Filter Coffee

Upon My Word

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

- Douglas Adams 

Words have a way of creeping insiduously from the places where they were born into "mainstream" language. The interesting thing about Douglas Adams' quote above is the word 'deadline'. It's one of those words that we use almost unthinkingly practically every day. And yet, like many of its counterparts, it has an absorbing tale (tales, actually, in this case) behind it.

Apparently during the American Civil War, there was a literal line drawn in the ground, about 17 feet away outside a prison wall. Soldiers guarding prisoners were allowed to shoot and kill any prisoner who stepped beyond the "dead" line. A rather extreme, if possibly very effective way of maintaining law and order! The other story is much more boring, and has to do with a line on a printer's press beyond which even if there is type, it will not appear on the page. Nowadays I suppose depending on what the job at hand is, the deadline might appear to be of one or the other type! Neverthless, the point is that a word that meant something in a very restricted and specialized sense has gone on to mean something more or less completely different in a generalized way. This could happen within a language (like it did for 'deadline'), or across linguistic boundaries.

Since we're calling this blog Filter Coffee, let's take a gander at words closer to home that have migrated into other tongues. Our juggernaut begins at Puri, and tracing the eastern seaboard, we run into bandicoots and mongooses who have shifted homes from their aavakai biryani land into English. Down south, in Kaveri country, unlikely looking catamarans venture into the Bay of Bengal to come back with the day's catch, which the villagers will buy for cash, which will perhaps allow the fisherfolk to relax at the end of hard day's work with a cheroot! Meanwhile, their cousins on the other side of the peninsula are simbly eating jack fruits and making plans to go to Gelf!

If you thought this traffic in language was entirely one way, or that it was a thing of the past, you have another think coming. In the mid 1700s, the Marquis de Bussy-Castelnau led a French expeditionary force of sorts on a picnic from Pondicherry to the Northern Circars (today's north coastal Andhra Pradesh), which had been newly ceded to the French. His extra-curricular activities spread over a few months and a few famous battles ensured that his reputation soared. To the point where when children were naughty or cranky, mothers would whisper, "Don't be like that, or the boochodu will come." The use of boochodu synonymously with boogeyman is something that continued for generations, I even remember it being used on us as kids, and it's probably still in use. The story is somewhat apocryphal and hard to verify, but it is rather fascinating to think that a mother in Vijayawada today is probably trying to spook her kids using the name of a Frenchman dead 250 years.

Or take the example of the German cruiser Emden. During the First World War, this plucky craft sailed all the way around the world and started lobbing shells at the terrified people of places like Madras and Penang. The shelling of Madras caused a severe sapping of British morale (and correspondingly lifted the hopes of people in the Indian freedom movement). Within a few months, emandan had become part of the local lingo. As in, "Hey, don't mess with that guy, he is an emandan." It's used even today, although not too many people probably remember that they have to thank Capt. Karl von Muller for allowing them this handy shortcut to describe their local strongman!

And that's the memo from the coffee house, for now.