Paracosms are not merely infantile fantasies, as the successes of Tolkien, Rowling, the Game of Thrones series on television and lesser-known children’s authors confirm. They often serve for grieving people to cope with tragedy, especially the death of a loved one, when bereaved people retreat into a paracosm in order to more safely process and understand their loss. It is said that famous writers like Emily Bronte, James M. Barrie and Isak Dinesen created their widely-read paracosms after the deaths in their childhoods of family members who were close to them. Children invent paracosms as a way of orienting themselves
in reality, never more essential than when their reality
has undergone the shock of a bereavement or major loss.
The Oscar-winning 2006 Spanish film Pan’s Labyrinth beautifully depicts the paracosm inhabited by a young schoolgirl whose father is killed in the Civil War and whose mother marries a fascist officer.
Today, one of the best-loved paracosms is the one inhabited by the cartoon strip characters Calvin and Hobbes—a little boy coping with the stresses of daily life, parental instructions and onerous demands of the real world by talking to, and receiving support from, a friendly tiger.
Sometimes we wonder whether some of our politicians live in paracosms of their own—how else to explain some of their more bizarre decisions and actions?
36.
Paraprosdokian
noun
A FIGURE OF SPEECH IN WHICH THE LATTER PART OF A SENTENCE OR PHRASE, OR LARGER STATEMENT, IS SURPRISING OR UNEXPECTED, IN A WAY THAT PROMPTS THE READER OR HEARER TO RETHINK THE FIRST PART OR UNDERSTAND IT DIFFERENTLY
USAGE
My favourite paraprosdokian declares that ‘the pun is the lowest form of humour—when you don’t think of it first’.
Paraprosdokian comes from two Greek words, para, meaning ‘against’, and prosdokia, meaning ‘expectation’. The earliest citation in English seems to be in 1891 in a humorous article in Punch: ‘A “paraprosdokian”, which delights him to the point of repetition.’ It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect—‘I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my father, not screaming and terrified like his passengers’ was a famous paraprosdokian of the comedian Bob Monkhouse. Groucho Marx loved using it for its anti-climaxes: ‘I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.’ I forget who said ‘The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it’s still on the list’.
Paraprosdokians are particularly popular among stand-up comedians: ‘When I was ten, I beat up the school bully. His arms were in casts. That’s what gave me the courage.’ Or ‘I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way, so I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.’ One old favourite is: ‘Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.’ And how about ‘Always borrow money from a pessimist. He won’t expect it back!’?
Satirists can excel at paraprosdokians: what better way to skewer the pretensions of society? ‘She got her good looks from her father; he’s a plastic surgeon.’ Or more notoriously: ‘I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.’ Cuttingly: ‘When tempted to fight fire with fire, remember that the fire department usually uses water.’ Memorably: ‘Going to a temple doesn’t make you a Hindu any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.’
A good use of paraprosdokians is to send up the conventional wisdom people like to inflict on you. ‘I always take life with a grain of salt—plus a slice of lemon, and a shot of tequila.’ Or ‘To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.’
Some paraprosdokians not only change the meaning of the first part of an observation, but they also play on the meaning of a particular word, creating a double joke: ‘War does not determine who is right—only who is left.’ Or ‘I used to be indecisive. Now I’m not sure.’ I’m still awed by the brilliance of ‘Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be’.
Perhaps the greatest craftsman of paraprosdokians was the immortal P.G. Wodehouse. A mere sentence was not enough for him; his best examples built up slowly and at length. ‘Myrtle Prosser was a woman of considerable but extremely severe beauty. She . . . suggested rather one of those engravings of the mistresses of Bourbon kings which make one feel that the monarchs who selected them must have been men of iron, impervious to fear—or else short-sighted.’
And that’s probably enough paraprosdokians. After all, a bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station . . .
37.
