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!