Tharoorosaurus

by Shashi Tharoor

  The aim of quarantine is to prevent transmission of the disease from potentially infected persons to healthy persons during the incubation period. Quarantine can take two forms: absolute or complete quarantine, which consists of a limitation of freedom for a period equal to the longest usual incubation period of the disease; and modified quarantine, which involves selective or partial limitation of movement, such as the exclusion of children from school or the confining of military personnel to their base. It therefore involves infringing upon the liberty of outwardly healthy people, and this has both legal and ethical implications which should not be taken lightly.

  Few infectious diseases have an incubation time or infective period greater than forty days—except rabies, which may not show up for several months. That is why animals that may have been exposed to rabies are quarantined for many months when they arrive in other countries. HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) does have a longer incubation period than SARS or COVID-19, but human rights advocates have ensured there is no quarantine for potential carriers of that infection, which in any case cannot be spread as easily as SARS or COVID-19.

  In 1969, the World Health Organisation issued international health regulations for just four designated quarantinable diseases: cholera, plague, yellow fever and smallpox. Smallpox was proclaimed eradicated by the WHO in 1979, and the other diseases on the list are relatively rare, so the quarantine stations that were formerly common in many seaports around the world have been abandoned, taken down, or converted into holiday resorts.

  Quarantine law and regulations still apply in many countries, however, to protect animals and plants of economic importance from exotic diseases. Animal and plant quarantine procedures are often as important as human quarantine. The economic importance of agriculture and animal husbandry in many countries makes it vital for them to keep out diseases that might wipe out valuable cattle herds or destroy a season’s harvest.

  Quarantine is usually always used literally, but that doesn’t prevent us from applying the word metaphorically, as in: ‘I would love to quarantine his bigoted communal ideas to prevent them infecting more people.’

  40.

  Quiz

  noun and verb

  BRIEF EXAMINATION OF

  A STUDENT ON SOME SUBJECT

  USAGE

  It’s always amazing that Indian students, who

  have to undergo so many tests and exams, still

  seem to enjoy participating in a quiz.

  The origin of the word ‘quiz’ is obscure: its first use, in the late 1700s, was to refer to an oddball or eccentric person (as the London Magazine put it, ‘one who thinks, speaks, or acts differently from the rest of the world in general’). Since it was also used for people who were pedantic and rule-bound, it was the late-eighteenth-century equivalent of calling someone a ‘nerd’ or a ‘dweeb’. Later it became another word for a joke or a wisecrack. It’s only in the last century and a half that it has been used in the current sense, of a set of questions requiring short answers.

  One marvellous story attributes it to the manager of the Theatre Royal in the capital of Ireland, Dublin, named either Richard Daly or James Daly (depending on which version you trust), who apparently bet that he could create a new word without any meaning and have everybody in the city using it within forty-eight hours. Challenged to prove this, he allegedly employed a large number of street-children (the Brits and Irish called them urchins in those days) to go around the city and chalk the word ‘quiz’ on every surface they could find––doors, windows and walls––so that the next day everybody was asking what this strange word meant. The word was short enough and easy enough for the urchins to write and people to remember it, and Daly accordingly won his bet, bringing ‘quiz’ into popular usage. Many linguists express scepticism about this story, suspecting a newspaper editor simply invented it to pad his columns, but I love the sound of it. Not every word comes with such a good story attached!

  The Oxford Dictionary tells us that ‘the word is nevertheless hard to account for, and so is its later meaning of “to question or interrogate”. This emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and gave rise to the most common use of the term today, for a type of entertainment based on a test of a person’s knowledge.’ The 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that its current meaning may be derived from the second syllable of the word ‘inquisitive’, which in turn derives from the Latin inquirire (to inquire). That certainly is more plausible than the Daly tall-tale.

  Today we all know that a quiz is a form of mind game, in which the players (as individuals or in teams) attempt to answer questions correctly to demonstrate their knowledge––either about a certain subject (like a ‘literature quiz’) or of esoteric and otherwise useless trivia (a ‘general knowledge’ quiz). Indians love to reveal their mastery of GK, and quiz competitions are a staple of most interschool and intercollegiate contests, sometimes televised to large audiences and increasingly featuring generous prizes. I was a ‘quizard’ in my college days, a term I invented, and proudly number, among my most cherished extracurricular achievements, founding the St. Stephen’s College Quiz Club in 1974 and serving as its first president. In those days it was the first such quiz club in the country; today rare is the college that doesn’t have one.

  Quizzing has also evolved considerably since I was a contestant in them, having become more sophisticated and complicated through the use of visual and musical questions, obscure slides and videos, and trick questions. But while in India we know of quizzes essentially as a sport (and watch them purely for entertainment), in some countries, notably the United States and Canada, a quiz is a serious educational challenge. The word is used for a form of student assessment that has fewer questions, usually of less difficulty, and requires less time for completion, than a test or examination. It’s often resorted to in classrooms to quickly check comprehension of a new lesson. In the US you also hear of a ‘pop quiz’, in which students are given no time to prepare but are simply surprised with it in class to see if they are up to speed with what is being taught.

