WICKED WORD-Grace under pressure

Some Indians associate “stiff upper lip” with snobbery. The phrase has nothing to do with snobs. To keep a stiff upper lip means "to remain resolute and unemotional in the face of adversity".

The British claim monopoly over stiff upper lip. But the phrase first appeared in American magazines. The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin used it before Englishmen took to it. As a slave trader takes Uncle Tom away, young George Shelby ties a dollar around his neck and tells him, “Keep a stiff upper lip.”

Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, admired the novelist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. He said, “This is the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war.” She later said, “God wrote the book. I took His dictation.”
W.B. Yeats writes about stiff upper lip in The Celtic Twilight. The captain of a ship tells him about his prayer—“O Lord, give me a stiff upper lip.” Yeats asks him what it means. “It means,” says the captain, “that when they come to me some night and wake me up and say, ‘Captain, we’re going down,’ I wouldn’t make a fool o’ meself.”

If cameras don’t lie, godman Nithyananda made a fool of himself when he let an actress go down on him and take his dictation. He was stiff no doubt, but not stoic, during the lip service. Morals come after orals.

The movie Carry on Up the Khyber makes fun of stiff upper lip. Afghan warlords in it are in awe of the Foot and Mouth regiment because these British soldiers go bare under their kilts. When rumours of a soldier wearing underpants spread, the warlords attack the British governor’s palace. The governor and his dinner guests keep their poise even as the roof crumbles on their plates. The soldiers repel the enemy by lifting their kilts.

Hemingway would call it “grace under pressure”. This famous phrase has a curious side: he hated his mother, Grace. She wrote excellent prose and skilful verse, painted and sang well, says the historian Paul Johnson in Intellectuals. Hemingway rejected everything she valued—even her God and her writing style—and treated her as an enemy.

Grace washed his mouth with bitter soap if she caught him swearing or lying. It had no effect. Wounded in war, Hemingway lied that he had been shot in the scrotum and had to rest his testicles on a pillow. A peacetime lie was more colourful: a Sicilian woman shut him up in her hotel and “hid his clothes so he was forced to fornicate with her for a week”.
General Lanham, a friend of his, writes: “He always referred to his mother as ‘that bitch’. He must have told me a thousand times how much he hated her and in how many ways.”

Afghans love India as much. The Taliban say India’s Great Game is up. They want India to close all consulates and leave. One of these establishments may well spring up in Jaffna.
The Khyber Pass is Cockney rhyming slang for ass. The Elephant Pass has no such linguistic backside. The isthmus owes its name to a rare elephant that crossed into Jaffna, where the water is too salty for elephants to survive. Eating rice cooked in Jaffna is an ordeal for humans. The salty diet makes people hyper-tense. They live the phrase “to jump salty”. It means “to fly into a sudden rage”. Salt must have kept the Liberation Tigers going.

Afghanistan has no pigs. Miangul Aurangzeb, former governor of Baluchistan, claims the Pushto word for pig is Sarkozy. General Ayub Khan was his father-in-law. But he seems more proud of his nephew and son-in-law Akbar Zeb, the Pak high commissioner to Canada. Miangul says Saudi Arabia refused to accept Akbar Zeb as ambassador because Zeb in Arabic means penis. And Akbar means great. “I wonder what my nephew thinks of all this,” writes Miangul in an email to Wicked Word. “Our whole family are Zebs.”
Keep the pecker up, Zeb!

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(The week)
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