Cycle gap

Observe a traffic jam on an Indian street, and you will find that it tends to follow a complex process of re-alignment over time. It all begins with vehicles lined up bumper-to-bumper. But as the minutes tick away and more and more vehicles enter the jam, impatience mounts and many drivers try to switch lanes to gain an advantage. Others drift lazily towards visible openings, having nothing better to do, and soon all the cars, buses, trucks and auto-rickshaws have interlocked themselves into a complex jigsaw, which will take hours to disassemble. You may think that the gridlock is now complete, but believe it or not, there is still some room left for new entrants. At this point, you will find cyclists blithely weaving their way through the narrow gaps between vehicles to move to the head of the queue.

The second gear is down and as you negotiate a pothole, a grand convoy of three bikes try to slip in on the left. There is just daylight between the car and the parked SUV. It’s whats popularly known as cycle gap. (Confessions of a Magnificent Mind)

(Auto rickshaws) run on three wheels and an engine that is mostly used for mowing lawns in the western countries. Other characteristics are they have a very small turn radius and can be turned in circles at the same spot. They are also known for pugunthufying (entering) and going within a cycle gap (A Gap just as wide to let a Bike Go). (Indian Cities and Riders of the Auto Rickshaw « 18,000 RPM)

'Cycle gap' provides a metaphor in South Indian English for an indigenous brand of opportunism. Where others may give up, a certain type of individual will discover a narrow window of opportunity and try to squeeze through. If he succeeds, chances are he'll also try to pull in all his friends, brothers, parents, uncles and what-have-you after him, and a mad scramble will result, till someone notices and slams the window shut. Hence, the local Chennai idiom, 'to try and squeeze an auto-rickshaw through a cycle gap'.

In Chennai I had the pleasure of taking the auto ride and I was reminded of a local saying "people drive auto in a cycle gap", no, no, now even a bus goes in a cycle gap! (Rattling Communicator)

Red lights and no-entry signs are just meant for learning boards in driving schools, as the popular saying goes we’d even fit an armoured tank in a cycle gap! (Dappan Koothu)

Wikipedia provides a brief (and rather inadequate) definition of this sense of 'cycle gap':

Cycle Gap: Tamil for trying to get things done without anyone noticing it. (Wikipedia page on Madras Tamil)

The following examples illustrate the figurative sense of the term:

See, we are a cycle gap country. If judgements and policies are not watertight and leave a crack in the door for exceptional cases. We will attempt to drive a 18 wheeler through that gap. (Reality Check India)

My cousin was here last week, looking to sneak through the proverbial “cycle-gap” in the hallowed doors of TCS, CTS, Wipro, Satyam and Infosys which would make her the financially pampered, mentally tortured, socially showcased, BIG 5 IT professional. (ExpertDabbler)

Gun Throat

Another example of eccentric South Indian English, this one found in Green Well Years, an autobigraphical novel by the artist Manohar Devadoss about growing up in Madurai.

She had a 'gun-throat' and explained to the doctor her 'menses problems' in a voice so loud that the entire household came to know what they were.

If you want to insult a blowhard, call him a beerangi vaya, or 'cannon mouth' in colloquial Tamil. Gun throat is a less pejorative term that describes someone with a loud, thundering voice.

I insist that you switch off your mobile phone. Never will I forget the lowlife who answered a string of business calls throughout The Fellowship of the Rings in a gun-throat voice. (C. K. Meena, The Rules of Movie-Going, The Hindu, May 15 2003)

...my bladder decides to speak up. And not in little whispers either. Nope, this is a gun throat variety of bladder. It screams so loud that you have answer the call immediately or risk some embarrassing one year old suited behaviour. (life through pink colour glasses, November 21 2005)

I have been lucky, I have what people call a ‘Gun Throat’. As soon as I thunder into the microphone, the audience has no chance but to listen! (Shaly Pereira, Look Who's Talking, Mangalorean.com, September 20 2005)

Rajapart

Rajapart is a piece of Tamil theatre jargon from the 1930s, referring to the lead role in a play. The word mixes Tamil and English: rajapart is the 'king's part', the hero's role in costume dramas staged by the travelling theatre troupes of the time. I found the term in the autobiography of Sivaji Ganesan, the legendary Tamil actor who started out in one such 'boys' company' during this period, and also appeared in a film titled Rajapart Rangadurai later in his career.

