My views on IITB lingo have changed considerably over the years. I used to find it ‘positively revolting’ in freshman year, and this slowly changed to ‘occasionally annoying’ somewhere around third year, finally settling at ‘mostly harmless’. I am sure reams of paper have been devoted towards discussing campus lingo in general (there’s an entire Masters Thesis about IITM lingo, for instance), so I won’t discuss it here.

There are two reasons why I wrote this post, and critiquing IIT lingo isn’t either of them—firstly, I wanted to demonstrate how we can investigate simple issues surrounding language usage by using freely and publicly available tools and resources, and secondly, I wanted to talk about how this teaches us to never _assume_ things right-away when dealing with linguistic issues, but to adopt a scientific approach where we try to look at data to prove or disprove our claims instead of blindly trusting our intuition. Let’s dive into it.

I was reading _Right ho, Jeeves!_ by P G Wodehouse recently, and was surprised to read this line—

But when he comes leering at Anatole through skylights, just after I had with infinite pains and tact induced him to withdraw his notice, and makes him so temperamental that […]

A lot of you may have guessed it right—it was the expression ‘infinite pains’ that caught my attention. For those unfamiliar with IITB lingo, _infinite_ (and its short form infy/infi, pronounced [ɪnfi]) is used extensively at IITB, in primarily two syntactic roles—

Aaj infi kaam tha. (I had infi (a lot of) work today)

Infi sexy bandi hai yaar! :sigh: ([She’s] an infi (very) sexy chick man! :sigh:)

In-fye-night-ly lambe form bharne pade yaar LUH, GnP or CTI ke liye (Infinitely (very) long forms had to be filled for LUH and GnP)

_Yaar girlfriend ke saath raat ko sameer-hill gaya tha. Wahaan bhi vigilance waalon ne pakad liya. Ab infinite pain hoga._ (I had gone with my girlfriend to Sameer Hill, but vigilance personnel caught us there too. Now we’ll have infinite (a lot of) trouble).

So we have _infi,_ infinite and infinitely, and prosody is one factor which might make people choose the longer three/four syllable form over the short one.

Now, being surrounded by _infi_ all around, and never  having seen it much in mainstream English, I was drawn to the natural conclusion that it was an idiosyncratic feature of IITB lingo, and any text that uses such a construction would sound non-standard. Obviously then, reading _infinite pains_ in PGW piqued my curiosity. I wanted to find out whether such usage was common, so the first thing I did was use the search feature in Google Books. The phrase ‘infinite pains’ returns 195,000 results. Here are a few examples—

infpans

Next, I went to Open Source Shakespeare to search for this phrase in Shakespeare’s works. I didn’t get any occurrence of ‘infinite pains’, but several instances of infinite being used the IITB lingo way.

A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy (Hamlet)

I love thee infinitely (Henry IV)

Her infinite cunning, with her modern grace… (All’s Well That Ends Well)

You get the idea.

Finally, I used the Google n-gram viewer to look at the usage frequency of this phrase. This not only corroborates previous data but also confirms my intuition to a certain extent—the usage frequency has been progressively reducing over the years.

In general, it’s best to follow a data-driven approach whenever a language issue is in question. In summary:

  • A lot of text, easily searchable, is readily available online
  • Google Books search is a very good way of seeing language usage across 3–4 centuries
  • Google n-gram viewer is particularly useful to observe patterns in usage change over decades and centuries
  • Always approach a questioning attitude towards linguistic issues, instead of considering one’s opinion as gospel truth
  • Keep thinking!