I know my blame is coming
Yes I know, language evolves and the arbiters of usage, compilers of dictionaries agree as they overhaul them each year adding new words and weeding out the unused dead. The women who served their households were afforded the dignity of their own names. Those above died naturally and some are deservedly put to death. I know that Americans say “my bad” to mean they were wrong about something but it’s ignorant and ugly — as when Donald Trump says “bigly”.The women who served their households were afforded the dignity of their own names.So “prepone” will enter the Oxford dictionary. US President Donald Trump (Photo: AP)“‘In vino veritas’ they sayThe idiot truths of the loosened tongueRegrets will flood the sober dayFor all the lyrics left unsung….
I began the column, gentle reader, with an insistence that I don’t and won’t lapse in my speech or writing into current Americanisms. The insulting British epithet, the shortening of the perfectly proud word — “Pakistani” — is known as “the P word”. I don’t suppose, gentle reader, that you, like myself, don’t know what these words mean or in what context they were used — but they sound fun.My cousin, translating literally from the Parsi Gujarati often says “I know my blame is coming!”Will these literal translations enter the Oxford dictionaries of the future?What about the ambivalent translation of the Hindustani word “bandh” as both “close” and “switch off” — as in “baththi bandh karo”? I once, in her presence heard Benazir Bhutto say that before a failed terrorist attack on her they were “closing the lights”. I haven’t checked in the dictionary but in contemporary usage we have abolished, for instance, what popular argot calls “the N word”. What then of the young reader of history? No empires? No monarchs?The said “junior” may not need to know what a bishop or a chapel is but they will, in today’s world, come across aisles in cinemas or even on an aeroplane sorry, wholesale LED ID light bar is that word not in the dictionary anymore?)Some words deserve this obsolescence. That’s all “good”. My grandmother and her associates referred to them as “that Mary”.
