Tharoorosaurus

by Shashi Tharoor

  The word enjoyed its vogue in the mid to late nineteenth century, when American politics, in the era of ‘robber barons’, was dominated by snollygosters associated with New York’s Tammany Hall and unscrupulous operators like New York’s Boss Tweed. Those were the days when all politicians were assumed to be on the take and available for sale to the highest bidder: it was said of the Rockefellers, who ran Standard Oil, that they did everything for Pennsylvania legislators but refine them.

  It is no longer widely used, which is why I decided to resurrect it in a tweet on 27 July 2017, when a chief minister of Bihar, elected alongside Congress and RJD on an anti-BJP platform, suddenly switched sides and joined the BJP. I promptly tweeted: ‘Word of the day! *snollygoster* Definition: US dialect: a shrewd, unprincipled politician . . . First Known Use: 1846 . . . Most recent use: 26/7/17.’ Of course, I could have resurrected it again when another politician betrayed years of eloquent opposition to the BJP by joining that party—but it hardly seemed worth repeating, so convinced are Indians that shrewdness and lack of principle are indeed the defining characteristics of Indian politicians.

  Snollygoster was reputedly popularized ‘almost singlehandedly’ by a Georgia Democrat, H.J.W. Ham, who travelled around the US during the 1890s with a stump speech titled ‘The Snollygoster in Politics’, defining the word as a ‘place-hunting demagogue’ or a ‘political hypocrite’. But Ham was a little too precise in his definition. He said: ‘A snollygoster is one with an unquenchable thirst for office with neither the power to get it nor the ability to fill it.’

  These days it’s hardly employed in the US, where its last recorded use was by the folksy President Truman in 1952. Saying that his grandfather used to tell him that when you heard someone praying loudly in public, ‘you had better go home and lock your smokehouse,’ Truman denounced Republicans with the term ‘snollygosters’ as an alternative to describing them as ‘bastards’ (as he quaintly put it, ‘a snollygoster is a man born out of wedlock’). Of course he was immediately corrected by the language mavens of the day, who quoted this splendid definition by an unnamed editor in the Columbus Dispatch of Ohio, on 28 October 1895: ‘a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophicalassumnacy’. (Don’t ask me to explain the last word: it doesn’t exist outside this definition.)

  Truman continued to use the word: his correspondence with his former Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, reveals Truman lamenting that President Eisenhower had given in to congressional ‘snollygosters’—unprincipled politicians.

  I prefer the ‘shrewd and unprincipled’ definition myself, because it is more widely applicable, including to politicians who are indeed able to get the office they cynically aspire to. In our country, alas, where politicians are all too often guided by personal advantage rather than by consistent values, ideological beliefs or moral principles, it is widely believed that to become successful in the world of politics one has to be an accomplished snollygoster.

  44.

  Spoonerism

  noun

  A LANGUAGE ERROR INVOLVING

  THE SUBSTITUTION OF SYLLABLES OF TWO WORDS IN CLOSE PROXIMITY TO EACH OTHER

  USAGE

  The preacher Reverend Spooner referred to ‘conquering kings’ (a phrase from a well-known hymn) as ‘Kingering Kongs’, thus coining a legendary spoonerism.

  This delightful infelicity was the contribution of the nineteenth-century Oxford don and ordained minister Reverend William Archibald Spooner, who unwittingly gave his name to this English-language error, known for a century and a quarter as spoonerisms.

  Rev. Spooner was famously absent-minded and tended, in his abstracted way, to switch unintentionally the vowels or consonants in two words in close proximity. Thus, intending to say that ‘The rate of wages will press hard upon the employer’, the Reverend declared in a lecture that ‘The weight of rages will press hard upon the employer’. This and ‘Kingering Kongs’ are in fact the only substantiated examples authenticated as having been actually uttered by him, but his reputation, enhanced by mischievous Oxford undergraduates who attended his lectures and sermons, spawned an entire cottage industry of invented spoonerisms.

