by Amitav Ghosh
+chop: ‘Another word of Hind. origin (from chhãp, “stamp” or “seal”) that has passed fluently from the English argot of India into the patois of southern China. It is not, however, related to +chop-chop, “quick, quickly”, which is of Cantonese derivation (from k’wái-k’wái); it is this latter form that yields the ugly vulgarism chopstick, none of the blame for which can be pinned on Hind.’
+chop-chop: See above.
+chopstick: See above.
+chota/chhota/choota/: Scrawled upon the back of the two of clubs in Neel’s Jack-Chits are these words: ‘Chhota is to burra as peg is to mast: hence the common Laskari locution chota-peg, often used synonymously with faltu-dol.’
+chota-hazri: See above. ‘How Barrère & Leland have managed to come to the conclusion that a chota-hazri corresponds to the “auroral mint julep or pre-prandial cocktail of Virginia” I will never understand, for it usually consists of nothing more than toast and tea.’
chownee (*The Glossary): ‘A great pity that this fine Hind. word for “military encampment” came to be replaced by the dull Anglo-Saxon “cantonment”.’
+chuddar/chadar: ‘In no field of meaning has English relied more heavily on migrants than in referring to the clothing of womens’ heads, shoulders and breasts. Yet, even having absorbed shawl, chuddar/chadar, and dooputty/dupatta, it still has no word for that part of the sari that serves the same function, for both ghungta and ãchal remain strangers to the Oracle. The cumbly/kambal (“blanket”) can scarcely be offered as an alternative.’
chuldan (*Roebuck): See choola/ chula.
chull (*The Barney-Book): ‘Barrère & Leland reveal their ignorance by giving this the gloss of “make haste”, a meaning that belongs more to the imperative jaw! Chull has much more the sense of the French allez or the Arabic yalla. One searches in vain for a good English equivalent, “come on” being hardly as expressive.’
chup/choops (*The Barney-Book): ‘Another word that has migrated through the nursery, being one of the few exhortations to silence that can be considered polite.’
chupow/chupao (*The Glossary): ‘Despite its present currency, this emigrant is unlikely to find a permanent seat in the House of Verbs, since it serves no function that is not already discharged by the English “to hide”.’
chute/choot: ‘This word’s popularity is largely due to the one notable advantage that it possesses over other more specific anatomical terms: to wit, that it can be applied to all human beings, irrespective of gender, in the full confidence that the subject will be in possession of a few such. This is possibly why it enjoys such widespread use, both in Hind. and English, the difference being that in English it is rarely used in the absence of some other paired element (ban-/betee- etc.). One exception is the cant term chutier, which is used abusively to imply an excessive endowment in regard to this aspect of the anatomy.’ See also banchoot/barnshoot etc.
cobbily-mash (*The Glossary): ‘This was, of course, not a mash at all, but a preparation of dried fish (being a corruption of the Bengali term shutki-maach.)’
+cockup: This was of course one of many words that perished in the abattoir of Victorian prudery. Being uncommonly fond of the fish to which it referred, lates calcarifer (bhetki/ beckty), Neel refused to recognize that this term was greatly endangered: he certainly bears some of the responsibility for its extinction.
+compound/kampung: There was for long a feeling within the family that this word ought not to be included in the Chrestomathy, since the fact of its having gained entry into the Oracle in both its forms would provide a convincing refutation of Neel’s pet theory (according to which, words could never migrate in pairs – see bandar). These anxieties were set at rest when a wordy-wallah pointed out that these words are neither homonyms nor synonyms: they are merely variant spellings of the same word.
conker/kunkur (*The Glossary): ‘This word has nothing whatever to do with water- or horse-chestnuts. It is a corruption of the Hind. kankar, “gravel”, and is used in the same sense.’
+consumah/consummer/khansama: See bobachee.
