English Is Just So Funny
And limiting, but also a fun challenge. It is entertaining to be able to create something with the limits bound to building blocks. As I walked home from soaking in the sunlight, I randomly thought of how absurd the word kidnap is. ‘Kid’, ‘nap’? Somebody just made a threatening word out of a kid taking a nap. But come to think of it, it might be fitting? A kid that has been kidnapped might take a nap after crying their tonsils out. Another one that comes to mind—aftermath. ‘After’, ‘math’?! English? History? Recess? End of the day? Tell me in the comments some such words that come to your mind, whose constituents are absurd, funny, or both.
Etymology
After I made fun of kidnap, I looked it up. Here’s what I found.
The word kid has been used to refer to a young goat since at least the 13th century. It comes from the Old Norse word kið, meaning “young goat,” and Proto-Germanic kidjom, which was brought into English during the Viking influence on Old and Middle English. By the 16th century, the word began to be used informally to mean “child,” likely as a metaphor for the lively and playful nature of young goats.
‘Nap’ is derived from the Middle English nappen, meaning “to seize or steal,” which likely traces back to the Scandinavian hnappan (“to pluck or snatch”).
The term kidnap initially referred to the practice of abducting children for labor or ransom, particularly in England and the American colonies. Over time, it broadened to include abducting people of any age.
Language Walls
Sometimes I’m awash with a deep regret for mostly only reading and writing in English. I live in South India, have been for the last 7 years. I should be able to learn at least one language—of the place where I live. And yet I continue to swim mostly in English, so that I don’t feel behind on playing with it and building stories in it. When I think in English, I can feel my thoughts struggle to reach for sounds it doesn’t find easily. But when I think in Hindi, I repose. When I hear Urdu, I feel deceived—what is this magic? How has this phrase said something I’d take at least a couple of sentences if not a paragraph of English to describe?
I’m sure that every language when translated into another feels this loss. But I’m not talking necessarily about translation. I’m talking about the innate ability for a language to hold up exclusively only in itself, make sense of time, gender, singular-plural differently, in its own weird, beautiful ways. That’s why Malayalam and Tamil speakers feel like the sweet ‘rra’s(zha) and ‘da’s spewing family from an adjacent kingdom, and so forth.
V for Faqir Chand Bookstore
That said, I did read one book in my first language last year—Dopehri by Pankaj Kapoor on Jass’s ask. It was a victory because I had overcome my childhood’s fear of having to stand up in the Hindi period to read prose—which I struggled endlessly with—until our teacher would make someone else read. The book was such a beautiful heartfelt story. I melted in the end.
This year I’m on a vendetta for something that happened with me last year. Jass and I were visiting Faqir Chand Bookstore in Delhi. We picked our books and proceeded to the checkout. What seemed like the latest generation of the owners of the bookstore, looked at my chosen book—तितली(Titli) by Manav Kaul—and asked if I’d read any of his books before. When I shook my head, they said that I should not read this book, since it dealt with very sad, dark and depressing areas of life. I felt angry that they were gatekeeping the book.
Lately I’ve been reading the book normally, without dwelling much on this feeling that has already passed. But when I am finished reading it, I’d like to write a retrospective of this gatekeeping, as well informed as it might have been—which I didn’t feel from their outlandish and smug suggestion instruction.
Language Account Suggestion
Follow this Instagram account, and you’ll live happily ever after.
Their vs His or Her
I’m reading and attempting exercises of Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin. She touched this interesting argument about the rightness and wrongness in prose.
Correctness isn’t a moral issue but a social and political one, often a definition of social class. Correct usage is defined by a group of those who speak and write English a certain way, and used as a test or shibboleth to form an in-group of those who speak and write English that way and an out-group of those who don’t. And guess which group has the power?
I detest the self-righteousness of the correctness bullies, and I distrust their motives. But I have to walk a razor’s edge in this book, because the fact is that usage, particularly in writing, is a social matter, a general social agreement about how we make ourselves understood. Incoherent syntax, mistaken words, misplaced punctuation, all cripple meaning. Ignorance of the rules makes hash of the sentences. In written prose, incorrect usage, unless part of a conscious, consistent dialect or personal voice, is disastrous. An egregious mistake in usage can invalidate a whole story.
Giving an example of a fake rule—a tenet thrown around by some, she writes
Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he.
Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.”
This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.)
The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.
My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why.
And that’s the important thing for a writer: to know what you’re doing with your language and why. This involves knowing usage and punctuation well enough to use them skillfully, not as rules that impede you but as tools that serve you.
After I read this, I downloaded her suggested punctuation, craft book: The Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed. I have begun to read it.
If Ursula K Le. Guin was a teacher—which she is, in a sense that I’m reading her craft book that she would have meticulously curated, from years of experience of teaching, and writing—I would have become razor sharp, and not take pride, that I still do, to have done well in English Grammar throughout high school because of instinct.
A Song
One thing I’ve been feeling excited and grateful about has been waiting for new songs to drop from our Sibs Spotify playlist. This week I discovered Wake Up by Gurinder Gill(all platforms link) shared by my cousin. I immediately added it to my gym playlist. When I listen to it when I am not working out, I feel amused. When working out, I feel pumped.
A Poem
Global temperatures passed critical 1.5°C milestone for the first time in 2024— something that we were warned about in our social studies’ textbooks when we were kids. Jeet Thayil’s poem Natural History, from his new stupendous, rhythmic, sing-song, sometimes rap like new collection of poetry I’ll Have It Here, paints a terrifyingly exact picture of what is in store for the world, if the climate crisis doesn’t get its way overdue attention. But it is also a meditation on the collapse of meaning, history and legacy.
‘Why do we live here?’ said the kid to a sky that rained fire. ‘To ride the river, to know desire and live in the shiver,’ he said, moving higher. Meanwhile these words appear as on a magic screen, and they don’t just appear, they mean more than they seem to mean, or maybe less, maybe they collapse inwards. What will the wind and the tree, the reptile on the golf link, the vivid green parakeet, retain of us after we leave? The earth’s metallic sheen, pink froth blowing on an inland sea? Only the futurists kept score, by means of handheld semaphores. Firelight flagged our calls for more when we measured the coastal haar. Our HQ was windy Edinburgh. All gone now and gone for good, into the storm, the endless flaming wood, helter-skelter, busy, intently mad. The kid said, ‘We been had.’ It was the end of the … I forget.
A Short Story
To Labor for the Hive: A beekeeper finds a new sense of purpose and community after helping to develop a warning system for floods.
This story won Grist’s annual Imagine 2200 climate fiction short story contest for 2024.
Remember to exercise, move every 30 minutes or so to stretch for just 2 minutes, drink enough water, get some sunlight, even if for 10 minutes, sleep enough and on time whenever you can.
Until next week 🌻
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