Today’s PAF (Performing Arts Festival) raised an interesting linguistic issue—what makes a word a word? In the PAF, Rajiv Gandhi’s character was called a mediaphobe since he was scared of facing the media. He retaliated, in almost a childishly innocent manner, by saying that _mediaphobe_ wasn’t even a word and so he couldn’t be called one. He went on to say that he couldn’t _be_ a mediaphobe for the same reason.

When you combine an awesome Harry Potter reference with Spanish phonology, you get a winner. This has got to be the funniest thing I’ve seen in the recent past: Since this is Linguistrix, let me add a few lines about the points of linguistic interest in this gag. Spanish pronunciation is delightfully easy and predictable with a very regular spelling system. Words usually have only one stressed syllable, and it is the last syllable, except when the word ends in N or S or a vowel, in which case it's the penultimate syllable (Michel Thomas calls this rule the Nose Rule).

The country was galvanized last year by the whole Jan Lokpal Movement, and a lot was said for and against the movement, its leaders and cheerleaders, and the thousands of Indians who poured into the streets in the largest display of public outrage in recent times. While we are all fashionably outraged at the way politicians misuse public money with impunity, a small look at the way we lead our daily lives is enough to show that what happens in the order of millions of rupees is just a bigger manifestation of a phenomenon that is integral to our everyday life.

This Friday, Sachin Tendulkar completed 100 international cricket centuries and did something that would have been considered impossible by many—prevent millions of Indians from realizing that the new budget is going to make prices rise even more. He also gave everyone an excuse to come up with all kinds of puns involving his name and the word Ton. I wonder if someone’s said Ton Ton Gopaal yet. Now, I don’t follow cricket all that much—I mean, I do watch a couple of matches a year to justify my Indian citizenship, and I keep track of big events such as this one, but that’s pretty much all.

As you may have read, Facebook has attracted the anger of—and I swear there is no other way to put it—the Chutiya community from Assam by blocking many Facebook profiles which mentioned Chutiya as their last name. This is of course a bit ironic coming from a company who’s CEO’s sister is named Randi (Hindi insult meaning prostitute), but let’s not digress. For those who don’t know Hindi, _Chutiya_ is an expletive that means _fool/idiot_ but is pretty offensive and insulting.

[This post is second in the series of general posts on Linguistrix (the first one was Stupid Analogues are like Stupid Analogies). I choose to include such posts on the blog because I find the topic to be of significant intellectual/academic interest.] [This post is second in the series of general posts on Linguistrix (the first one was Stupid Analogues are like Stupid Analogies).

Mamta Sharma, the head of the National Commission for Women, India, has gotten herself into trouble by saying (at a function) that girls shouldn’t be offended if guys call them sexy, as it’s a word with positive connotations of beauty and charm. Her exact quote (or at least what HT reported) was: Boys pass comments on girls terming them sexy but sexy means beautiful and charming. We should not see it in negative sense.

[Edit: A few days after this post was written, the powers-that-be decided to retain the name JEE for the new entrance test that would replace JEE+AIEEE combo from next year] The JEE and AIEEE, two flagship examinations that used to be conducted for students aspiring to secure an admission into the IITs/NITs are going to be replaced by an exam called ISEET (Indian Science Engineering Eligibility Test). There are of course loads of issues surrounding this decision that the government took, but none that come under the purview of Linguistrix.

A joke (sorta lame but, whatever) that has been going around on the internet since ages (if pro is the opposite of con, what’s the opposite of progress?) was finally picked up and printed on the front page of Mumbai Mirror, in light of today’s civic body elections, thus ensuring that the handful of people who hadn’t heard it earlier are now aware of it. The grammatical mistake (IT shouldn’t have been there) and the bad spacing (you need a space after the comma) notwithstanding, a lot of people would find it decently funny, so I thought I would take this opportunity to write a bit about this pun, so to speak, from a linguistic angle, because, well, that’s what Linguistrix is all about.

Back in November, I discussed what happened when Tom Cruise used machine translation to connect to his Indians fans. Since I am in Japan, I come across bad English translations on a daily basis. I hadn’t posted any on Linguistrix because Chinglish/Janglish is very common stuff and you get them dime by the dozen. But today I found this one that is incomprehensible in at least two languages (I have to check up my Chinese friend to find out whether it makes any more sense in Chinese than it does in English/Hindi.