+coolin/kulin: ‘In no way to be confused with “coolie”, this was the word used to refer to the highest rung of certain castes.’ A contracted form has recently gained some currency in classy circles: “cool”.’
cot: See charpoy.
cotia (*The Glossary): A vessel from the Kerala coast that was only rarely to be sighted on the Hooghly.
cow-chilo (*The Linkister): ‘Often have I heard this item of the South China patois being used to disparage the Chinese and their regard for women. Yet the expression is merely a badly matched pairing of words, the first being a corruption of the Cantonese kai.’
cranny/karani (*The Glossary): See carcanna.
+cumbly/kambal: See chuddar.
+cumra/kamra/camera (*The Glossary, *Roebuck): Neel gave the credit for the introduction of this item of Portuguese nautical usage (camara), into the languages of Hind., English included. In its original nautical sense, it was used of course to mean ‘cabin’, but by virtue of conveniently expressing the idea of partitioned space, it has reverted to the sense of its Latin avatar, in which it meant ‘room’ or ‘chamber’. ‘The curious use of gol-kamra (literally “round-room”) to mean “drawing-room” is unlikely to survive.’
+cumshaw: See baksheesh.
cunchunee/kanchani (*The Glossary): See bayadère.
cursy/coorsy/kursi (*The Barney-Book, *Roebuck, *The Glossary): From the Jack-Chits. ‘This Laskari word is not derived from the common Hind. word for “chair” (kursi) as many suppose: it is, in my opinion, a corruption of the English nautical term “cross-trees”, for it too refers to the perch that is formed by the junction of a yard and a mast. But the resemblance is not accidental, for it is in this seat that the lascar enjoys the few moments of leisure that fall to his lot.’
+cushy/khush/khushi: ‘In Laskari this was the equivalent of the English nautical usage “cheerily”. To the lascar, then, goes the credit for inventing the English meaning of this word, which was carried onshore by sailors.’
dabusa (*Roebuck): ‘Roebuck avers that any cabin may be so designated, but it is a truism that every vessel is a world unto itself, with its own tongues and dialects – and on the Ibis this term was applied, always and exclusively, to the “tween-deck”, which should properly have been the “beech-ka-tootuk”.’
+dacoit: ‘This word’, writes Neel, ‘although universally known, is frequently misused, for the term applies, by law, only to miscreants who belong to a gang of at least five persons.’
dadu (*The Barney-Book): ‘Strange that this English gypsy word for father should be the same as the Bengali for “grandfather”; no less strange that the Eng. gypsy for mother, dai/dye, should be the same as the common Hind./Urdu for midwife.’
+daftar/dufter: This was another word which had already, in Neel’s lifetime, yielded to an ungainly rival, ‘office’. This too carried down with it a lashkar of fine English words that were used for its staff: the clerks known as crannies, the mootsuddies who laboured over the accounts, the shroffs who were responsible for money-changing, the khazana-dars who watched over their treasuries, the hurkarus and peons who delivered messages, and of course, the innumerable moonshies, dubashes and druggermen who laboured over the translation of every document. It was the passing of the last three, all concerned with the work of translation, that most troubled Neel; those were the words he would cite when Englishmen boasted to him of the absorptive power of their language: ‘Beware, my friends: your tongues were flexible when you were still supplicants at the world’s khazanas. Now that you have the whole world in a stranglehold, your tongues are hardening, growing stiffer. Do you ever count the words you lose every year? Beware! Victory is but the vanguard of decay and decline.’
dai/dye (*The Barney-Book): See dadu.
+dak/dawk: Neel believed that this word would eventually yield to the English ‘post’ even in India, but he was convinced also that it would find its way into the Ora
cle, not on its own steam, but because of its innumerable compounds – dawk-bungalow, dawkdubba (‘post-box’) etc.
+dam/daam (*The Glossary): ‘Sad indeed that India’s currency took its name from rupya (Skt. “silver”) rather than the more accurate Hind. dam, “price”. I well remember a time when an adhelah was half, a paulah a quarter and a damri an eighth of a dam. A tragedy indeed that the word, like the coin, was driven to beggary by a counterfeit – in this instance, by the misinterpreting of the Duke of Wellington’s comment of dismissal (“I don’t give a dam”). What the Duke had meant to say, of course, was something in the order of “I don’t care a tu’penny” (dam), but instead he bears the guilt of having put into circulation the damnable “damn”. At this remove we can only speculate on how different the fate of the word would have been had he said, instead, “I don’t give a damri.”’ On the margins of this note an anonymous descendant has scribbled: ‘At least Uncle Jeetu wouldn’t have ruined the last scene of Gone With the Wind by shouting at Rhett Butler: “A dam is what you don’t give, you idiot – not a ‘damn’ . . .”’
