Kindle Notes & Highlights
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July 12 - October 12, 2025
In the old Wild West, a .45 cartridge for a ‘six-gun’ (revolver) cost 12 cents—so that was the price of a ‘shot’. But a glass of whiskey at a Wild West saloon also cost 12 cents—so it was easy to conflate the two. If a patron was low on cash, he would instead offer the bartender a cartridge in exchange for a drink. This became known as a ‘shot’ of whiskey.
Indians have started saying ‘apartment’ rather than ‘flat’ (though ‘lift’ still prevails over ‘elevator’).
to have or do something to the fullest extent possible is to go the full nine yards. But why? American fighter planes in World War II used machine guns fed by a belt of cartridges. The average plane held cartridge belts that were 27 feet (9 yards) long. If the pilot used up all his ammunition, he was said to have given it the whole nine yards!
I have long immodestly considered myself the inventor of the term ‘prepone’. I came up with it at St. Stephen’s in 1972, used it extensively in conversation, and employed it in an article in JS magazine soon after.
Over the years, I was gratified to see how extensively its use had spread in India.
I was told by Catherine Henstridge of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), no less, that they have an example of the use of the word ‘prepone’ from 1913 in the New York Times.
Clearly, the origin of ‘prepone’ has been preponed from 1972 to 1913, and I duly withdraw my claim to its origination. Mind you, I can still make a case, through frequent usage, for being somewhat involved in its popularization!
Many phrases we take for granted in ordinary conversation are actually quite unusual abroad—calling elders ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’, for instance, or using the expression ‘non-veg’ to convey a willingness to eat meat. That doesn’t make them wrong, or even quaint. It just makes them Indian.
‘mugging’ (cramming hard for an exam, with much rote learning and memorization involved) uses a word that means two very different things to Americans or Brits abroad (a criminal assault by a robber, as in ‘She was the victim of a mugging in a dark alley’
When an Indian student tells a foreigner he was ‘mugging for an exam’, bewilderment is guaranteed.
The Indian habit of saying ‘I will return back’ is an unnecessary redundancy: if you return, you are coming back.
a correspondent saying ‘I will revert to you by next week’ does not mean that he will convert himself into what you used to be, merely that he will issue a reply.
the desi practice of using ‘till’ to mean ‘as long as’ is simply incorrect English; it is wrong to say ‘I will miss you till you are away’ when you really mean is ‘I will miss you till you come back’!
Indians assume that the English word rickshaw, pronounced raksha in Hindi, originated in the subcontinent, but in fact it comes from the Japanese jinrikisha—jin means ‘man’, riki means ‘strength’ or ‘power,’ and sha means ‘carriage’.
If you look around the world, there are several more emotions captured in other languages which describe feelings that cannot be expressed so easily in English.
‘Let’s eat grandma’. Unpunctuated, it suggests a cannibal family deciding to consume the grandmother for dinner; with a simple comma—‘Let’s eat, grandma’—it’s a friendly invitation!
No one really knows where the question mark (?) came from, but we are all familiar with the exclamation mark (!). It was probably derived from the Latin phrase ‘io’, which was an expression of joy that medieval writers placed at the end of sentences for emphasis. Eventually the ‘I’ was placed above the ‘O’ and it became an! So enjoy!
The closing of the Apostrophe Protection Society—because, it says, of the ‘ignorance and laziness’ of the general public—strikes a body blow against those fighting for correct English.
After eighteen years of existence, the British Apostrophe Protection Society was disbanded by its founder and chairman, retired journalist John Richards, because, in his words, ‘the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!’ Despite his best efforts, he told the media, he lost the battle for proper usage of the ‘much abused’ apostrophe.
