Taking a
look now and then at the oldest files in my old records, I invariably
get a thrill to see the way some of my initial literary efforts have
survived the test of time and still look and sound as fresh as they did
when I wrote them. Here's a vintage sketch which was published by THE
HINDU almost 50 years ago.
I
hadn't expanded or explained the standard abbreviations of the Latin,
French and Italian expressions figuring in the text because they were
quite familiar to all educated Indians who could read an English
newspaper as a normal routine -- thanks to the Oxford English
Dictionary and/or the Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, which
listed selected foreign-language terms with English translation. But as
this blog is read in several countries where the norms of
English-learning may be different, I am providing a useful glossary.
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Glossary
R.S.V.P. -- Repondez s'il vous plait -- (French : pronounced Rayponday seel voo play) = 'Reply if it pleases you', just meaning "Please reply".
e.g. -- exempli gratia -- (Latin : for sake of example) = for example.
ibid. -- ibidem -- (Latin : in same place) = same source mentioned previously.
op. cit. -- opere citato -- (Latin : work cited) = same work mentioned previously.
viz. -- videlicet -- (Latin : in other words) = namely.
do. -- ditto -- (from Italian : detto = said) = same as above (in lists/tables).
etc. -- et cetera -- (Latin : and similar things) = and so on.
---------- ----------
THE HINDU, 1967
R.S.V.P.
YOU'LL
probably find it very amusing, but I did spend several years of my
schooldays under the honest impression that R.S.V.P. was a lorry
service. The only explanation I can offer for this curious mix-up is the
fact that we have a well-known lorry service down South called S.R.V.S.
-- and in those days a popular Tamil magazine used to carry a
prominent advertisement for them on its back cover every week. So,
whenever my parents received an invitation card bearing the discreet
legend 'RSVP' in a corner, I invariably thought that an RSVP truck
would be hired for the occasion, presumably to drop the car-less guests
back home.
Another
weird abbreviation with which I had a great deal of trouble in my
childhood was 'e.g.' -- I used to imagine that it was some kind of
mysterious egg, which for some unfathomable reason was alluded to in all
kinds of unlikely contexts. It did occur to me once that probably the
author was suffering from hiccoughs, and had to relieve the strain by
articulating "eg. . . eg. . ." every now and then. This idea
fortunately didn't survive for long, but the egg complex had deeper
roots, and persisted almost into teen-age.
Yet another such misunderstanding, which I developed at the shamefully late age of fifteen or sixteen, concerned 'Ibid.' and 'Op.
cit.' I had just started reading books on heavy topics, with endless
foot-notes in them ; and in whichever text I looked at, on whatever
subject, I found copious quotations from Ibid. and Op. cit. Those were days of voracious reading, and the conviction grew steadily in my mind that Ibid and Op cit were
two tremendous books of wisdom, perhaps even more formidable than the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Not being quite sure about it, however, I was
too diffident to ask the librarian where they were stacked; but I
remember wasting a lot of time exploring the shelves and scanning the
catalogues for these twin colossal compilations.
Strangely
enough, I never had much trouble with that particularly tricky
expression 'viz.' -- but a junior stenographer who once used to work
with me apparently did. If you dictated "namely", he always took down
and typed "namely", to the letter. As no amount of explanation could
make him understand that namely and viz. were one and the same thing, I began dictating 'viz.' plainly as "vizzzzzz. . . ." It
was rather taxing at first, but after some time I realized it was great
fun merely to be intoning "vizzzzzz. . . . . ." during office hours :
oh, what a merciful, if momentary, escape from the dullness of decorum!
But
of course, there's equally good fun to be derived from lending an
attentive ear to other people saying these alien expressions aloud. I
remember the Chief Accountant who used to mutter to himself "do, do. .
." whenever he happened to bury his nose and his blue pencil in one of
those ledgers which have as many dittos as debits. I also
remember the laconic stranger who sat next to me at a club dinner once.
He was a man of few words, but what I found intriguing was the way he
kept rounding off his measured utterances with the irrelevant and
undignified admonition "Eat easy!" At first I thought he was
just trying to control his ravenous appetite with a bit of
auto-suggestion, having probably picked up the idea from some Sunday
paper. But when he said it again over the coffee, when the only solid
consumables on the table were the toothpicks, the truth suddenly dawned
on me. The gentleman had only been pronouncing 'ETC.', letter by
letter!