Phobia
noun
AN EXTREME DISLIKE OR IRRATIONAL FEAR OF, OR AVERSION TO, SOMETHING, WHETHER A PLACE, A SITUATION OR AN ANIMAL
USAGE
SHE CAN NEVER GET INTO A CROWDED LIFT BECAUSE
SHE SUFFERS FROM CLAUSTROPHOBIA.
ALSO
He lives alone in the mountains because he has a phobia about crowds and freaks out with a bad case of ochlophobia every time he comes into the city.
As these examples suggest, phobias come in various shapes and sizes. The word itself derives from the Greek—phobia, from phobos, meaning ‘fear, panic fear, terror, outward show of fear; object of fear or terror’, though originally it meant ‘flight’, in the sense of fleeing, which was how the epic poet Homer used the word. (That too conceals an interesting story: phobia traces its origins to the Proto-Indo-European root word bhegw-, meaning ‘to run’, which of course has survived in Hindi as ‘bhaag’ and ‘bhagna’.)
Phobias involve fear of various sorts: there’s fear of creatures or things, from spiders and rats to needles or mirrors. There’s the fear of certain situations, from riding a car or a lift to being caught in a storm. There’s social phobias, from fear of untidiness to fear of eating in public. There are the more ‘understandable’ nervous fears, of blood, or dentists, or heights. All of them, in severe cases, can involve attacks of anxiety or panic, racing heartbeats, sweating, palpitations, nausea and the risk of fainting. In other words, phobias are not to be taken lightly.
The better-known phobias include claustrophobia, a fear of closed spaces, and its opposite, agoraphobia, an aversion to wide open spaces. There’s acrophobia, a fear of heights (from the same root that gives us the word ‘acrobat’ for a high-flying trapeze artist or tightrope-walker), arachnophobia (a fear of spiders, a surprisingly common phobia amongst women) and the condition mentioned in our second usage example, ochlophobia, a fear of crowds. Most common of all is xenophobia, an aversion to strangers, and a widespread affliction in the Western world these days, as well as increasingly seen, sadly, in BJP-ruled India.
Less common as words, but not as conditions, is aerophobia, a fear of flying (I was once seated on a flight next to a very pretty actress who suffered from aerophobia and asked me to hold her hand tightly during take-off, landing and every time the plane hit turbulence, which got me some arch looks from the stewardesses and fellow passengers!), amathophobia, an aversion to dust (I am a mild sufferer from this condition myself), haematophobia, a fear of blood (which puts many students off biology when they first have to perform a dissection!) and nyctophobia, a fear of the dark (how many children do you know who don’t suffer from nyctophobia?)
Then there are the really rare and obscure conditions for which words nonetheless exist, like ereuthophobia, the fear of blushing, emetophobia, a fear of vomiting (pity the poor emetophobe who becomes pregnant!), ornithophobia (the fear of birds) and its cousin zoophobia (aversion to animals). (An extreme version of the latter is alektorophobia, fear of chickens!) Schoolchildren might suffer from scolionophobia, the fear of school, though their teachers might be victims of ephebiphobia (the fear of teenagers: met any terrifying ones lately?)
There are words you imagine should be in more common use than they are, like pyrophobia (the fear of fire), verminophobia (the fear of germs) and triskadekaphobia, fear of the number thirteen, a widespread affliction of the superstitious. As a chil
d I lived in a building in Kolkata that had a twelfth floor and then a fourteenth floor but no thirteenth, for fear people would deem it unlucky and refuse to live there.
Some terms for phobias are quixotic: keraunophobia sounds like an aversion to the chief minister of Kerala (the Kera Uno!) but is actually the word for a fear of thunder, which we hear a lot in Kerala, particularly preceding pre-monsoon showers. Since Keralites are warm people, they may be more susceptible to cryophobia, fear of ice or cold.
All phobias, doctors tell us, are more common in women. (That includes androphobia, the fear of men, which may also be linked to aphenphosmphobia, the fear of being touched—especially by a man with facial hair, if you are suffering from pogonophobia, the fear of beards.) Among particularly female conditions are cacophobia, the fear of ugliness, obesophobia, the fear of gaining weight, ataxophobia, the fear of disorder or untidiness, atelophobia, the fear of imperfection, and catagelophobia, the fear of being ridiculed.
