WICKED WORD- Cheese and sandwich

By V.S. jayaschandran



Cookbook writers can whip up wacky titles. Tushita Patel has named her book Flash in the Pan. Though clever, it smells of gunpowder.

The phrase “flash in the pan” comes from a pan in the old flintlock gun. The pan, with a lid, held a trace of gunpowder. On pulling the trigger, the flint hit the pan, causing a flash, which ignited the load of gunpowder in the barrel for the bullet to fly. Sometimes the flash did not ignite the load. Shooters called this failure a flash in the pan.

Writers used it to describe a “failure after a promising start”. Later it came to mean a “brief spurt of success”. The phrase had little to do with cooking or gold panning—or flipping one’s lid and flashing one’s privates.

The explorer Captain Cook’s name for Hawaii was Sandwich Islands. He named it after his mentor, the fourth earl of Sandwich. While gambling, the earl hated to leave for dinner, and asked for slices of bread packed with meat. People who saw him eat it named it sandwich.

Batter he may not have liked; but banter he did. He teased the actor Samuel Foote, saying he would either die of syphilis or hang from a rope. “My lord,” Foote retorted, “that will depend upon one of two contingencies—whether I embrace your lordship’s mistress or your lordship’s principles.”

Captain Gopinath declined a sandwich massage in a Phuket hotel, but ordered a masseuse each for himself and his Deccan Aviation partner, the pious K.J. Samuel. They were sharing a room. Sam spoiled the fun, says Gopinath in his autobiography, Simply Fly.

On another page, the author massages his ego and his fly. A female trekker befriends him as he explores the Grand Canyon. They swim naked in the river Colorado, pitch a tent, cook a meal and hit the bed. “I still remember the night vividly,” he writes.

The captain based his principles on the Kipling poem titled If. He memorised it at the National Defence Academy. It is framed and kept on every NDA cadet’s desk. The players’ entrance to Wimbledon’s centre court bears these lines from the poem: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same.”
But ‘if’ does not interest P. Chidambaram, who is willing to date the Maoists. “I would like no ifs, no buts and no conditions,” he said, asking them for a simple statement abjuring violence. It is no longer a class war between the bourgeoisie and the booboisie. It is danse macabre, the dance of death.

Bihar knows how to sidestep the dance. It is slipping out of the BIMARU group with a healthy economic growth rate. The legislator Shyam Bahadur Singh displayed another side of the state when he gyrated with dancing bar girls in Patna. He thrust his hips at them and wriggled like a man bitten by tarantula.

The Italian town Taranto yielded the word tarantula, though it had no such species. It harboured only the milder wolf spiders. A dance of the town, called tarantella, apparently could give relief from spider bite. Doctors thought the dance was a hysterical response to a strong urge to wriggle. The Pelvis of Patna has this urge, no doubt. He should not delay calling his voters for a lap dance.

Raveena Tandon danced into stardom with the song Tu cheez badi hai mast mast in 1994. The suggestive Persian word cheez, meaning thing, led to the English phrase big cheese. Big cheese originally meant first-rate in quality, the real thing. Later it signified an important person, a big fish.

‘Mast’ also is of Persian origin, meaning intoxicated. It is another word for the elephant’s musth. Musk is more exciting. It descended from the Sanskrit muska (testicle), as the ancients mistook the source of the aroma. But they didn’t go wrong with mushkara (bully in Sanskrit). He is one with large orchids.
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(The Week)
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