  But quizzes have acquired worldwide fame and popularity principally as money-spinners for gifted housewives on television shows, most famously Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and its spinoffs. Kaun Banega Crorepati, one may well ask––and the real answer is the well-paid TV quizmaster!

  41.

  Rodomontade

  noun, verb and adjective

  BOASTFUL OR INFLATED TALK OR BEHAVIOUR

  USAGE

  The politician’s rodomontade speeches sought to

  conceal his total lack of substance, or indeed of

  any real accomplishment.

  Rodomontade is a delightful word, as swaggeringly self-important

  as the behaviour it seeks to describe. It originated in the late sixteenth century as a reference to Rodomonte, the Saracen king of Algiers, a character in both the 1495 poem Orlando Innamorato by Count M.M. Boiardo, and its sequel, Ludovico Ariosto’s 1516 Italian romantic epic Orlando Furioso, who was much given to vain boasting. I am told the name was inspired by an Italian dialect in which the word literally means ‘one who rolls (away) the mountain’. In English, it was used to describe an extravagant braggart.

  There’s a line from a John Donne poem from 1612, ‘Challengers cartells, full of Rodomontades’, that suggests that a rodomontade is a single boast that can be multiplied in the plural, but modern usage dispenses with the ‘s’, using rodomontade as a collective noun for an entirely boastful disposition, bombastic language or empty bragging. Literature students might recall this lovely usage in the nineteenth-century novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë: ‘She knows what she’s about; but he, poor fool, deludes himself with the notion that she’ll make him a good wife, and because she has amused him with some rodomontade about despising rank and wealth in matters of love and marriage, he flatters himself that she’s devotedly attached to him.’

  Inevitably, the word has been used for poli
ticians—one can deliver a speech that is an ‘empty rodomontade, a string of resounding sentiments aiming not at conviction but at applause’. Or one can use it to describe the style of President Donald Trump, who is much given to extolling himself in the most unselfconsciously boastful terms (‘No one knows more about this than me’, he has said, and ‘I’m the greatest’.)

  The word was applied to the rhetorical style of a very different man, too, the boxing champ Muhammad Ali. One newspaper article writes: ‘Until the mid-’60s, rodomontade was rare even in sports. Then came Muhammad Ali. His exuberant braggadocio was what made Ali so different . . .’. As the Ali example suggests, rodomontade is not confined only to politicians: the Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1919 usage to characterize society in general—‘These instances in themselves are not edifying to our rodomontade civilization.’

  Rodomontade, by extension, can even apply to music full of pomp and flourishes. The German composer Georg Philipp Telemann composed a Suite in H minor for violin solo and strings which ends with a piece named ‘Rodomontade’. The singer Morrissey has described his own music as rodomontade. It is less used in literature, unless one is being distinctly uncomplimentary. Vladimir Nabokov criticized Fyodor Dostoevsky for his ‘gothic rodomontade’.

  Still, politicians are more given to rodomontade than most, and no better example can be found than that of the braggadocious Winston Churchill, whose wartime Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, found him impossible to work with. A senior bureaucrat with the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, counselling his boss, was reported to have said: ‘His rodomontades probably bore you as much as they do me, but don’t do anything silly under the stress of that.’ (The plural crept in as late as 1940, and in written accounts of this exchange there is an extra ‘h’ in the spelling, rhodomontade, which is definitely not the preferred style today.) Even Roy Jenkins in his adulatory biography of Churchill wrote of a general who ‘revealed a plain soldier’s distaste for the publicity rodomontade which always attended Churchill’.

  Churchill’s adversaries, the Nazis, were no better. The great chronicler of the worst war crimes of that era, Hannah Arendt, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, describes Adolf Eichmann’s boasting: ‘Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann’s undoing. It was sheer rodomontade when he told men working under him during the last days of the war: “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews . . . on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.”’

  In my UN days, the Falklands War of 1982 led to strongly critical attacks in the UN Security Council on Britain as a colonial power imposing its military will on Argentina. The UK ambassador, Sir Anthony Parsons, began his response to the Security Council debate by saying: ‘Obviously we expected other delegations to give bent to atrociously offensive, confused and ill-directed rodomontades against my country . . .’

  On the whole, then, rodomontade is best avoided; simple language is always preferred. After all, the character Rodomonte’s extravagantly boastful talk in the epic leads to his death. Speak modestly, and you can stay alive!

  42.

  Satyagraha

  noun

  AN ACT OF NON-VIOLENT CIVIL RESISTANCE,

  A TERM INVENTED BY MAHATMA GANDHI

  USAGE

  Mahatma Gandhi first resorted to satyagraha during his early battles in South Africa, though the concept gained recognition and respect when he applied it to the freedom struggle in India.

  The Mahatma invented the term satyagraha—literally, ‘holding on to truth’ or, as Gandhiji variously described it, truth-force, love force or soul-force—to describe his method of action in terms that also imbued it with moral content and authority. He called satyagraha a ‘religious movement’: ‘It is a process of purification and penance. It seeks to secure reforms or redress of grievances by self-suffering.’