Phobias affect one in every eight people around the world, so we need to take them seriously. Still, the one condition no male of my acquaintance has ever admitted to—even those suffering from gamophobia, the fear of marriage, or venustraphobia, the fear of beautiful women—is genophobia, a fear of sex. Given the trolling I have become accustomed to, I should stop here: this long but still-partial list is enough to give many readers phobophobia—a phobia about phobias!
38.
Prepone
verb
TO ADVANCE AN APPOINTMENT OR PLAN;
TO MOVE FORWARD IN TIME
USAGE
The traffic was much lighter than we had expected, so I called my host to ask if we could prepone our meeting.
I have long immodestly considered myself the inventor of the term ‘prepone’. I came up with it at St. Stephen’s in 1972, used it extensively in conversation and employed it in an article in JS magazine soon after. ‘Prepone’, as a back-construction from ‘postpone’, seemed so much simpler, to a teenage collegian, than clunkily saying ‘could you move that appointment earlier?’ or ‘I would like to advance that deadline’ or ‘please bring it forward to an earlier date’. Over the years, I was gratified to see how extensively its use had spread in India.
But boy, was I wrong. In keeping with the long-standing wisdom that there is nothing new under the sun, I am told by Catherine Henstridge of the Oxford English Dictionary, no less, that they have an example of the use of the word ‘prepone’ from 1913—and it is not, alas, Indian.
In 1913, a J.J.D. Trenor wrote in the New York Times: ‘May I be permitted to coin the word “prepone” as a needed rival of that much revered and oft-invoked standby, “postpone”?’ It didn’t catch on much in the West, but the proceedings of the 1952 Indian Science Congress reveal that other Indians thought along the same lines: ‘In Indian villages . . . demand for power can be preponed or postponed not only by hours but even by days in order to comply with meteorological conditions.’
Clearly, the origin of ‘prepone’ has been preponed from 1972 to 1913, and I duly withdraw my claim to its origination. Mind you, I can still make a case, through frequent usage, to being somewhat involved in its popularization!
Still, the persistence and survival of what is called ‘Indian English’ (often with a sneer, as if to differentiate it from the Queen’s ‘propah’ English) deserves to be taken seriously. Our English, spoken without the shadow of Englishmen looming over us, is a vigorous and local language, which draws strength from local roots. If Americans can say ‘fall’ for autumn and ‘gotten’ for ‘have got’, though both are archaisms in England itself, why can’t Indians say ‘furlong’, ‘fortnight’ and ‘do the needful’, even if these have fallen out of use centuries ago in London? So many words in Indian English have stood up to the only test that matters—the test of time and usage. If enough people find a word or phrase useful, it is, to my mind, legitimate.
Indian English is a living, practical language, used by millions every day for practical purposes. Many phrases we take for granted in ordinary conversation are actually quite unusual abroad—calling elders ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’, for instance, or using the expression ‘non-veg’ to convey a willingness to eat meat. That doesn’t make them wrong, or even quaint. It just makes them Indian.
Some Indian English was created by our media and passed into regular usage— ‘airdash’ (‘the chief minister airdashed to Delhi’) and ‘history sheeter’ (‘the police explained that habitual criminal X was a history sheeter’, i.e., that he had a long criminal record). Some, like my ‘prepone’, came from school and college campuses: ‘mugging’ (cramming hard for an exam, with much rote learning and memorization involved) uses a word that means two very different things abroad (a criminal assault by a robber, as in ‘She was the victim of a mugging in a dark alley’ or an elaborate and often comically exaggerated expression, as in ‘he was mugging for the camera’). When an Indian student tells a foreigner he was ‘mugging for an exam’, bewilderment is guaranteed. Yet it’s a vivid word that conveys exactly what is intended to every user of Indian English.