In the theatre jargon of those days, I wanted to play Rajapart which was the role of a King. I appealed to my teacher demonstrating to him my prowess at playing this role. Gradually the number of female roles that came to me lessened and I was given male roles, and finally, I reached the status of a Rajapart actor. I was considered one of the most important actors in the troupe. (Sivaji Ganesan, Autobiography of an Actor, ed. by T. S. Narayana Swamy. Translated English edition, Chennai 2007)

Elsewhere in the text, Ganesan introduces the following terms, which illustrate the eccentric manner in which Tamil speakers tend to adopt English words.

Iron Streepart means a very important female part and similarly Iron Rajapart means a very important male role.

Why iron? I've been scratching my head, but the best I've got is this equation: iron=something strong=something very important. Maybe someone out there has a better explanation?

Spell Check Blues

Ninety million English speakers in India, but try getting spell check to recognize your name..

Live at Gotham
Hari Kondabolu - Spell Check
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Convent/convented/convent english

Convent, n. In north India, a generic term for an English-medium school, usually a girls' school. The usage derives from the fact that schools run by missionaries were the first to use English as a medium of instruction, and they are still considered by many to be superior in this respect. A convent education is a status symbol, something that improves a girl's chances on the marriage market. Hence, convented, an adjective for someone who has studied at an English-medium school, found frequently in Indian matrimonial advertisements. (A Google search should turn up several ads seeking matches for 'beautiful Brahmin convented girls' - there is, of course, no such thing as a Brahmin convent). Convent English describes the affected manner of speech adopted by the 'convented', replete with schoolgirl slang and anglicizations of Indian words.

In modern India, where children were bought and sold for marriage through the newspaper, a girl's chance of a wealthy match improved sharply if she had been to a convent. The scramble gave a new word to the language. A matrimonial ad in the Sunday papers, after describing the bride-to-be as very fair, beautiful and homely (meaning house-trained), clinched the business with convented. Naturally, convents multiplied across the country, most without the trace of a nun, and one of them named, memorably, BLONDIE CONVENT (I. Allan Sealy, Trotternama)

It’s one of the most fabled lines in LSR history, passed down from batch to batch and teacher to student. The matrimonial ads, which after asking for a ‘homely, convented girl’ state categorically and firmly: LSR girls need not apply. That line has been quoted with pride by several women, glorying in the fact that their minds are considered too unconventional to fit in with the typical Indian bride mentality. (Article about Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi in the Indian Express, November 12, 2005)

Now we all know, in most parts of our country, particularly the north, a “convent” is just a general way to describe an English-medium school. In Punjab, you can often find a St Kabir Convent, a Guru Gobind Singh Convent, or some place else, a Maharishi Dayanand Convent. But a Lohia Convent? You name an English-medium school after a man who dedicated his life to throwing English-medium schooling, an instrument of colonialism, out of this country? And you do it in the heart of Lohia-land? (Shekhar Gupta, Indian Express, May 15, 2009)

We are against foreign missionaries but we open money-minting schools with such names as St. John Convent and even Durga Charan Convent. A few years ago a young lady gravely said to my late aunt Hamida Begum, "You have such a large house lying vacant in the country. Why don't you open St. Hamida Convent in it?" (Qurratulain Hyder,'Ignorance is not bliss', The Times of India Sunday Review, July 6 1997)

After Ayaram

The Indian Express compiles a lexicon of political jargon for this year's Indian general election. Excerpts:

108 kuien kuien kuien: A phrase popularised by Chief Minister YSR Reddy to remind people of his Rajiv Gandhi Arogyasri Scheme, which involves participation by private sector hospitals to bring medical care to the poor. The numbers 108 and 104 (for cities and rural areas) are what you need to dial for an ambulance which carts the patient to the nearest hospital. The ‘kuein kuein kuein’ was used effectively by YSR to mimic the siren.

Ruler: When Punjab politicians say ‘ruler’, what they mean is ‘rural’. Call it a Freudian slip or a malapropism, but most of the prominent leaders of the state, including the chief minister, say: “Aaj ruler areas vich rally haigi (today there is a rally in rural areas).” The word has caught on: people in these ‘ruler areas’ think ‘ruler’ means village.

Cover: This elections, ‘cover’ means a variety of gifts distributed to voters either early in the morning or late in the night—when it’s safe from election observers and rival party cadres. The word was coloured to mean bribe after voters in some areas received crisp Rs 500 notes recently. Even when the gift becomes saris or tokens for liquor, the question now is: “Did you get the cover?”