  Far from being unintentional mix-ups by an abstracted professor, they were created entirely intentionally for humorous purposes. The most famous, because it was both plausible and hilariously funny, was that in a toast to Queen Victoria, Spooner—instead of raising his glass with the words ‘Three cheers for our dear old queen!’—invited those present to give ‘Three cheers for our queer old dean!’

  Another example has him saying ‘The Lord is a shoving leopard’ instead of ‘The Lord is a loving shepherd’. And asking a couple at a wedding if it was ‘customary to kiss’ the bride, Spooner is supposed to have said, ‘Is it kisstomary to cuss the bride?’ In these stories, Spooner renders a ‘crushing blow’ as a ‘blushing crow’, calls a well-oiled bicycle a ‘well-boiled icicle’ and describes a ‘cosy little nook’ as a ‘nosey little cook.’

  But in fact most of the famous spoonerisms are apocryphal and cannot be convincingly attributed to him. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (third edition, 1979) lists only the ‘weight of rages’ as a substantiated spoonerism.

  The Oxford provenance of most of these invented spoonerisms is apparent in their content. Thus the Reverend, wanting to find out ‘Is the Dean busy?’, asks ‘Is the bean dizzy?’ He accuses an undergraduate, ‘You were fighting a liar in the quadrangle’ as opposed to ‘You were lighting a fire in the quadrangle’. Going to church and seeing his customary place in the pew taken, he intends to ask an usher to show him to another seat, but instead says: ‘Someone is occupewing my pie. Please sew me to another sheet.’ And the most brilliant of all has an indignant Spooner dismissing an errant undergrad from his presence with the words: ‘You have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. Please leave Oxford on the next town drain.’ (‘You have missed all my history lectures. You have wasted a whole term. Please leave Oxford on the next down train.’)

  The appeal of the spoonerism is that it is a rich source of humour even when it has nothing to do with Oxford or the queer old dean himself. For example: ‘I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.’ There’s something hilariously accurate about describing a bad ‘grilled cheese’ sandwich as a ‘chilled grease sandwich’. The Washington, D.C. political comedy sketch group Capitol Steps famously referred to President Reagan as ‘Resident Pagan’ and described US elections as ‘Licking their Peaders’ (picking their leaders). The spy wars with Russia were described as the CIA not ‘snooping on Putin’ but ‘poopin’ on Snutin’.

  That indispensable source of research material, the Internet, tells me that in his poem ‘Translation’, Brian P. Cleary describes a boy who speaks in spoonerisms (like ‘shook a tower’ instead of ‘took a shower’). Humorously, Cleary leaves the poem’s final spoonerism up to the reader when he says: ‘He once proclaimed, “Hey, belly jeans” / When he found a stash of jelly beans. / But when he says he “pepped in stew” / We’ll tell him he should wipe his shoe.’

  45.

  Troll

  verb and noun

  (VERB) 1. TO TRY TO LURE OR INCITE SOMEONE BY PASSING SOMETHING WHERE THEY CAN SEE IT; 2. TO ISSUE HOSTILE OR OFFENSIVE SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS. (NOUN) 1. A NORSE DEMON THAT LIVES UNDER BRIDGES; 2. SOMEONE WHO POSTS PROVOCATIVE MESSAGES TO SOCIAL MEDIA INTENDED TO CAUSE MAXIMUM DISRUPTION

  USAGE

  The ruling party engages a well-organized army of trolls on social media to attack those of different political views.

  The origin of the modern usage of ‘troll’ is something of a mystery. How a creature from Norse mythology—ugly and slow-witted, dwelling in isolated rocks, mountains, or caves, and often quite hostile to human beings—became emblematic of antisocial behaviour on social media is a mystery, since Norwegians didn’t invent Twitter!

/>   In Norse mythology, an ancient tale from the ninth-century book Skáldskaparmál describes an encounter between a reciter of heroic verse, Bragi Boddason, and an unnamed troll woman, who aggressively asks him who he is, in the process describing herself. Numerous tales in Scandinavian folklore characterize trolls as very strong, but slow and dim-witted, often man-eaters, and as creatures who turn to stone upon contact with sunlight.

