The headline screamed “Bench comes down heavily on inspector”. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was a case of falling furniture in a police station. The news was actually about a High Court judge being very critical of the conduct of a police official.
Newspaper headlines are often a cross between idiom and jargon and abound in the use of words with multiple meanings; yet a reader is able to instantly comprehend the correct meaning in relation to the context. Headlines such as “Sindhu crashes out in semis”, “Rahul lashes out at Modi” and “BJP slams Congress” are obviously dictated by the need for brevity and at the same time, to convey the message forcefully, which perhaps explains the underlying theme of violence!
That may not always be appropriate as in “16-day campaign against gender violence kicks off ”, a rather awkward title for a news item about a campaign against violence. Sometimes, idiomatic headlines can result in interesting juxtaposition of words as in “Security beefed up near Karnataka temple”.
With globalisation and liberalisation, business reporting has evolved its own catchphrases and jargon. So today, all companies are players, business units are verticals, loss is pressure on the bottom line, to review is to revisit, we do not think ahead or plan but strategise, expenditure has become spend, one does not cut one’s losses and run, but only exits, ABC Airline is not bankrupt but is merely facing a liquidity crunch and so on. And you do not just commence a project or campaign but always “kick-start” it, though the original activity of kick-starting has become almost redundant with the advent of push-button starters in two-wheelers.
The IT sector has quietly hijacked the words “professional” and “technology” and its slang “techie”, almost implying that lesser mortals working in other fields of engineering and technology are blundering amateur tinkers.
In more than a century and a half of its existence, the Railways in India have spawned their own quaint language. A coach or a wagon when taken for repairs becomes “sick”, a “running room” is not a room for workouts but a place for taking rest for the “running” staff, who incidentally are not running away from anything but are only staff such as drivers (now called loco pilots) and guards who run (operate) trains.
Online of yore
Long before the phrase “on line” became linked to the Internet, in the Railways, it meant being out of one’s headquarters on a tour of duty or inspection. A call boy is not the male version of his more notorious female counterpart, but refers to a messenger who used to serve notice or “call” (in the days before mobile phones) to a driver or guard to appear on duty. Footplate has nothing to do with footwear but refers to the “cab” of a locomotive. “Odd hours” is indeed odd; it refers to midnight! The list is endless.
Meanwhile, long gone are the days when a platform usually meant the area in a railway station from where you boarded, or alighted from, a train.
One day many decades ago, during the heyday of the steam locomotive, I found my colleague, the locomotive maintenance engineer, an Anglo-Indian and Second World War veteran, bemoaning the abysmal standards to which stenography had sunk. During an inspection visit to a locomotive maintenance depot, he had observed that a locomotive required immediate rectification of the excessive clearances in its “motion parts”, the mechanism that converts the to and fro movement of the pistons to rotary motion of the wheels. In railway parlance, this condition is called “lost motion”. However, in the draft of the inspection report dictated by my colleague, his stenographer had typed: “Locomotive YP 2345 has loose motion, needs immediate attention.”
Surely, the noted economist John Maynard Keynes did not have such linguistic googlies in mind when he said, “Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.”
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