Changing colours

EXPRESSIONS often begin life in quite a mundane manner. The original usage is quite utilitarian and ordinary. Time blurs the original usage and the expression after being used in different contexts becomes quite colourful. For instance, taking someone down a peg or two sounds quite graphic. It really did originate with the use of pegs. According to an old naval practice, a visitor was honoured by raising the ship’s colours. The greater the visitor, the higher on the mast did the flag fly and the honour accorded varied as per the flag’s height. A system of pegs held the flag in position. Hence, lowering the flag a peg of two meant taking the visitor down a peg or two.

Another interesting naval expression is son of a gun. For us, a son of a gun is just a person who makes trouble, a mischief-monger. The expression was a polite word for bastard in the eighteenth century. In those times, when a woman lived on board and delivered a baby while at sea, a makeshift maternity area would be set up. This was usually a closed off area on the deck near the midship cannon. If the paternity of the child was not certain, the ship’s log recorded the father, as ‘gun’—so, ‘son of a gun’. The word bastard itself has a colourful beginning. It comes from the old French files de bast, son of a pack-saddle. Given the long-drawn out nature of olden battles and the constant slow travelling, the illegitimate child was presumed to have been fathered among the pack-saddles by an anonymous soldier or mule-driver.

Spick and span is quite commonly used to describe something smart and new or neat and clean. It comes from shipbuilding, where a spic was a spike or nail and a span was a plank or shaving of wood. Initially, the phrase was spick and span new, meaning that the ship was absolutely new, from nails to wood.

Paraphernalia could mean all the above — as in the paraphernalia of a language. It could also mean a group of people or things. Politicians never travel without their full paraphernalia! In former times, the word referred to a specific set of things. When a woman married, her property was divided into two categories — her dowry, which became the property of her husband; and her other possessions, that belonged to her. The legal term for the latter was paraphernalia which came via the Latin parapherna which itself was borrowed from the Greek parapherna. Para meant beside and pherne meant dowry. The later meaning of clutter or impedimenta shows the dismissive light in which a woman’s odds and ends were viewed.

Tap-root

Lihaf in Arabic refers to a thick quilt. After Hindi ‘borrowed’ the word, lihaf grew in meaning to encompass any kind of covering during sleep. Similarly tel in Sanskrit refers to sesame oil alone. In Hindi, tel is any kind of oil, edible or not. Kushal in Sanskrit was an adjective for a pupil who brought Kusha.In Hindi, it has become an adjective for anyone who is smart or proficient.

— Deepti