He reads aloud the word ‘cough’, and is told the ‘ough’ rhymes with ‘off’. Then he reads ‘bough’ as ‘boff’, and is told it should be ‘bow’. Then he pronounces ‘through’ as ‘throw’ and is told the ‘ough’ is pronounced ‘oo’. He goes through the same confusion with the words ‘thought’ (where ‘ough’ is pronounced ‘aw’), ‘tough’, where it’s pronounced ‘uff’, and ‘though’ where it’s supposed to come out as an ‘oh’. And this is the same four letters, ‘ough’, that’s pronounced six different ways! Arnaz gives up in frustration—and many an unwary learner of the English language might do so too.
In 1906, the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who had given away much of his fortune endowing public libraries, created a Simplified Spelling Board to ‘rationalize’ American spellings. Carnegie and his supporters argued that the only thing preventing English from becoming a ‘world language’ and an instrument of global peace was its ‘contradictory and difficult spelling’.
When President Theodore Roosevelt endorsed the recommendations and vowed to use the new spellings in his own communications, the press had a field day.
The Louisville Courier-Journal mocked him: ‘Nuthing escapes Mr. Rucevelt. No subject is tu hi fr him to takl, nor tu lo for him to notis. He makes tretis without the consent of the Senit.’ Nothing works as well as ridicule. The president rescinded his order, and American English is still recognizably English, give or take an extra zed!
the interesting thing about language is that irrationality is part of its charm. It’s absurd, but it’s English, most people thought, and we love it the way it is. That’s why, however rational the Simplified Spelling Board’s ideas might have seemed, most people preferred to leave most words spelled the way they traditionally are—even when those spellings don’t really make any sense.
Those of us who love words have to admit, occasionally, that the best words are the ones writers use to insult people.
One of the words commonly used in England for foolish ideas, talk, or activities was ‘bosh’, as in ‘that entire theory is utter bosh’. Bosh, it turns out, comes from bos, a Turkish word meaning ‘empty; useless’. In similar vein, I would have expected British colonials in India to create ‘buckwash’ out of the Hindustani bakwaaas, but they never got beyond ‘eyewash’.
How often have you lately been sent the cryptic ‘TL;DR’? I had no clue what it meant when I first saw it myself. ‘TL;DR’ means ‘too long; didn’t read,’ and it functions in a variety of ways, whether apologetic (sorry, I didn’t have the time to read the long piece you sent me), to accusatory (I asked you a question but what you sent was too long to read). But it’s also increasingly being used to mean ‘the gist’ or ‘the summary’ of a long and complex idea, as in ‘the TL;DR of this is’, followed by a short explanation: ‘the TL;DR of this is that global warming is real’. And it even serves as an
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Not long ago in India, BJP supporters of the prime minister put it out that following this rule, ‘Narendra Modi’ was ‘a Rare Diamond’. They were quickly corrected by language mavens who pointed out that the prime minister’s name contained an extra N and the correct anagram would be ‘Rare Diamond? Na!’ Political opponents of the PM leapt at the opportunity to come up with ‘a modern drain’ and ‘a modern nadir’.
The Harry Potter series has a character called Tom Marvolo Riddle whose name is an aptagram of ‘I am Lord Voldemort’, the series’ villain. This ‘inside joke’ is a key part of one book’s story line, but with the Harry Potter books being translated into sixty-eight languages, publishers around the world were forced to devise ingenious aptagrams that would mean the same thing.
The cleverest aptagram of all, perhaps, is transforming ‘eleven plus two’ to ‘twelve plus one’, which apart from using all the letters, is also mathematically accurate.
aptagrams haven’t widely caught on. It could still work as a party game for bored English ‘teachers’, who could become ‘cheaters’ by using the internet to do their work for them!
Many words are so commonly used that we don’t even realize that are eponyms. If you go berserk, you are living up to the name of a legendary Norse hero of the eighth century, Berserk, who fought with reckless fury.
a child born through a caesarean section is reminding us
of the first such case of birth through cutting the womb, that of Julius Caesar in 100 BCE.
if you eat a sandwich, you are paying tribute to the inveterate gambler the eponymous Earl of Sandwich, who had the snack invented for him so he didn’t have to interrupt his card games for a meal.
