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Some words mean less than others. So rum, revenge, soap and winter make sense the moment they’re heard or read. Abut, redoubt, discern and limpid are a bit slower-fused. Torpid, saturnine, remiss, rebarbative, endeavour hang like a Shar-Pei’s folds off the bone beneath. While trope, jouissance and aporia aren’t words at all; they are passwords to a freemasonry of academic riddlers. They have designated meanings, but these meanings are like reward points in a video game: they have no purpose outside that game’s narrative. They win no public arguments, raise no memories, trigger no past-bearing smells.
Some words can’t be said with a straight face, like seize, sojourn or entwined. “On our sojourn together I seized the moment and soon we were entwined.” Not likely. Most words that begin with an en- are unusably starchy. Thus: enthralled, entombed, engorged, enrapt, endowed, ensconced… Some of these en- words read like disguises for squalid thoughts, like endowed, for instance, or engorged. If you think about it, even enraged is silly. “I was enraged” sounds like someone wrapped in rage instead of howlingly angry, which is what people generally mean when they use that word. Amiss, alight, accost, attire set your pompous pants on fire. You know a novel is dead to you when you read that someone’s face is “alight with joy”. I can see the point of attire if, in a story set in late- 18th-century India, an East India Company nabob is trying to describe what natives in Calcutta wear in a letter home, but otherwise it must belong in the same waste basket as raiment.
Some unattractive words can’t be replaced because they summarize something in a a way that no other word does. Take accost. Journalists routinely accost politicians because the alternative would be to spell out that they approach and address them aggressively. But accost is nearly as bad a word as amiss. It sounds like an antique stage direction: [sepoy accosts the hookah bearer, stage left]. Much better then to ambush someone (metaphorically) on the street with hostile questions than to accost him.
There are lots of words that we all recognize as vaguely archaic and hard to use without giggling. So bedew and betide are obviously daft words in any contemporary context, but you still read throat-clearing sentences in speeches where speakers will say without embarrassment that they don’t wish to “belabour the point”. And anyone who has corresponded with institutions in India knows that pertain, pursuant and eschew still have their uses.
There are several reasons why desi writing in English is so ridden with elaborate and archaic words. To start with, our vocabularies are derived more from the words that we’ve read than from words we’ve heard. Everyone who writes in English, not just desis, grows his vocabulary by reading, but given that we don’t hear that much English spoken around us, we are more dependent on the written word than someone who grows up in a principally English-speaking country.
One result of this is that the words and rhythms of spoken English aren’t an important influence on the way we write. This is not to argue that we should write in the same idiom as we speak; there’s always some distance between the written and spoken word. It is to say, though, that this distance is likely to be greater in the practice of desi anglophones than it is, say, with an American.
The other reason for this larger divergence between the spoken and written word with desis is the influence of their mother tongue. As someone born and raised in Delhi, I’m a Hindi speaker. Anyone who has formally studied Hindi will know that the style and vocabulary of written Hindi is the very opposite of colloquial. This formal distinction between a ‘high’ style associated with the published word and early public broadcasting and a ‘low’ style associated with everyday speech is internalized by Hindi speakers and transferred to their practice of English.
Here it doesn’t work quite so well because English doesn’t embrace this diglossia, this distinction between the written and spoken, the mandarin and the demotic, with as much enthusiasm. Simply put, anglophone desis are keen on long, Latinate words when they write because their own written languages welcome classicizing elaboration and don’t set much store by the colloquial and the vernacular. In the Sixties and Seventies, Akashvani’s Hindi news was commonly regarded as so sanskritized as to be incomprehensible. This was the subject of feeble jokes such as: “Yeh Akashvani hai. Ab aap samachar mein Hindi suniye”, which, roughly translated, reads, “This is All-India Radio. Now listen to Hindi in the news.”
It isn’t surprising that academic social-science writing in India is, with very few exceptions, unconcerned with being readable. Instead of a writer explaining himself to his readership, the author becomes an adept performing for initiates. Here, a specialist vocabulary, opaque to everyone except those in the know, becomes an asset rather than a liability and a thousand aporias bloom. The thrill of being joined by a specialist jargon into a charmed circle of knowingness becomes the object of both reading and writing. Dealing in English in a post-colonial circumstance ought to be a self-conscious business. We can only assert that English is an Indian language if we accept that anglophones have a special duty to be lucid given the elitism inherent in the use of English in India.
When I read doctors’ prescriptions and find words like febrile and ambulant, I’m both surprised and annoyed. I can see that medicine, as a discipline needs, a specialist vocabulary, specially when doctors and nurses need to communicate amongst themselves. So to use icteric to describe someone with jaundice or to use acute as a way of describing the duration of the symptom as opposed to its severity, must make sense when doctors talk amongst themselves or make notes for some other doctor to read. But prescriptions are meant for patients too. So, why write febrile instead of feverish and ambulant instead of mobile?
This must have something to do with medicine in India being taught in a colonial language. It might be interesting to look at the language of Chinese medical practice. Do Chinese doctors write high Mandarin translations of Western medical terms in their patient prescriptions? I know that American doctors write ordinary language prescriptions in prose that the patient can understand. Maybe the threat of litigation makes clarity essential; whatever the reason, it’s a good thing because patients are entitled to know what’s wrong with them without learning a Latinized jargon.
One reason why written English in des is sometimes stilted and ill-fitting is because we haven’t managed to domesticate the language. Our English has its own colloquialisms but they haven’t become part of a standard received angrezi in the way that schlep and chutzpah have. Our colloquialisms differ from one part of the country to another because many of them are derived from regional languages and their vocabularies. But this isn’t a permanent problem.
We have already seen bindaas and lafda and prepone and updation and dei and da and naika and yaar become part of the patois of the interwebs. And the absence of linguistic gatekeepers in the online world means that it’s much easier to hybridize English and make it intimately ours because some online urban dictionary will explain what we mean. So, hopefully, there will come a time when our response to accost, belabour and eschew will be, “avoid, stop giving it those ones” and everyone, everywhere, magically, will understand.
