When I visited the recently opened Starbucks near Horniman Circle, I noticed this on the glass door: The fact that the word free has two senses in English is often brought up because the difference in the two senses is sometimes critical/relevant. Especially in the FOSS (Free and Open Software) world, the distinction is often explained as Free as in free speech, not as in free beer, to disambiguate the two senses: one of freedom and another of not having to pay anything.

I had heard about the Hinglish project back in June when Sindhu shared the link to their website on her status. I had since forgotten about it, only to be reminded of it some time ago when an Incredible India! video featuring the project was shared by many people on Facebook. The video has over 70000 views now. A few people even pinged me with the link and suggested that I do a Linguistrix post on it.

This cartoon appeared today in my Facebook feed: I’m posting it on Linguistrix because it’s a rather cute display of syntactic ambiguity, and for a change, it’s in Hindi. Syntactic ambiguity is when a particular sentence can be parsed in more than one grammatically correct ways, each with a different meaning. A popular example is I shot an elephant in my pajamas, which has not two but three parsings—either I was wearing my pyjamas, or the elephant was inside my pajamas, or that the elephant was wearing my pajamas.

The Society for Promotion for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) recently launched ‘Scitech Majlis’: Weekly group discussion session about science and technology. The name gave rise to a bit of buzz because of the use of the Urdu word majlis (مجلس, मजलिस). When I first heard it, it sounded a bit tone-deaf to me—the two words didn’t seem to lend well to compounding, but whatever. Anyhow, I am no Urdu expert but I do know of some good places where we can look, and I went to my trusted resource, Platts’ Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English.

The SMBC comic from a few days ago goes like this: Something didn’t seem right about the whole thing but SMBC is usually grounded on at least some fact, so I decided to explore, and it turned out to be more interesting than I had earlier thought. It turns out that the term vanilla (used to describe the beans) does come from the Latin root vagina, but it’s not as simple as that.

I was browsing a website on my phone using the Dolphin browser when a prompt came up. I couldn’t take a screenshot, so I am paraphrasing what the prompt said: In order to improve this application, would you mind giving your experience a star rating? Below the question were two command buttons No | Rate ‘Uh-0h,’ I said to no one in particular. When someone asks me something by phrasing it in the Do You Mind form, it’s often an invitation for trouble.

You know that politics (and its reporting in the media) in your country is hitting a new low when they take Mamata Bannerjee and then criticize her for a silly linguistic foible. She threatened to pull her men out of the union on Jummabar, leading to hue and cry not over the pulling out but on her choice of word—Jummabar. TOI has been kind enough to give us a quick Urdu lesson about the Urdu word for Friday:

This post is about a piece of news that’s more than a year old, but I am posting it now because 1. Linguistrix didn’t exist back then, and 2. the post is relevant in light of my recent post on India’s linguistic plurality. This comes from the days when the Jan Lokpal Movement was in full swing and there were talks and discussions between Team Anna and the government on an almost daily basis.

As the government faces the aftermath of another scam, the name with which media is referring to that scam is of some linguistic interest. The Indian Coal Allocation Scam is being widely referred to as Coalgate, a variation on the Watergate scandal with the added punny bonus of it sounding the same as a popular toothpaste brand. The Watergate scandal, apart from leading to then president Richard Nixon’s resignation, became immortal when countless scandals around the world began getting named after it, all ending in -gate.

Every once in a while in human history comes a time when a semantic gap needs to be filled; when a word needs to be born to take on the responsibility it was destined to. A day shall come when lexicographers would lay their pens to rest and take a well deserved retirement. That day is not today. Today, we create a new word. Toolder [verb, transitive] Pronuncation: ˈtul.dɚ (tool-duhr), ˈtul.