over" and elevated them to general use. (My holy grail is to discover "petard" used in some other context. I haven't yet, but I'm sure it's out there; I can feel it.) Perhaps it's the incredibly polyglot atmosphere of the city, but Mumbaikars seem loathe to waste linguistic diversity potential, and sometimes don't even seem to get the concept of rigidly proscribed usage. One of our press people asked me one morning how best to characterize an official's terse and blunt response. "Monosyllabic?" I suggested. "No, no," she said, "it was longer than that." I got her draft report later that afternoon: "The Chief Minister gave a disyllabic reply."
(3) neologisms (e.g., the delightful "prepone," which means "to move something up in time", as contrasted with "postpone" -- and which is so useful, many of us have freely adopted it).
(4) language which may be neologistic, but one suspects is actually preserved intact from the time of the Raj ( e.g., "please do the needful"; "kindly revert to me" [kindly reply to me]). Not to press the Star Trek thing too far -- I'm really not even a proper fan and am bound to get it wrong -- but you know that episode in which the gang leaves some artifact(s) behind on a planet, goes away, returns some huge time later, and finds that an entire human-parallel-but-not-quite-right culture has sprung up, with the locals interpreting those artifacts as best they can and ending up playing out a what-if version of American history? (The details are a bit fuzzy with memory. It was sort of like The Gods Must be Crazy, but with Shatnerian bathos.) Ok. For "artifacts" substitute "British culture circa 1860", and you've got Mumbai. Nineteenth-century Anglicisms have been thoroughly scavenged, spruced up with a bit of modern grammar, and sent out into the world with their tiffins.
(5) and, most importantly, never using five words where one can use 20. There's many a paragraph-length Indian sentence which I've first scanned and found reasonable on the surface, then tentatively hacked off a redundant word, then phrase, then ironed out some grammar, then found the whole thing, and its illusion of meaning, to pop and vanish like a soap bubble.
I have, as you might imagine, more thoughts on all this, including a theory for the reason behind the last point, but K is trying to enforce my getting eight hours of sleep a night. You'd think that's awfully sweet and caring, but it's actually mainly because he has to deal with me when I don't.
And can I get a pre-digression out of the way? It may lend context to my mood, so it isn't, strictly speaking, a digression. Last night, K and I bought an assortment of snacks/tapas at the below-mentioned Swati Snacks, as carryout. I ate about two-thirds of a takeaway container of their very delicious bhel puri (a kind of soggy trailmix of dried noodle and a zillion other diced veggies and spicy sauces) straight out of the plastic tub, then re-sealed it, left it in the fridge overnight, and took it with me to work this morning. It was so good, and I am -- was -- so fond of bhel puri, that I decided to have it for breakfast. So there I was, reading my morning email while shoveling it into my mouth, when I was distracted by movement in my peripheral vision. I looked down. Yep: the little heaps of shredded vermicelli were alive with tiny, many-legged insects. Since the container was sealed right after dinner and stayed that way until breakfast, all I can think is that a whole bunch of eggs hatched. I've been having intense stomach pain all day, and keep expecting to see something burst forth from my gut, Alien-like.
Anyway.
A dissertation could be devoted to the subject and qualities of Indian English, but the broad categories I've unearthed in my editing are thus:
(1) minor consistent differences (e.g., "educationist" for "educator").
(2) more inventive use of terms that have only limited employ in American English (e.g., not only can one "offer condolences," one can also "condole." One can also "felicitate" and "gift" something to someone). In general, Indian English seems to have seized phrase-bound words like "runneth" in "my cup runneth over" and elevated them to general use. (My holy grail is to discover "petard" used in some other context. I haven't yet, but I'm sure it's out there; I can feel it.) Perhaps it's the incredibly polyglot atmosphere of the city, but Mumbaikars seem loathe to waste linguistic diversity potential, and sometimes don't even seem to get the concept of rigidly proscribed usage. One of our press people asked me one morning how best to characterize an official's terse and blunt response. "Monosyllabic?" I suggested. "No, no," she said, "it was longer than that." I got her draft report later that afternoon: "The Chief Minister gave a disyllabic reply."
(3) neologisms (e.g., the delightful "prepone," which means "to move something up in time", as contrasted with "postpone" -- and which is so useful, many of us have freely adopted it).
(4) language which may be neologistic, but one suspects is actually preserved intact from the time of the Raj ( e.g., "please do the needful"; "kindly revert to me" [kindly reply to me]). Not to press the Star Trek thing too far -- I'm really not even a proper fan and am bound to get it wrong -- but you know that episode in which the gang leaves some artifact(s) behind on a planet, goes away, returns some huge time later, and finds that an entire human-parallel-but-not-quite-right culture has sprung up, with the locals interpreting those artifacts as best they can and ending up playing out a what-if version of American history? (The details are a bit fuzzy with memory. It was sort of like The Gods Must be Crazy, but with Shatnerian bathos.) Ok. For "artifacts" substitute "British culture circa 1860", and you've got Mumbai. Nineteenth-century Anglicisms have been thoroughly scavenged, spruced up with a bit of modern grammar, and sent out into the world with their tiffins.
(5) and, most importantly, never using five words where one can use 20. There's many a paragraph-length Indian sentence which I've first scanned and found reasonable on the surface, then tentatively hacked off a redundant word, then phrase, then ironed out some grammar, then found the whole thing, and its illusion of meaning, to pop and vanish like a soap bubble.
I have, as you might imagine, more thoughts on all this, including a theory for the reason behind the last point, but K is trying to enforce my getting eight hours of sleep a night. You'd think that's awfully sweet and caring, but it's actually mainly because he has to deal with me when I don't.
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