  Trolls were always described in these legendary stories as dangerous, given to kidnapping people and overrunning their estates, antisocial and quarrelsome creatures who made life difficult for travellers. Perhaps that explains our modern idea of troll behaviour—it goes back 1100 years!

  When the Internet began gaining popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the term used for posting inflammatory or hostile messages was ‘flaming’, but these ‘flamers’ soon started being described as ‘trolls’ instead, and the latter term has completely driven out the former. The troll’s intent is usually to insult, offend or abuse his targets in order to provoke a response for the troll’s own amusement or to score political points. One definition of ‘troll’ speaks of online harassment; another is that of ‘a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families’.

  Earlier, the non-Internet-related use of ‘trolling’ occurred in military parlance: there is a 1972 citation from the Vietnam War, in which US Navy pilots spoke of ‘trolling for MiGs’, meaning using decoys, with the mission of drawing fire away from US planes. This usage has of course been eclipsed by that relating to the Internet, with the Oxford English Dictionary finding its earliest usage in this sense in 1992. Here too ‘trolling’ was a verb, in the phrase ‘trolling for newbies’, an expression used in alt.folklore.urban (AFU) to refer to questions or topics that had been so repeatedly discussed that only a new user would respond to them earnestly. Such posts would help identify new subscribers. This definition of trolling was relatively benign and meant something much narrower than the contemporary understanding of the term. One of the most famous AFU trollers, David Mikkelson, went on to create the urban folklore website Snopes.com.

  From this usage, the noun troll usually referred to an act of trolling—or to the resulting discussion—rather than to the author, though now a troll is always seen as a nasty creature behaving obnoxiously in social media, and ‘to troll’ is only understood to mean ‘to insult, abuse, attack and offend someone on social media through one’s posts’. In Kerala politics, however, the word has been transmuted further, and is used (in Malayalam) not to refer to an antisocial individual but to a humorous meme. ‘That was a great troll about you!’ friends and supporters would tell me gleefully, to my bewilderment, until I realized that words can acquire different meanings in different languages.

  There is, in fact, a still older usage of the word ‘troll’, to mean ‘to fish by pulling a line through the water’, usually from a slow-moving boat, as opposed to ‘trawl’, which involves dragging a large net from a much larger boat. In this sense, of course, politicians like myself are always trolling for votes—and that’s what our critics, as trolls, do to us on the Internet too!

  46.

  Umpire

  noun

  A SPORTING OFFICIAL, ESPECIALLY IN

  CRICKET AND ASSOCIATION FOOTBALL,

  WHO ADJUDICATES THE GAME

  USAGE

  The umpire ruled him out, even though the evidence for him having snicked the ball was scanty.

  The word ‘umpire’ has a hoary pedigree. In Middle English, the earliest form of this word is as ‘noumper’ around 1350 (meaning not a peer, i.e., not a member of one of the teams, and therefore impartial) though it changed to ‘umpire’ because of a common error. The expression ‘a noumper’ (with ‘a’ being the indefinite article) led to a typical confusion also seen elsewhere, with the leading ‘n’ becoming attached to the article, changing ‘a noumper’ to ‘an oumper’ and eventually ‘an umpire’. (This kind of linguistic shift, known as ‘false splitting’, gave us the word ‘orange’, because of the same mistake in speaking of ‘a norange’ (the word ‘naranj’ was the term for the fruit in Arabic, and it initially came to English as ‘a norange’, only to become ‘an orange’ because of this false splitting.) The word ‘umpire’ was applied to the officials of many sports, including football (where it has been superseded by ‘referee’) and baseball (which still uses it).

