WICKED WORD- Duck the dogs of war

By V.S. Jayaschandran


Romans were keen bird watchers. They had priests, called augurs, who studied vultures and other birds of omen. Augurs watched the flight of birds, their feeding and their singing, and predicted auspicious times for inaugurations. The words augur, inauguration, auspicious and auspices all come from the Latin avis, meaning bird.
The biologist Thomas Huxley loved birds, but didn’t care two hoots about omens. The rationalist was neither a believer nor an atheist. He called himself an agnostic—a word he invented in 1870 by prefixing ‘a-’ to Gnostic. A Gnostic is one who knows. Huxley was better known as the defender of evolution who called himself “Darwin’s bulldog”. He asserted that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Scientists last month proved him right, after studying a fossil found in China.

Canary evolved from canines. The bird was native to the Canary Islands, which got its name from the large dogs (canis in Latin) that roamed the islands. The place, in turn, lent its name to the bird. But some Canarians growl that it is all a canard. They say Romans named the place after seals called sea dogs.

Frenchmen eat canard. It is their word for duck. The English word canard, meaning false report, came from the French saying vendre un canard à moitié—that is, to half-sell a duck. If you half-sell a duck, you are playing a hoax on the buyer.

The forces fighting the Maoists dismiss reports of state terror as canards. There is no collateral damage, says P. Chidambaram. But officers on the Maoist hunt would like some airborne action and have asked for helicopters. If Indians could strafe Nagaland and Mizoram in the past, why deny them the pleasure in the drone age.

Germans chanted Gott strafe England during World War I. It meant God punish England, a pun on the anthem God Save the King. They printed the phrase on buttons, badges and wedding rings. It became a greeting that rivalled Guten Tag. But they admired Roland Garros, the French aviator who found a way to fire through the propeller blades of his plane in dogfights. They copied his technique. An American newspaper called him ‘ace’ when he shot down five German planes.

Tennis ace Andre Agassi loved to give the bird—a gesture with the middle finger. He writes about four dogs in his autobiography, Open, and senses ill omens in two of them. One is a dog that his first wife, Brooke Shields, tattooed on her hip without telling him. Another, her albino pit bull called Sam, eyeballs him all the time. The marriage goes to the dogs.

The presence of dogs in a Paris restaurant unsettles him at the Roland Garros in 1988. He writes: “The first time I walk into a café, on the Champs-Elysees, a dog raises its leg and unleashes a stream of pee against the table next to mine.”

Agassi is all praise for the fourth dog, which appears at a match in Indianapolis in 1996. He is well ahead of his opponent, Daniel Nestor, who breaks his serve. In a fit of anger, Agassi whacks the ball out of the stadium and abuses the umpire and referee with a word that rhymes with duck. They stop the match and declare Nestor winner.

“The fans start a riot,” Agassi writes. “...They are booing, firing seat cushions and water bottles into the court.” The tournament mascot, a dog, trots onto the court. “He reaches the middle of the net, lifts his hind leg and pees. I couldn’t agree more. He makes a jaunty exit. I’m right behind him, ducking my head, dragging my tennis bag.”

The words tennis, tenure and lieutenant descended from the Latin word tenir, meaning to hold. Lieutenant was one who held tenure in place of another person. Its American pronunciation, lieu tenant, reveals the root. Lieutenant generals facing court martial in the Sukhna case should court the bawdy poet Martial. He can teach them how to give everyone the bird.
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