  In his own words, ‘The pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.’ Thus when he first called for a fast, Gandhiji was at pains to stress it was not in the nature of a ‘hunger-strike, or as designed to put any pressure upon the Government’. It was instead, ‘for all satyagrahis, the necessary discipline to fit them for the civil disobedience contemplated in their Pledge, and for all others, some slight token of the intensity of their wounded feelings’. The satyagrahi’s objective, according to the Mahatma, was ‘to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer’.

  Gandhiji conceived the term ‘satyagraha’—a compound of two Sanskrit words, satya, meaning truth, and agraha, connoting ‘polite insistence’ or ‘holding firmly to’—in South Africa after a public competition in 1906. He disliked the English term ‘passive resistance’, which journalists had applied to his civil disobedience movement, because satyagraha required activism, not passivity. If you believed in Truth and cared enough to obtain it, Gandhiji felt, you could not afford to be passive: you had to be prepared actively to suffer for Truth.

  No dictionary imbues ‘truth’ with the depth of meaning Gandhiji gave it. His truth emerged from his convictions: it meant not only what was accurate, but what was just and therefore right. Truth could not be obtained by ‘untruthful’ or unjust means, which included inflicting violence upon one’s opponent. ‘I believe that non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.’ Hence, he would call off a satyagraha if any participant resorted to violence—as he did when the killing of policemen in Chauri Chaura in 1922 led him to call off his nationwide protests just as they were gathering steam.

  Satya is derived from the word ‘sat’, or ‘being’; Truth is that which exists, and there is no reality beyond Truth. For Gandhiji, Truth encompassed all aspects of being, from truthfulness in speech and a refusal to lie, to an acknowledgement of the immanence of real truth, as opposed to what is non-existent (asat). In moral terms he saw the Truth he was striving to hold to as the defence of the good as opposed to evil; he had no hesitation in telling the British viceroy that he considered British rule in India to be a ‘sin’. This moral framework was crucial to Gandhi’s understanding of and belief in non-violence: ‘The world rests upon the bedrock of satya or truth. Asatya, meaning untruth, also means non-existent, and satya or truth also means that which is. If untruth does not so much as exist, its victory is out of the question. And truth being that which is, can never be destroyed. This is the doctrine of satyagraha in a nutshell.’

  On the cover of the first edition of his speeches and writings in 1922, Gandhiji printed his credo: ‘I believe in loving my enemies. I believe in non-violence as the only remedy . . . I believe in the power of suffering to melt the stoniest heart . . . If the world believes in the existence of a soul, it must be recognized that soul force is better than body force—it is the sacred principle of love which moves mountains.’

  Gandhiji was profoundly influenced by the principles of ahimsa and satya and gave both a profound meaning when he applied them to the nationalist cause. This made him the extraordinary leader of the world’s first successful non-violent movement for independence from colonial rule. At the same time, he was a philosopher who was constantly seeking to live out his own ideas, whether they applied to individual self-improvement or social change: his autobiography was typically subtitled ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth’. Gandhiji was the first political activist to believe that just ends cannot be attained by unjust means; in satyagraha, means and ends were inseparable.

  If truth was his leitmotiv and guiding credo, satyagraha was his principal mode of major action precisely because it was infused with truth, the highest of all moral principles. As he put it elsewhere: ‘ahimsa is the means; Truth is the end.’

  So non-violence, like many later co
ncepts labelled with a negation, from non-cooperation to non-alignment, meant much more than the denial of an opposite; it did not merely imply the absence of violence. Non-violence was the way to vindicate the truth not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self. In satyagraha, it was essential to willingly accept punishment in order to demonstrate the strength of one’s convictions.

  Today, in the ‘post-truth’ era, one can only ask in despair how much of that old spirit of Mahatma Gandhi survives in our country’s politics.

  43.

  Snollygoster

  noun

  A SHREWD, UNPRINCIPLED POLITICIAN

  USAGE

  Though ‘Snollygoster’ is a fanciful coinage in American English slang going back to 1846, it can easily apply to many practitioners of Indian politics in 2020.

  Trust the Americans to come up with a word no one had dreamt of before. Snollygoster (sometimes spelled, less popularly, snallygaster) was originally, in American English, the name of a monster, half-reptile, half-bird, that preyed on both children and chickens—suggesting rural origins. From its usage in 1846 to describe an unprincipled politician, however, it has come to mean ‘a rotten person who is driven by greed and self-interest’. That is a description, alas, that in both nineteenth-century USA and twenty-first-century India, more often than not applies to politicians.

  In today’s US, however, it is often applied to an amoral or inconsiderate boss: ‘That old snollygoster who runs this company won’t even allow us toilet breaks!’ The unusual word indicates a likely German origin, from the immigrant community known as the Pennsylvania Dutch (who were actually German, not Dutch, but since they were Deutsch, the German word for Germans, they became known as Dutch!). The Pennsylvania Dutch had the word schnellegeeschter, ‘fast spirits or ghosts’, a corruption of the German schnelleGeister with the same meaning, schnell being fast, and Geist meaning spirit or ghost.