  In cricket, an umpire is a person who has the authority to make decisions about events on the cricket field, according to the Laws of Cricket, first published in 1774. Besides keeping a record of the number of deliveries bowled and announcing the completion of an over, the umpire makes vital decisions about the legality of the deliveries bowled, appeals for wickets and the general conduct of the game in a legal manner. The umpire is meant to function as a trained professional, knowledgeable in the laws of the game, fully aware of the laws, the relevant match conditions and understanding of the pressures under which the players are playing. He is required (and expected) to be totally fair and unbiased

  in the execution of his duties and the making of split-second decisions. The slightest error or misjudgement can transform

  the course of a match and determine its eventual outcome. As

  A.G. (Allan) Steel wrote in his chapter on umpiring in the book Cricket, written in conjunction with R.H. (Robert) Lyttelton, in 1888: ‘If anyone were to ask us the question “What class of useful men receive most abuse and least thanks for their services?” we should, without hesitation, reply, “Cricket umpires.” The duties of an umpire are most laborious and irksome; they require for their proper performance the exercise of numerous qualifications, and yet it is always the lot of every man who dons the white coat, the present dress of an umpire, to receive, certainly no thanks, and, too frequently, something which is not altogether unlike abuse.’

  A Latin poem by William Goldwin from March 1706 describes two umpires ‘leaning on their bats’ —apparently in those days the batsmen were required to touch the umpire’s bat with theirs to register a run. Over time, of course, this began to be considered somewhat unnecessary, and the umpires’ bats were done away with—no doubt saving the umpires a few accidental whacks on their shins by running batsmen.

  In the earliest days there were no independent umpires—each side supplied an umpire to ensure an unbiased game was conducted. (This practice persists in much amateur cricket, such as the games I played on weekends as a UN official in Geneva and Singapore.) Subsequently the practice became that the host association (and in Test matches, the host country) supplied the umpires. This resulted in so many outraged cries about biased umpiring that the very viability of international cricket was threatened.

  The umpiring bias was real, especially in Pakistan, whose umpires were known to seek instructions from the country’s Test captain before a match. During the 1956 MCC tour of Pakistan, several English cricketers brought a particularly egregious Pakistani umpire, Idris Baig, to their room, offered him a drink, and when he asked for water, emptied a couple of buckets of it over him. Baig did not take kindly to this humiliation and the matter snowballed into an international incident, though many a foreign cricketer had probably wished a similar fate upon other Pakistani umpires. (A notable example was Shakoor Rana, with whom the touring English captain, Mike Gatting, had a notorious finger-wagging standoff in 1987.)

  By 1986-87 Pakistan’s series against the West Indies was played under neutral umpires—as it happens, Indian umpires invited by the Pakistan Cricket Board. Its president, Nur Khan, and skipper Imran had become understandably tired of their team’s successes being discredited by the performance of the Pakistani umpires. Their decision to remove allegations of umpiring bias from the equation not only made the cricket tension-free (except for the more enjoyable sporting tensions associated with the run of play), it started a worldwide trend. Today all Tests are umpired by officials from other countries, ODIs feature one host umpire and one neutral, and T20Is two host-country umpir
es. But one could argue that the introduction of technology has reduced the prospects of bias, since umpiring howlers would be visible on television for the world to see, and the offending umpire’s career would plunge more rapidly than an out-of-form batsman’s average.

  From the traditional two umpires on the field, one standing at the end where the bowler delivers the ball, and one at 90 degrees from the facing batsman (usually, but not always, at square leg), the modern game now uses four umpires: two on-field umpires, a third umpire who watches video replays and adjudicates decisions referred by the on-field umpires, and a fourth umpire who looks after the match balls, takes out the drinks for the umpires and fills in in emergencies.

  The International Cricket Council (ICC) has three panels of umpires, an Elite Panel, an International Panel and a Development Panel. Most Test matches are controlled by members of the Elite Panel, with local members of the International Panel providing support in the third- or fourth-umpire roles. The umpires’ old omnipotence has been further undermined in international matches by the creation of a new position of match referee, who enforces the ICC’s Cricket Code of Conduct, imposes fines on offending players reported by the umpires, and is tasked with ensuring the game is played in a reputable manner.

  Still, the indispensability of the umpire is best summed up in this story of a conversation among three umpires about their craft.