Feminists comfortable with homonyms might want to issue patriarchs a useful reminder: The Son is not the centre of the solar system; the Sun is!
Oxymorons sound like idiots out of breath, gasping for air, but they’re just phrases (like ‘falsely true’ in this example, or ‘loving hate’ in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) that combine two words of opposite meaning to good effect.
vegetarians eat vegetables, but humanitarians don’t eat humans. And that’s not all: writers write, but grocers don’t groce. For that matter, fingers don’t fing, dangers don’t dang, and hammers don’t ham. You can say your teacher taught well, but you can’t say the preacher praught well.
Languages don’t have to always be rational, but English probably wins the irrationality prize.
The names of things in English defy all logic too. There is no egg in ‘eggplant’ nor ham in ‘hamburger’; neither apple nor pine in ‘pineapple’. Sweetmeats are candies, while sweetbreads, which are neither sugared nor made in a bakery, are not sweet but meat. A ‘guinea pig’ is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. English muffins were not invented in England nor French fries in France.
English is full of popular expressions that involve their own idiosyncrasies. If ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’, how do banks have ‘branches’? Why do they call it a TV ‘set’ when there is only one? Why do airlines offer ‘non-stop flights’ when passengers have to get off somewhere? Why do people refer to ‘rush hour’ when traffic moves at its slowest then? Why do doctors ‘practice’ medicine and lawyers ‘practice’ law? If they are still practising, when will they ever be ready?
As every child knows, kangaroos carry their young, known as joeys, in a body pouch. The phrase kangaroo word therefore describes a word that contains all the letters of a synonym, called a joey word, within itself. One more catch: the synonym must also appear in a such a way within the kangaroo word so that the letters appear in the same order in both words.
Got it? Thus, the word inflammable contains the joey word ‘flammable’, which means the same thing; joviality includes joy within itself; regulate includes rule, indolent contains idle, and encourage carries its joey, urge.
In case some of you missed the news, Turkey (the country) is no longer ‘Turkey’ in English. The country officially changed its name in 2022 to Türkiye, which the government felt better reflected its culture and traditions.
Turkish news agency TRT World has pointed out, ‘Turkey’ is more commonly associated with a bird that features on Christmas menus or Thanksgiving dinners, and English dictionary searches for ‘turkey’ will also get results that include ‘a stupid or silly person’ or ‘something that fails badly’. No wonder the Turks wanted the name changed.
It was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, who wanted our country named either Bharat or Hindustan, to deny it any right to claim the storied legacy of the name India, to which he felt his own state had equal claim. At the same time, our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, insisted on retaining the name ‘India’ for the newly independent country, in the face of resistance from nativists who wanted it renamed ‘Bharat’, in order to ensure that we were seen as the successor state to the India that had enjoyed membership of the United Nations and the League of Nations. By retaining
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English is full of very precise words for very common features we take for granted, words we didn’t know even existed, and probably never felt the need for. For instance, philtrum is the vertical groove on your upper lip, below your nostrils. Bizarrely, seductive powers were once attributed to this common facial feature, so the Greek word for ‘love potion’—philtrum—was used for it. Now when was the last time you went gaga over someone’s philtrum?
Or examined his nails to baptize the crescent-shaped or half-moon whitish mark at the base of the fingernail a lunule? If you’re besotted with someone’s nails to the point that you need to name the marks on them, a ring might be more useful than a word!
(Google has a history of monitoring dictionaries ever since their name became a synonym for internet searching, arguing that generic use erodes the value of their brand. But they can’t stop everyone who tells you to ‘google it’!)
over-sensitive experts have established a new orthodoxy in language without anyone really noticing. In America, some changes were politically needed: ‘Negroes’ became ‘Blacks’ and now is being overtaken by the more generic ‘people of colour’. Of course, one must address people as they wish to be addressed, but the desire to avoid giving offence sometimes deprives language of the exactitude and colour that communicates most effectively. Would you prefer to learn that X was imprisoned, or that he was ‘a person experiencing the criminal-justice system’? What on earth does that even mean?