Mahal factor: The phrase is often used to underline the importance of the Scindia family in the electoral politics of the Gwalior-Guna-Shivpuri region. When a representative of the erstwhile royal family is contesting, the mahal (palace) factor comes into play directly. When a Scindia is not in the fray, a representative backed by the family, irrespective of the political divide, is believed to benefit from the M factor.

Yeddy-Reddy-Cheddy: This is a reference to the power triumvirate within the BJP in Karnataka—Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa, the Reddys (mining barons from Bellary) and the khaki shorts (cheddy or chaddi) of the RSS. The phrase emerged in the opposition Congress camp and was used by former chief minister S. Bangarappa (now in the Congress) in the course of his electoral battle with Yeddyurappa’s son B.Y. Raghavendra.

India's Endangered Languages

196 Indian languages are in danger of extinction, according to UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing. Ahom, Aimol, Andro, Chairel, Kolhreng, Rangkas, Sengmai, Tarao, Tolcha are some the languages that are already extinct, according to a report in Outlook, which also provides a map showing the regional distribution of the threatened languages. Essentially, they are clustered on the margins of the Hindi heartland - the mountain regions where Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken,the tribal regions of central and south India, the North-East and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. You can find another report here, and the Atlas itself is available online here.

HollyWords

'Jai Ho!’ and ‘Slumdog’ from Slumdog Millionaire top the list of words from Hollywood that most influenced the English Language in 2008, according to the Global Language Monitor:

1. Jai Ho! (Slumdog Millionaire) – Literally ‘Let there be Victory’ in Hindi.
2. Slumdog (Slumdog Millionaire) – Definitely a politically incorrect term for young slum-dwellers in Bombay (Mumbai).

Bangalore Banter

Bengalooru Banter is a blog that provides samples of Bean Town bakwas, like these overheard conversations or this list of Kanglish (Kannada + English) slang. A few examples from Bikerdude's slang dictionary:

AJM: Short for Akkan Jusht Missu (Lit: Elder Sister just missed) 1. Minor disappointment 2. Narrow escape. "Aye ticket siktheno?" "Illa lo, AJM agoythu." Do not use in polite company!

Budding: Short for Brigade road Up and Down. bangalore's most popular pastime. (Also Mudding - MG road Up and Down)

Free kotre phenoylu kudithaane : Lit: If its free, he'll even drink phenyl. Curmudgeon, compulsively economical person.

Meetru : Lit: (autorickshaw) Meter. Gumption/cheek. "Yeno, eshto ning meetru?"

Mishtik : Lit: Mistake. Used for errors, leave, illnesses, sudden departures, misunderstandings, deletions, etc.

Raiyya: From the English "Right" (used by bus conductors after passengers have got off or on at a bus stop). To leave/depart. "Boss picture mugdid takshna naan mane tava raiyya."

Simp-simply : Translated from the kannada sum-sumne. For no reason at all. "Aye don’t simp-simply come and dishtrub me I say."

Further linguistic confusion in this post which reproduces a conversation in the hybrid 'Kan-Tam' (Kannadized Tamil)spoken in the city's Malleswaram area. Dig in.

Indian English: Language & Culture

Indian English: Language & Culture is a Lonely Planet guide to the quirks of English as spoken in India. Essential if you're a visitor mystified by travel agents who want to 'prepone' your ticket: I'm less certain that a phrasebook of this kind can help anyone decipher a conversation in Hinglish, or even your average Mumbai tabloid. Worth a look, nevertheless. (I should add here that I served as a consultant on this project - my contribution, however, was limited to pointing out some obvious errors and suggesting a few sample phrases).

For obvious reasons

Indian English Illustrated

Ingenious. Memsaab Story presents Indianisms like 'tight slap', 'shoe-bite' and many more in grabs from sub-titled Bollywood flicks.