+daroga: See chokey.
dashy (*The Barney-Book): See bayadère. ‘This word is said to be derived from devadasi (temple dancer), hence the frequent pairing debbies and dashies.’
+dastoor/dastur: Because Neel always gave precedence to nautical usages he assumed that this word would come into the Oracle because of the Laskari usage, in which it was the equivalent of ‘stu’nsail/studdingsail’ (see also dol). He allowed, as a long shot, that its homonym, which designated a Parsi religious functionary, might also stand a good chance of inclusion. He was wrong on both counts: the Oracle unaccountably has chosen to gloss it as ‘custom’ or ‘commission’, from which usage it derives dastoori, destoory etc. These last Neel ruled out, because their meaning was so close to bucksheesh.
+dawk: See chit.
+dekko, dikk, deck, dekho: Neel took bitter exception to all attempts to attribute this word to English Gypsy slang, insisting that it was a direct and recent borrowing of the Hind. dekho, ‘to see’.
+devi, debi, debbie: ‘In English usage, the Hind. word for “goddess” acquired a wholly different connotation (for which see bayadère). The Laskari devi, on the other hand, was a corruption of the English “davit”.’
+dhobi: ‘The mystery of laundering.’
digh (*Roebuck): Neel was firmly of the opinion that this Laskari equivalent of the nautical sense of the word ‘point’, as in ‘points of sailing’ or ‘headings in relation to the wind’, came from the Bengali word for ‘direction’.
+dinghy: From time to time, Neel would inscribe a question mark against words which had been rewarded, in his view, beyond their just desserts. Neel’s interrogation of dinghy was scored with an especially heavy hand, for of all the Bengali words for river-craft this one seemed to him the least likely to be raised to coolinhood, the dingi being the meanest of boats.
doasta: ‘This is one spiritous liquor about which the good Admiral Smyth is right; he describes it as: “An inferior spirit often drugged or doctored for unwary sailors in the pestiferous dens of filthy Calcutta and other sea-ports in India”.’
dol (*Roebuck): Several of Neel’s Jack-Chits are devoted to the lascars’ words for the architecture of a sailing vessel. ‘Dol is what they call a mast, and for sail they use a borrowing from the English serh (though I have sometimes heard them employ the good Bengali word pâl). To these are attached many other terms, of greater specificity: thus trikat (often mispronounced “tirkat”) is “fore-” when attached to either dol or serh; bara is “main-”; kilmi is “mizzen-”, and sabar is t’gallant. A jury mast goes by the apt name phaltu-dol. As for the other sails: a sawai is a stay-sail; a gavi is a topsail; a tabar is a royal; a gabar is a sky-scraper; a dastur is a stu’nsail; and a spanker is a drawal. By combining these elements they are able to point to the most insignificant scraps of canvas – in their speech, the fore-t’gallant-stu’nsail is the trikatsabar-dastur, and they have no need even to attach the word serh for their intention to be perfectly understood. The most curious words are reserved, however, for the tangle of tackle that projects agil from the vessel’s head: the jib, for example, is a jíb, which malums imagine merely to be a Laskari mispronunciation of the English word, little knowing that it means “tongue” in Hind.; their word for flying jib, fulanajíb, might be similarly mistaken by those who did not know that it might also mean “anything’s tongue”; but most curious of all is the word for the very tip of this spar, which is called the shaitan-jíb. Could it be because to work there is indeed to feel the terror of sitting upon the Devil’s tongue?’
+doll/dal: Neel would have been glad, I think, to learn that the Oracular form for this commonest of Indian foods is dal, rather than either doll (not to be confused with pootly) or the mysterious dhal, which is of course the Hind./Bengali word for ‘shield’. In one of his jottings he speculates that it is often thus spelled in English because it refers to a popular battlefield dish, ‘lentils cooked in a shield.’
