Turning English on its head!

Satish K Sharma

FRIends, there is no shortage of funds for the promotion of our new product but we must achieve our sales targets. Let’s, therefore, tighten our belts…’, the territory manager was addressing his sales representatives.  

‘Have I heard correctly?’ someone in the audience wondered. Well, she had, and the speaker had clearly not meant to enforce austerity. All that the boss wanted was to make his field staff to ‘pull up their socks’. But, obviously, he thought that would not suffice. After all, if you really want your team to get going, a tighter belt is a better bet than a stretched-up pair of socks. 

Anyway, most of the audience got the sense right because none was innocent of the common Hindi phrase — kamar kasna, which means the same as pulling up one’s socks. The chief had only rendered it into English literally, and had, yet, managed to hit the bull’s eye, so to say. 

In meetings, conferences and private conversations in India, one often comes across such gems without any loss of sense. Whatever the puritans might say, the desi twist to English phrases does no harm to the language. On the contrary, it often enriches the flavour, much like what mango ripple does to vanilla ice-cream.     

A friend and cop is fond of using ‘lame duck’ instead of ‘sitting duck’. Thus you hear, ‘Naxals find security forces as lame ducks during an ambush because they overlook the basics of tactics.’ One is never inclined to correct him. Isn’t a ‘lame duck’ nearly as vulnerable as a sitting one in the face of imminent danger?           

A phrasal twist can even lend poetic beauty to an otherwise staid expression. When I heard someone using ‘Hobson’s option’, it made me wonder if it wasn’t an improvement on the original. I am sure even Mr Hobson would agree that it has the beat and rhythm which ‘Hobson’s choice’ does not.      

As a nation comprising the largest number of English-speaking people, we can even claim the right to turn English idioms on their head, as some of us do in our flow, and without hurting the message. So, the stickler need not get his knickers in a twist on hearing ‘feathers of the same bird’. Actually if we read carefully, it is more precise than the original. 

Similarly, though the rule of logic says that the reverse is not always true, who can dispute that ‘where there is fire, there is smoke’ is as much of a truism as vice versa?