Jabberjee writes: 'As poet Burns remarks with great truthfulness, "Rank is but a penny stamp, and a Man is a man and all that."' This is a pleasant skid on the banana skin of education. Bertie and Jeeves, you remember, get tangled up in this same quotation at a moment of great crisis.Journalists like David Gardner have claimed to find echoes of P. G. Wodehouse in Indian English, but it seems more likely that the reverse is true: Wodehouse's style owes a debt to Babu bombast.
Rem acu tetigisti, non possumus, surgit amari aliquid, ultra vires, mens sana in corpore sano, amende honorable - these are gobbets of education that Jabberjee uses and Jeeves takes over. And (this is sad) we find that it was Jabberjee, and not Bertie, who first made that excellent Shakespeare emendation, only conceivable through the ears, only translatable through the eyes. Jabberjee writes: 'Jessamina inherits, in Hamlet's immortal phraseology, "an eye like Ma's to threaten and command".'
It’s time once again to play What Did That Writer Mean? Elizabeth Kolbert
(who often reports in the New Yorker) is one of the best popular science
writers ...
4 comments:
Terrific post, Devraj.
If you want to read a humorist who writes without the "faint quotation marks in his voice", read Kyril Bonfiglioli, who quotes entire Jeeves/Wooster passages in his devastatingly funny "Mortdecai" series of books. If ever there was a successor to the great Plum, it was the short-lived Mr. Bonfiglioli.
Cheers,
krishna
Wow, whatasite....I shd have discovered it long ago.
Hi,
Do you know anything in detail about the origin of the word "Gandu" - looks like these days we do not mean "catamite" when we say gandu.
Interesting site. Plum indirectly ploughed back what he had imbibed from the Raj traces of which shall remain indelible.
Apropos the slang word 'gandu'. Its etymon is 'gaand' denoting anus. Gandu denotes sodomite, bum bandit, catamite, even a pederast or paedophile. Its general meaning signifies a coward, wimp, or wuss. A derogatory word.
The Urdu word 'launda' or 'laundi' is also amenable to more than one semantic permutation.
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