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The dotard drama

The cogent, coherent and compelling colour that comes across in a conversation in one’s mother tongue is just incomparable! The same potency and vitality is not evoked by a foreign language.

The dotard drama

Illustration: Vishu Verma



Harvinder Khetal

The cogent, coherent and compelling colour that comes across in a conversation in one’s mother tongue is just incomparable! The same potency and vitality is not evoked by a foreign language. No wonder, when two Punjabis — even strangers — strike up a chat, they soon find themselves spouting the choicest words, seeped in common culture, that only they can truly comprehend… and feel… and enjoy. The sense of conveying your case most effectively comes when communicating in the native lingua. This liveliness is imbued in every language, and it’s no wonder that we find most people slipping into their mother tongues with ease when in like company. And, definitely, it’s no slip of the tongue! The formation of those words just comes naturally. More so, in matters of the heart and emotions. 

As Vice-President M. Venkaiah Naidu said at an event last week: "Subbulakshmiji used to be called MS Amma (mother).… Amma comes from the heart and Mummy comes from the lips. In Urdu, it is Ammi.”

Half the fun is lost if you have to consult the dictionary for the meaning of a word. And, one does have to run to the tome often when dealing in foreign languages. Even those of us who claim to know the English language as much as, if not better than, the Englishman are foxed at times. And, this time, it was North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Un who added to the vocabulary of many people a new word: dotard.

By calling US Donald Trump a dotard, Kim has won this round of the trading of abusive words that the two leaders have been exchanging, much to the onlookers’ amusement. He called Trump a "dotard" after the American leader threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea if the US was forced to defend itself following the island nation’s recent testing of nuclear missiles. Interestingly, because of Kim’s frequent missile blasts, Trump had given him the epithet of ‘Rocket Man’. He also branded him a ‘madman’ a day after the reclusive regime hinted it may explode a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean. The war of words is escalating. It is not the end of the bellicose, combative and reckless rhetoric from both sides.

Now, let’s see what vileness Trump and his speech writers hurl at Kim in a bid to outdo Kim’s ‘dotard’. North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency and an address read out on state television quoted Kim as declaring: "I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire."

So, while we get the clear idea that dotard is a tongue-lashing uncomplimentary abuse, what exactly does it mean? As people ran to Merriam-Webster, looking for the meaning of dotard, the dictionary dug out the long-forgotten etymology of the word. It defines dotard as a person in his or her dotage and dotage is “a state or period of senile decay marked by decline of mental poise.” It further explains: Dotard comes from the Middle English word doten (meaning "to dote"). It initially had the meaning of "imbecile" when it began being used in the 14th century. The dictionary digs out this quote from Thomas Randolph’s The Jealous Lovers of 1632:

Rot in thy grave, thou dotard, I defie thee.  

Curst be our day of marriage: shall I nurse  

And play the mother to anothers brat?

Well, well! We all do speak so many different languages, don’t we? It takes me to that myth of the biblical Tower of Babel. The story of Tower of Babel tries to explain why we people speak so many different languages. It says that after the Great Flood, generations of united human beings were speaking one language. As they migrated eastwards and reached the land of Shinar, they build a city and a tower tall enough to reach heaven. The Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.

Well, I am speechless!

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