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| Jemima and (right) Imran Khan |
London, Jan.13: Jemima Khan is turning out to be so Tweet, especially the way she is poking gentle fun at the way English is spoken in Pakistan.
“Sometimes,” she noted on Twitter, “those old fashioned words come up in Pakistan — ‘Nothing doing,’ ‘She’s very fast’ (meaning promiscuous) ‘dastardly dacoits’.”
She could have added that some expressions, such as “need not mention”, are also used in India, almost certainly a hangover from the days of the Raj.
A BBC insider confirmed that reports filed by its Pakistani correspondents had to be routinely vetted for “miscreants” who were forever being pursued by “crack troops”.
Jemima, who was married to Pakistan’s former cricket captain, Imran Khan, from 1995 to 2004, still speaks of him with affection. She campaigned for him to be freed from jail when a desperate President Musharraf locked him up. Her current preoccupation, though, seems to be with the way English is used in Pakistan.
One Tweet ventures a good nature dig at Imran: “And for anyone who has seen Gone With The Wind, Imran once said to me, ‘I know your type. It’s that Rhett Cutlet type!’ ”
It is entirely possible Imran, who may not be a movie buff, had in mind Rhett Butler (played by Clark Gable), who attracted and was attracted by the wrong sort of woman.
Today, Jemima, still only 36 and the mother of two boys, is often to be found on the picket line, affecting the fashionably tousled look of a human rights activist. She was outside court last month, offering bail money to try to ensure WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was not extradited to Sweden to face sex charges.
Jemima hates being called a socialite though she has often given an excellent impression of being one. But she is clearly more than just a pretty face. After attending Francis Holland School, a London establishment notorious for producing precocious girls, she won a place at Bristol, which is not an easy university to get into and certainly not to read English. After two years, she left to marry Imran when she was 21 and the cricketer a frisky 42, but returned in 2002 to finish the course and get a creditable Upper Second. She went on to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to do an MA on “Modern Trends in Islam”.
All this plus frequent and usually very readable articles in British national newspapers have equipped her to provide quite a superior class of Tweet, much better, say, than Elizabeth Hurley’s, whose ex-boyfriend, Hugh Grant, Jemima acquired for a while.
In Britain, the meaning of numerous words have changed through usage. But Pakistan, perhaps less exposed to the West than India, may not have caught up with the times.
Jemima provides examples: “Also ‘queer’ (as in ‘How very queer’) before it meant gay and gay when it still meant jolly.” It is entirely understandable that Imran’s fellow cricketers, few of whom went to English medium schools, Pakistanified western names or idioms.
Jemima has one example: “Imran’s favourite teammate language blunders — “My favourite film is Pissico’ (Psycho) ‘Both of you three come here.’ ”
Another that she has picked out sounds more British Asian than Pakistan — “ ‘Many of my best friends are Pakistani, Didn’t it?’
She has reassured her followers that her jokes are without malice. “I love Pakistan and Pakistanis and have Pakistani children and a Pakistani ex-husband. I think I’m allowed to make the odd joke (fondly)?”
She has also been toying with unfamiliar words that she likes: “Termagant, an overbearing, quarrelsome, shrewish woman; Pogonophilia, a love of beards; Logophilia, love of words.”
May be Jemima’s Pakistani in-laws or possibly even Imran did not always appreciate her impish sense of humour.
She even noticed her mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, widow of the late Sir James Goldsmith, slipping into language from a Noel Coward age. “My mother just said someone at dinner was ‘tight.’ Has anyone said that since 1950?”
Her mother meant “drunk”, whereas today people are tight — that is, mean — with their money.
“It sounds so Princess Margaret,” she observed. “Or Cary Grant to Ingrid Bergman.”
She was “also amazed recently to hear someone use those old Sloane classics — ‘snazzy’ ‘yonks’ and ‘zonked’… not to mention the unmentionable, bonk.”
Sloane is Sloane Square, the nesting place for upper middle class men and women in London. Snazzy means showy, yonks is interchangeable with ages (as in “I haven’t seen you for yonks”), and zonked refers to tired (as in “after a couple of bottles of whisky, he was really zonked out”).
But “bonking” remains very much in vogue, especially at the Bentley Hotel in South Kensington, as Jemima would have discovered had she consulted one or two people in the know.
Jemima, whose critics in Pakistan are outnumbered by her Indian admirers, is not yet done. When she was married to Imran, she used to live in Pakistan itself but would airdash to London to see her relatives only. She is now knowing people in both countries. Her book on Pakistan is on the anvil.