Brag-rapping, Hyderabad style

Khallas

A new book on the jargon of bhai-land:

It is a world where anaar (pomegranate) is a grenade, “artist” a shooter, atthais (28) an alcoholic, baja (musical instrument) a handgun, blue a Rs. 100 note, “camera” a weapon, “capsule” a bullet, chabbis (26) a young promiscuous girl, “Clinton” fake American dollar bills, “Delhi” is Dubai, “Indian bat” a country-made revolver, jhadu (broom) is an assault weapon, “Kanpur” is Karachi…

The Hindustan Times has an extract here. The author is a well-known crime reporter who's covered Mumbai's crime beat for the Indian Express and the Hindustan Times, so I guess he knows what he's talking about when he tracks the origin of underworld slang terms to specific gangs:

Dana Live rounds, a relatively old term, can be traced back to Dawood and the early 1980s.
Item Sexy damsel. Originally coined for Meenakshi Sharma, who wanted to join Bollywood but ended up as a key operative in Babloo Shrivastava's gang.
Zero dial The informer, as he was known in Dawood's stronghold Dongri, in South Mumbai.

The extract features a few slang words new to me:

Gaddi (Train) The position of practising sodomy inside a crammed jail.
Lift-wali building 9 mm Caliber Semi-automatic Star Pistol. So called because bullets are pushed upwards by a spring in an automatic pistol, just like an elevator.
Roti A term used by intelligence officials to denote compact discs (CDs), which are often dispatched through couriers

Dress dada

A dress dada is not a preening street goon or a transvestite toughie, it's a respectful Bollywood term for a senior dressman. 'Dada' here is the Marathi word for 'elder brother' and is used liberally on Bollywood sets, as explained in this posting to Sarai:

As I learnt early on, a production unit has certain unwritten codes such as an established system of address. Everyone calls everyone else 'xyz-ji'. This old-world form of 'respectful' address has found much favour in the film industry. It actually helps maintain a certain amount of professional distance and creates an atmosphere where the very politeness of the form of address disallows (to some extent) ugly exchanges. Representatives of departments like make-up and dress are called Make-up dada and Dress dada respectively. The guys in charge of properties (art direction) are clubbed together as Setting dada. (Debashree Mukherjee, 'Making Of Johny Johny, Yes Papa', Sarai)

With folded hands

Jug Suraiya discusses the anatomical impossibility of this Indian English phrase:

A couple of columns ago I used the typically Indian phrase 'with folded hands', a gesture implying, among many other things, entreaty or surrender. A reader has pointed out that while the phrase is, indeed, in common use, it represents an anatomical impossibility much more so than that suggested by the other choice Indian Englishism: my head is eating circles (a direct translation from the Hindustani 'Mera sir chakkar kha raha hai').

Automatic Hinglish

Google Translate now offers translation from English to Hindi and vice versa. Type in some text and check out the results. Chances are you'll get some garbled nonsense, but with computer-generated translation, that's par for the course. What's surprising is that if you translate from English to Hindi and convert the results back to English, some of the original text is restored. Here's a portion of Hamlet's soliloquy in Google Hindi:

' Tis एक consummation
श्रद्धापूर्वक को wish'd. करने के लिए मौत की नींद के लिए.
नींद के स्वप्न को perchance करने के लिए: सॉफ्टवेयर, यही तो कठिनाई है!

That's completely meaningless, of course. But feed this drivel to the Google translator, and it becomes Shakespeare again - with a few improvements.

'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to wish'd. To death for sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream: software, there's the rub!

Software, there's the rub: truer words have never been spoken. Coming up: Surdas in Hinglish ('Surdas, Braja is very bad now, kahe not let ubare') and Google's take on hip-hop lyrics, which is so polite, you'll never feel the need for a Parental Advisory ('Shake your booty' translates as 'Hilayein apni loot').

The Elvis of English

This is off-topic somewhat, but I can't resist linking to this great New Yorker piece on China's 'Elvis of English'. Li Yang, founder and chief teacher at Li Yang Crazy English, trains Chinese tongue muscles with an ESL technique that has been described as 'English as a Shouted Language'. Rapidex, Chinese style:

Li stood before the students, his right arm raised in the manner of a tent revivalist, and launched them into English at the top of their lungs. “I!” he thundered. “I!” they thundered back.
“Would!”
“Would!”
“Like!”
“Like!”
“To!”
“To!”
“Take!”
“Take!”
“Your!”
“Your!”
“Tem! Per! Ture!”
“Tem! Per! Ture!”
One by one, the doctors tried it out. “I would like to take your temperature!” a woman in stylish black glasses yelled, followed by a man in a military uniform. As Li went around the room, each voice sounded a bit more confident than the one before. (How a patient might react to such bluster was anyone’s guess.)