Some Indian Englishisms are merely translated from an Indian language: ‘what is your good name?’ is the classic, since all Bengalis have a ‘daak naam’ that they are called by, and a ‘bhalo naam’ (or ‘good name’) for the record. But ‘what is your good name?’ is still the most polite form, in any Indian version of the English language, for finding out the identity of your interlocutor.
Some Indianisms are creative uses of an ordinary English word or phrase to reflect a particularly Indian sensibility—such as ‘kindly adjust’, said apologetically by the seventh person slipping into a bench meant for four. Our matrimonial ads have created their own cultural tropes with expressions that only mean something in Indian English—‘wheatish complexion’, of course, and better still, ‘traditional with modern outlook’.
But acknowledging the legitimacy of Indian English and many of its formulations doesn’t mean that ‘anything goes’. Some things are simply wrong. The Indian habit of saying ‘I will return back’ is an unnecessary redundancy: if you return, you are coming back. The desi practice of using ‘till’ to mean ‘as long as’ is simply incorrect English; it is wrong to say ‘I will miss you till you are away’ when you really mean is ‘I will miss you till you come back’! The Indian official doesn’t ‘waive off’ a fine, he just waives it, though he could wave you off if you thank him too profusely. ‘I am staying Bandra side’ is not an acceptable equivalent of ‘I am living in the Bandra area’. And ‘back side’ for ‘rear’ causes much unwitting hilarity, as in signs proclaiming, ‘entry through back side only’. These can’t be justified under the rubric of Indian English. They are just bad English.
But for the rest, we have nothing to apologize about: we should defiantly celebrate their use as integral parts of our Indian English vocabulary. After all, ‘we are like that only’. And if you don’t like it, kindly adjust . . .
39.
Quarantine
noun and verb
A PERIOD OF ENFORCED ISOLATION FOR A PERSON, ANIMAL, OR OBJECT SUSPECTED OF CARRYING A COMMUNICABLE DISEASE
USAGE
All the passengers on the cruise ship Diamond Princess were placed in quarantine for fear they might have been infected by the coronavirus.
The pandemic of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) assailing the world has suddenly brought the word ‘quarantine’ into widespread use. The term goes back to the 1660s, when disease was often carried across the seas on ships, and referred to the period a ship suspected of carrying disease was kept in isolation. Quarantine came from the Italian quarantinagiorni, literally ‘space of forty days,’ from quaranta (forty) and giorni (days), in keeping with the Venetian policy (first enforced in 1377) of keeping ships from plague-stricken countries waiting off its port for forty days to assure that no communicable cases were aboard, since no effective treatment or cure was known then. After three centuries of this practice in Italy, the broader sense of �
�any period of forced isolation’ emerged.
Initially, the Venetians reacted to the bubonic plague, known notoriously as the Black Death, which was spreading through Europe between 1347 and 1350 (it is estimated that one-third of Europe’s population died). The Great Council of Ragusa passed a law establishing trentino, or a thirty-day period of isolation for ships arriving from plague-affected areas. When in 1377 the isolation period was extended from thirty to forty days, the term changed from trentino to quarantino.
Interestingly, in English the word quarantine had an earlier meaning, that of a period of forty days in which a widow had the right (and some say, the obligation) to remain in her dead husband’s house (1520s), and even earlier, as quarentyne, it had religious connotations, referring to the time in the desert in which Christ fasted for forty days, Moses’ time on Mount Sinai, and the Catholic observation of Lent, a forty-day period of spiritual purification. Now its usage is perhaps more common and more banal, as in, ‘My dog had to be quarantined when I moved back to India.’ Indian students evacuated from the Wuhan area were ‘in quarantine’ in Manesar, along with the brave diplomats (one of them a nephew of mine) who went to arrange their evacuation.
When an outbreak of SARS moved through Canada in 2003, about 30,000 people in Toronto were quarantined. Epidemiologists (experts in the spread of disease) are still debating whether it effectively helped to control the spread of disease, but in any case, during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, health workers returning to the United States from affected areas were quarantined.
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