Ingliss - As She Is Badly Spocken

“Sir, I want picassu”

I was stunned. Has art appreciation become so widespread in rural India that a labourer wants a Picasso to adorn his living room? What have I done? Employ a connoisseur of art do mundane work of weeding in my farm?

“The thorny plants will have to be uprooted. For that I need a picassu” he continued.

I heaved a sigh of relief as it dawned on my “Inglissless-brain” that he is asking for a pick-axe! This was soon after I bought this place and there were many other instances of the language being murdered. As I became wiser, I learnt that “Ashly” is Aster, “beenju” is beans and “battery samy” is actually Betaraya Swamy. The last one could be termed reverse murder!

A country bumpkin or a bunch of bumpkins ‘murdering’ English may be swallowed with a pinch of salt but when educated urban citizens do that, one needs more like a fistful of salt. A colleague who went abroad to visit a similar organization was talking about how information about the institution is made available to the public at the foyer itself. “They have kept taps”. Stunned silence. This is the first time we were hearing information flowing out of taps! Turned out that he was talking about “tapes” which the public can view then and there.

Worse is when a teacher commits such folly. A chemistry demonstrator dictating experiment procedure suddenly boomed “Taste the gas”. I almost puked because, he was talking about hydrogen sulphide and to the uninitiated I must declare that this gas is the foulest smelling thing on earth. The man wanted to say “test” but the lack of the short vowel in Hindi made him convert the ‘test’ to ‘taste’ but I wish he had done that to a gas other than hydrogen sulphide. My innocent but worried query made the entire class burst out in laughter but only invited a stony glare from the demonstrator.

‘Ingliss’ guides often wield cruel knives. From “air-condison trees” to 7^th century “dembles”, I have witnessed quite a few murders but what takes the cake is this. In the wonderful bird sanctuary at Bharatpur, rickshaw drivers double as guides. I saw three birds swooping at high speed close to the water surface and I asked my sardar guide what bird that was. “Leevar Turn” he said. Thinking that he must have been in the military earlier and that this is his version of “about turn”, I looked around and blinked. Lee Var Tun. He repeated, virtually sitting on every syllable. I looked blank. Eyes are said to be windows to the soul. On that day his eyes clearly revealed what his soul thought about my ingliss. Back home, Salim Ali’s guide finally solved the riddle – River Tern.

In my smoking days, I was often corrected by the shop-keeper to the pronunciation of Gold Flake. They always say it as “Flak” as though I deserve flak for smoking. Recently, the man at Sony service centre kept saying that the lens “blak” (block) needs to be changed. I wanted to scream that my lens is not black. Google might want to close shop if they hear a software cum hardware engineer who assembled my PC pronounce it as “Goog lee”. Noodles might want to hang themselves a la Tom & Jerry cartoon if they hear a waiter announce grandly that they have “Vigitable Nood Less” on the menu. The ego of any language will be punctured if they see the word mis-spelt in as many ways as possible – punchar, puncher, pancher not to mention “Punchur Shop” If one gets vegetables in a vegetable shop or groceries in a grocery shop, does  one get puncher in a 'puncher shop'?!

My headmaster who was also my English teacher dubbed the language as “shameless”; nevertheless he made me repeat the word ‘film’ ten times as he insisted that the ‘l’ and ‘m’ should not have any gap between them – a tough task for a twelve-year old who had just transited from a rural Tamil medium school.  Will he turn and twist in his grave if he hears “sitate bank” or “gruntee” (guarantee) or “kaapi”(coffee) or “varald”(world) ?

Throw in vernacular idiosyncrasies like the rounding of the “O” by the Mallu and we can have more fun. “There was a bomb scare. Police came with dogs” Try repeating this sentence with every ‘o’ rounded to the full as one would say "both". Daniel Jones would wince and would never have classified diphthongs. A colleague was commenting about the difficulty a Bong has in pronouncing ‘v’ and how they say it as ‘b’ to which the boss responded vehemently – “no, no, no problem” and proceeded to write the two letters and grandly declared “This is b and this is b”!!! The whole department laughed but the boss didn’t know why. But imagine a neighbour’s consternation when a visitor commented “Bhy don’t you bhitewash your balls. They are so dirty!”