Dick & Garlick

Himadri Roy on 'Farsi', a lost gay argot used in Delhi: Nouns like panthi, koti, niharan, dhurani, jogta, danga were used with sim...

In 'Word of the Day', a daily column that ran in the Bangalore Mirror through the latter half of 2015, writer Sriram Aravamudan, who...

In a land where rainfall is scarce, the act of reading the skies and attempting to name the unattainable becomes unbearably poignant. Arati-...

On the night of 22nd September 1914, a lone German cruiser slipped unnoticed into the waters off Chennai. Once the ship was in range, its co...

Aditya Sinha's amusing New York Times piece on the Indian bureaucracy's love of euphemism: If the “War on Terror” had been underta...

Via the city guide Mumbai Boss , now defunct: Gaysi, the chaps behind LGBT open mic night Dirty Talk, return this Sunday, April 6 with 2×2 ...

This was described to me as a slang term for testicles, used at St Andrew's School in Bandra, Mumbai. 'Bugger, I'll kick you in ...

I'm not too sure where I came first across this line of Kabir's, which describes his views on language in a pithy epigrammatic style...

For those who haven't come across the word, prepone means to move something to an earlier date or time: quite simply, it is the opposit...

“I am glad, sir” said a lady to Dr. Johnson, “that you have omitted all improper words from your dictionary.” “I hope I have, madam,” answer...

Hi-hello friend Colloquial term for a casual acquaintance, fairly common in online forums. Most of the examples I've found seem to con...

S W Fallon’s A New Hindustani-English Dictionary (1879) is regarded as one of the most remarkable works of Indian lexicography. With its...

Anyone who's observed or participated in a political discussion in recent times is probably familiar with the word libtard , a derogato...

The South China Morning Post runs a language column titled Language Matters by Lisa Lim, which occasionally picks up Indian words that hav...

Since I haven ’ t posted here in a while, I have a backlog of links to share. For starters, here ’ s a Caravan essay by Chitralekha Basu o...

Parsi Bol 2 is an updated edition of Sooni Taraporevala and Meher Marfatia's very entertaining book on Parsi insults, endearments and ...

Parsi Bol , a Gujarati-English phrasebook which catalogues the caustic insults and salty lingo of the Parsi community. From  Time Out  : ...