+doolally/doolally-tap: ‘An illness once greatly prevalent among sahibs and mems, being the English equivalent of the Malay “amok”. It derived its name from Deolali, where there was a well-known asylum. I believe it to have been one of the side-effects of laudanum, which would account for its present desuetude.’
+dosooti/dosootie (*The Glossary): Literally ‘two yarn’, coarse cotton cloth; ‘I was astonished to learn from Mr Reid that in America Dosootie is considered the highest quality of shirt fabric.’
druggerman (*The Glossary): ‘Like moonshies, dubashes and linkisters, a mystery of language – an interpreter whose title derives from the Arabic-Persian tarjuman.’
+dubba/dubber: This word owes its presence in the Chrestomathy to lascars, who made the Hind. word for ‘box’ or ‘container’ a common article of nautical usage.
dubbah/dubber (*The Admiral): Neel took exception to the Admiral’s definition of this term: ‘a coarse leathern vessel for holding liquids in India.’ ‘Almost never in Hind. is this common term for container applied to a receptacle that holds liquids. Such a usage is clearly exceptional, even among those who occasionally apply it to certain objects that are necessary for the proper conduct of stool-pijjin.’ See also dawk.
+duffadar/dafadar: One of those many ranks of lower officialdom that found an afterlife in the Oracle. ‘The magnitude of the part these men once played in our lives can be easily judged by looking at any kalkatiya migrant’s certificate of emigration, on the back of which is almost always noted the name of the duffadar who was responsible for the recruitment (and usually in the scribbled Bengali script of some harried cranny).’
dumbcow/dumcao (*The Glossary): ‘The popularity of this word and its steady advance towards the Peerage of the Verb is due no doubt to its bilingual expressiveness, a dumbcowing being a harangue intended to cow – or better still gubbrow – its victim into dumbness.’
+dumbpoke: Kitchens which served ‘casseroles’ never failed to ignite Neel’s ire, for he believed that word to be an insufferable piece of pretension, especially when the dumbpoke was at hand and ready to use. The recent resurrection of the Hind. original dumpukht would in no wise have consoled him, since it is now used in a strictly Hind. sense.
+dungaree/dungri: ‘What dinghy was to boats, the Hind. dungri was to cloth – a coarse cotton fabric unworthy of survival, far less coolin-dom.’
+dupatta / dooputty: See chuddar / chadar.
durwauza-bund (*The Glossary): ‘These were the words which khidmutgars would use to turn away unwanted visitors: in a BeeBee’s mind the use of the Hind. for “closed door” was more acceptable than an outright lie. The Oracle is sure to welcome it, for the sheer cunning of its reasoning.’
+durzee: ‘The mystery of tailoring.’
Faghfúr of Maha Chin (*The Glossary): ‘Such was the Laskari phrase for the “Emperor of China”, and if you asked to whom it referred, they would tell you, almost always, that the personage in
question was the Raja of Chin-kalan, which was but their name for Canton.’
faltu- or phaltu-dol (*Roebuck): ‘This is, strictly speaking, the Laskari term for “jury-mast”, and it is in that sense that it often finds employment in shipboard girlery, being understood to refer to a foreshortened, unreliable or deficient organ of increase.’
faltu/phaltu-tanni (*Roebuck): See turnee.
+fanqui: ‘The anglice of fan-kwei, which the *The Linkister defines as “foreign devil”. The term may easily, and less offensively, be translated as “unfamiliar spirit”.’
+foozle/foozilow: ‘Almost certainly from the Hind. phuslana, “to make a fool of”, which is said to have been further transformed in America to foozle and even comfoozle.’
+free: Neel was much in love with this word and would have been glad to know that the Oracle had fully acknowledged it to be a derivation from the common Sanskrit and Hind. root priya (‘dear’ or ‘beloved’). ‘As for the truth of “freedom” it will remain forever elusive until such time as it is wrested free of English; not till then will the fuller meaning of priya be restored to it.’