Eating words

English is quite a pun language; one can have fun because of the puns. But an entire headline which first startles and then explains is this on pix11.com:

Spelling Bee winner eats his winning word for the 1st time: K-n-a-i-d-e-l, knaidel

It all about how the US Spelling Bee winner, Arvind Mahankali, who spelt knaildel correctly and bagged  US30,000 and then ordered one in a restaurant since he had never eaten it ever, being a vegetarian. The restaurant had to make one for him.

He was not eating his word in the sense, he was not owning up to a mistake which is what the idiom means. He was eating the soup. The headline draws you to it, especially, if you had read Chidananda Rajghatta's dispatch about how the spelling was disputed. The venerable New York Times had written about it.

Mahankali was conceding his mistake, you'd think. Far from it; he was tasting it!

The idiom means, "if you eat your words, you accept publicly that you were wrong abut something you said", according to www.usingenglish.com and "to have to take back one's statements; to confess that one's predictions were wrong", according to idioms.thefreedictionary.com
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He was only eating the soup. By the way, there is a dispute - or lack of clarity - on whether soup is eaten or drunk.

Interestingly, the above piece was posted on Facebook by Chidananda Rajghatta.this blog had a post on his dispatch in The Times of India on the dispute, which if read now, would help understand the whole thing better.

Large English-speaking population, but shy of spelling

India too has a spelling contest is apparently not such a rage in India as it is in the United States where the 86th edition of the National Spelling Bee was held last week, and a student of Indian descent won the top honours.

Indian Americans have been winning it for the past six years.

Around 11 million apply to participate in the US while in India, 2,50,000 students between age nine and 14 did this year to participate in the contest run by HDFC since 2009.

An official who runs it was quoted by Wall Street Journal's India Real Time saying that Indian schools "don't consider spelling competitions as important academically and put a greater focus on other subjects".

"Exceptional" at science and mathematics, Indian students are "not as good at English" and their "vocabulary is not very developed and less importance is put on the understanding of English than other subjects".

But then, isn't India ahead of others in the business outsourcing business (BPO) and such I-T enabled services because it has the largest English-speaking population?

By the way, such contests are orthographical. Look up the dictionary for orthographic it is not often used here. 

Not quite kosher

Read this dispatch from Chidanand Rajghatta, who writes for the Times of India from the United States. He has an uncanny gift for turning phrases, and irreverence,but this one takes the cake.

It is about how some words spelt out by Arvind Mahankali who won this year's US Spelling Bee were acceptable to to the judges but not others.

The thing to note is the use of words, apparently or Yiddish origin which is used by Americans but are unfamiliar to Indian readers. They have been marked bold by this blogger.

"Bee-winning spelling not kosher
Chidanand Rajghatta

Washington:

    You just can’t take their word for it. 
    The buzz is that the US National Spelling Bee and its 2013 titlist Arvind Mahankali might not have been right on the matzo ball when it came to the winning word on Thursday. That’s the kvetch from Yiddish mavens cited in the New York Times, produced from the home of the largest Jewish diaspora in the world (New York City has more Jews than Jerusalem.) 
    Mahankali spelled out kn-a-i-d-e-l, a German word of Yiddish origin — which is a dough or dumpling that Jewish cooks put in chicken soup — to win the $30,000 prize ahead of 281 finalists. The Spelling Bee judges accepted the way he spelled it because that’s the way it’s laid out in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, bible for all worker bees and drones. 
    Merriam-Webster officials defended their choice of spelling as the most common variant of the word from a language that is about as alive as Sanskrit in India, and is written in the Hebrew, not Roman, alphabet. 
    But linguists at the Yiddish Scientific Institution YIVO say that’s not so kosher. Their preference is kneydl, and they nudged the NYT into the etymological shemozzle, suggesting the Bee graders may have been schnookered by the Indian boy — or goy, a Yiddish word for someone not of Jewish faith. 
    On Saturday, the hoary paper, in a needling article, reported with considerable chutzpah that not only is Mahankali, an eighth-grader from Queens, “son of immigrants from southern India,” but also “he has never eaten an actual knaidel.” Most reader responses did not accept the spiel though. 
    “'Why are words that are not English, particularly words that do not use the Roman alphabet, like Yiddish, used in a spelling bee?” one reader asked. 
    It was not the first time such a glitch was occurring at this year’s championship. 
    In an earlier round when Nikitha Chandran from Florida proved to judges that they had wrongly disqualified her for spelling the word “viruscide” the way she did, and that it was the third variant of the “viricide” and “virucide” — the only two entries in the spelling bee dictionary, they agreed and corrected their error, and Nikitha was added to the list of 41 semifinalists."