Chak De Again

Think I'll take Sidhu's word for it (in this case, he may actually know what he's talking about):

The intricate meaning of the word is Chak De Phatte, Nap De Killi. Killi is a small lever that you pull. And when you pull it, the water starts gushing into the fields through a motor. Now that Killi is always invariably hidden under a well. And that well is covered by wooden planks. So you lift the phatta, i.e. Chak De Phatta, and then you pull the killi. And then the water starts flowing, gushing into the fields. So it's got everything to do with positivity,' said Navjot Singh Sidhu, former Indian cricket player.

Chak de phatte

Turn on the car radio, and chances are a bhangra number will come on soon enough, urging you to 'chak de phatte'. All very good and rousing, but uhm, what is one supposed to do beyond the usual one-legged hop with fingers pointing heavenwards (whiskey glass balanced on head, optional)? I know what the phrase means literally, something like 'lift up the planks' in Punjabi, but how exactly does one chak the said phattas? And what is the true origin of this now ubiquitous Punjabi slang phrase? I googled around a bit and found quite a few explanations, most of them spurious no doubt. Here are the more plausible origins, this first one from the Urban Dictionary :

Chak De Phatte -though loosely translated as pick up the floorboards is more of a war cry than a housekeeping call. The origins of the phrase lie in the times when the Khalsa i.e. the original warrior Sikhs were formed, they would cross canals and attack Mughal camps in a blitzkrieg attack and then just as they came would retreat leaving the enemy helpless. The sport of tent pegging also evolved from this camp raiding where the riders would remove the pegs of the tents trapping the occupants under, what then used to be a very heavy fabric. While escaping back to their base the Khalsa warriors would dismantle any temporary bridges constructed by them(made out of 'Phatte') to prevent the Mughals from chasing them and sometimes to prevent the enemy from escaping, hence the cry 'Chak De Phatte'. The phrase then acquired the meaning: to complete the route. And is now used as in the figure of 'Bring the house down!'.

And here's another plausible explanation, found in a comment posted by Subrat to a review of the movie Chak De at Water, No Ice:

Chak De comes from Chak De Phatte. While the term loosely does mean ‘come on’ or ‘go for it’ (obvious from its usage), it traces its origins to the farms of Punjab. The motor which pumps water into the fields is normally underground and is covered with wooden planks (called phatte in Punjabi). When you want to turn on the motor, you were asked to ‘chak de phatte’ which meant turn the planks over. It was a sort of clarion call to get down to business. The term that followed this was ‘Nap de Killi’ which meant turn on the tap. Hence, these two terms are used together - “chak de phatte, nap de killi”. So there ends my small dissertation on Punjabi folklore (must admit I have never been to the fields of Punjab to hear this).

And a third, which attributes the origin to bhangra bands in the UK:

‘Phatte’ is also synonymous with wooden floor boards. So when desi bands in the UK needed a cool phrase to hook their music (bhangra) on, they used a literal translation of ‘beat up the floor boards’ or chak de phatte.

Prince kisses chuddies

Via Yahoo News:

Extolling what he called the 'splendidly unstoppable' South Asian contributions in Britain, Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the British crown, told a dinner thrown for 200 Asian guests at Windsor Castle that the word 'chuddie' - Punjabi word for underwear - is here to stay in the English language.

'I must say I am constantly struck by the fact the Britons of every origin in fact share more in common than they think,' Charles said in his speech to the celebrity guests at the gala dinner. 'The sharing of language is a further case in point. The most well-known examples are probably 'bungalow', 'verandah' and, indeed, 'shampoo'. And more recently, 'chuddies' seemed to have crept into the English language - if that is the correct way to put it,' he told guests who included actor-couple Sanjeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal, cricketer Saj Mahmood, author Vikram Seth and actor Art Malik.

A day after Hindus anointed Prime Minister Gordon Brown as Govardhan Brown on Diwali at the House of Commons, Charles' mention of 'chuddies' at Windsor Castle - his mother Elizabeth II's 900-year-old official residence - risked lowering the tone of celebrations a bit. But it was an occasion for humour and the British royal made his risque reference fully aware that it was Bhaskar and Syal, the creators of the BBC comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, who first put the word 'chuddie' in the lexicon of the evolving English language. The word became famous after Bhaskar and Syal coined the phrase 'kiss my chuddies' in their serial. And in 2005, it was officially entered into the Collins English Dictionary.