July 13, 2005

Slang Sighting: One-Tharah Types

Bangalore slang, mixing Kannada and English. One tharah types are one of a kind, eccentric, idiosyncratic, 'like that only'.

Cosmopolitan people, you think? Yeah, they're a mixed bag. Different, one-tharah types. Not so hard-and-fast. A chill crowd, like. Doing ultra-cool things chumma, simply, for no reason other than to do it. (Lavanya Sankaran, The Red Carpet)
Sankaran has a good ear for Bangalore talk, and as she mentions in this interview, her publishers have been 'gracious enough to let her chumma and one-tharah be without qualifiers'. You can read an excerpt from the book here.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bangalore slang is very infectious.
When I was working there, I was determined to maintain my Bambaiya speech "heritage" (if you could call it that).
But I soon found myself falling into
the pattern of
What da Macha ? and Yakke?
Still don't know exactly what Macha means.I assume it is guy/dude or the Bombay equivalent of yaar.

R Devraj said...

Macha is the South Indian equivalent of saala, meaning brother-in-law

Libran Lover said...

Machcha is the Tamil equivalent of saala, meaning brother-in-law. Since in Tamil culture, the practice of the maternal uncle marrying his niece was/is quite common, the b-i-l could also be the nephew. So, machcha is also used as the equivalent of baanja, meaning nephew.

Libran Lover said...

Further, it is an evidence of the large presence of Tamils among non-Kannadiga's in Bangalore, that you would think machcha is part of the Bangalore slang. The truth is that, it is probably more a part of the slang of Chennai or whole of Tamilnadu. Also, in Bangalore, the number of people who actually use machcha is quite small in general, and very very small among true-blue localites (meaning, Kannadigas and those born and brought up in Bangalore).

Cat said...

I see all these notes on one-tharah and swalpa adjust madi everywhere, but no mention of the the Kannada Ree.
HOW could they forget the Ree?

En-ree samachara?
Yak-ree late-u ivathu?

Its part of every sentence. No Bangalorean worth his Iyengar Bakery Benne-Biscuit would forget the Ree.

So I thought "I would kindly do the needful" and remind everyone here.