Now you know how, if journalists use strange words, the readers are at sea. One cannot turn to the dictionaries every time a strange word is used.

I have read some of these words, and wondered what they meant, in some American pulp fiction. 

Is or was?

This blog attempts to look at the usage of English in daily life which also includes the media. It has to a lot to do with grammar. Therefore this question:

Shouldn't the is, the third person singular present tense have been avoided and the singular past was employed in this headline in Moneylife, Someone knew Narayana Murthy is coming back and traded on it?

It is like this, If he was to come back, I would welcome it. If not Infosys would have to settle for what was its fate.

Having said this, Moneylife is a useful, brave journal.

Bombayite or Mumbaikar?

There was a time when a Bombay resident was a Bombaywallah or a Bambaiyya. Since the city reverted to its non-anglicized origual name, Mumbai, such persons are called Mumbaikar. In Marathi, the 'kar' is normally a suffix to a place-name which means 'resident of'.

My ancestors are said to have been residents of Vijapur, which made us Vijapurkars. All residents of Thane, regardless of their surnames, thus also qualify to be Thanekars, like all Pune residents, Punekars.

Most newspapers, even English language ones, have taken to the use of 'Mumbaikar' but some bloggers, as this, use 'Bombayite'. Some prefer Mumbaiite. The Hindustan Times has also taken to it almost routinely. Which means, there is no consistency.

This brings us to the use of two other usages: 'Andhraite' and 'Keralite' when referring to people from the two states, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. To my understanding, Andhra Pradesh is a region (pradesh) where Andhras live and in Kerala, people who speak Malayalee, and therefore are Malayalees, reside. If this logic were wrong, then people of Bengal (I am on West Bengal) would be Bengalites.

Tamilnadu was the name coined for the region where Tamil is spoken and by the same logic, Odisha for the region where Odiya is the language. Like Gujarat is the state of Gujaratis. All this has to do with the linguistic basis for forming the state, the first being Andhra Pradesh, the region of Andhras who speak Telugu. It is a surprise it did not become Telugu Pradesh or Telugunadu.

It is possible I may be wrong. If there are any contrarian views, hey are welcome here. But do take the trouble to convey it.

'Decide' is forerunner to a 'final decision'?

You 'decide' on doing something. Is that a prelude to a 'final decision' to come later?

A blurb to an interview of K Keshava Rao, a Congress leader in Andhra Pradesh says "in this interview with Rediff.com 's Vicky Najappa, Rao says that he has decided to join the TRS, but would wait until Thursday night before taking a final decision"

I suppose when you decide, it is final. Or you are only considering deciding to do something.

Read the interview and it would emerge that the blurb could have said Rao was edging toward a decision but dependent on how the powers that be in Congress and the Government respond to a demand for quick decision on formation of Telangana.

It is equivocation containing  threat to the party for its dilly-dallying.

We need to decide, finally, how we use the word without a qualifier.

Comptroller - the 'p'?

With Vinod Rai, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) having retired, we are less likely to read and hear about that office for few, even if in a Constitutional office, attract such attention as he had because of his report on G2 telephony and the presumptive loss of 1.7 lakh crore.

It was so often used that CAG, an abbreviation became the norm for referring to the office, even in the first reference breaking a journalistic norm, that very few had to grapple with Comptroller, with a p. How is it pronounced? We in India do bring that p when uttering it. Do we need to?

We needn't.The Merriam-Webster online dictionary's audio facility excludes that p. Try it here. The freedictionary which provides audio support for both British and American pronunciation too skips the p. Click on the Union Jack.

The Oxford Dictionaries, online, explains that its origin is "late 5th century: variant of CONTROLLER, by erroneous association with French compte 'calculation' or its source, later Latin comptus"