WICKED WORD-Lay Of The Land

By V.S. Jayaschandran




Abhishek Bachchan, all set to anchor Bingo on boob tube, must be full of beans. Bingo developed from beano, a card game using dried beans, in which players shouted “beano” to declare a winning hand. Toy salesman Edwin Lowe popularised it in New York in 1929. He called it bingo after a player exclaimed “bingo”, instead of “beano”, in her excitement.

Bangalore got its name from beans. So did the Roman consul Fabius, whose family grew the legume. Two other consuls, Lentulus and Piso, owed their names to lentils and peas. The name of the orator Cicero came from chickpeas called cicera.

Cicera became a password in the Sicilian Vespers, an Italian insurrection against French rule in 1282. The rebels killed thousands of French residents in Sicily. The six-day massacre began at the vespers, the evening prayer, on Easter. As Frenchmen tried to pass themselves as Italians, the rebels asked them to pronounce the word cicera. The French could not get it right and were slain.

Shibboleth, a more ancient killer password, meant ear of corn as well as flowing water in Hebrew. The biblical people of Gilead conquered the neighbouring Ephraim and captured the Jordan River fords. Whenever someone wanted to cross the river the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied no, they said, “Now say shibboleth.” They killed him if he mispronounced it as sibbolleth. Ephraimites had no ‘sh’ sound. Forty-two thousand people perished for one sibilant.

Shibboleth later acquired different shades of meaning such as catchword, custom, taboo and outmoded beliefs. Wait for the HRD minister’s education reforms to throw up Kapil sibboleths.

The parsley plant came handy for Dominican president Trujillo’s soldiers in 1937. In six days they massacred 25,000 Haitians who had crossed over to the Dominican Republic. Parsley was prejil in Spanish, the local language. Haitians, whose mother tongue was not Spanish, could not pronounce it. To identify them, the soldiers held up a bunch of parsley and asked them, “What is this?” Those who answered pesi or prersil were butchered.

“Parsley is gharsley,” wrote the poet Ogden Nash about its taste. Trujillo had a ghastly end. He was assassinated in 1961. But he was a true leader who looted his country and rooted with any girl he fancied. He employed an officer in the presidential palace for an unstaunched supply of wenches. An officer on special duty in the Hyderabad Raj Bhavan most likely learnt the ropes under him.

But how I envy N.D. Tiwari! He laid down office in bed. If Gandhi intoned ‘Hey Ram’, Tiwari chanted ‘Harem’. Two girls, naked and nubile, slept on either side of Gandhi. That was the celibate’s way of testing his will-power. An unauthorised erection horrified him once in a blue moon. Tiwari is a master of three Vedas, a trivedi. Blame him not if he tested his willie power with a threesome. At 86, one needs the rope and pulley to hoist the mast.

Eighty-Sixed is a gay novel by David Feinberg, who named his hero B.J. Rosenthal. The Raj Bhavan sting had shots of BJ, which some Hindi speakers pronounce as below-job. The Japanese would mouth it as bro-job. They utter the ‘la’ sound as ‘ra’. American soldiers in the Philippines exploited this tongue trouble to catch Japanese infiltrators in World War II. They asked all suspects to say lallapalooza, which means something outstanding. While it rolled off Filipino tongues, the Japanese could only manage rarraparooza. They got shot for the blur.

Lalu Prasad says Nitish Kumar is no lallapalooza. He says Nitish wasted public money by holding a cabinet meeting on the Ratnagiri hill in Rajgir on December 29. He is right: why go for a cliff, and not a clit? After all, the word means “a little hill” in Greek.
(wickedword09@gmail.com)
(The Week)
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