Whose English is it Anyway?

LIFE IS A constant battle where we are mere warriors. The one who can overcome all the hurdles and come out victorious is the real winner. So keep fighting, because you can’t afford to loose the...

Hey, hold on a second! Was it actually what I read or did my vision dip suddenly? Okay, let’s rewind.

...because you can’t afford to loose the war.

There goes another brick in the wall of English slip-ups. Phew!

Facebook statuses provide an interesting glimpse into an individual’s life, his thoughts and musings (this isn’t applicable to every one of course; some just do Ctrl C + Ctrl V). So I frequently keep on checking and commenting on my friends’ status updates, and that’s how I came across this catastrophic quote. We definitely want to win every battle in life, but if we don’t win we lose, we don’t loose! Urghh! It’s really annoying to find people repeating this mistake of adding an extra ‘O’ to the word. I’ve noticed bunches of examples of people (including my friends all of whom are gonna kill me after reading this), mostly on the internet, writing the word ‘loose’ when what they really mean is ‘lose’. Is it just an innocent typo, or do they need a quick recap of their long forgotten Wren & Martin lessons? Silly!

So guys, when your girlfriend dumps you, you lose her, not loose her (just try and imagine the situation of loosing someone’s girlfriend!). Similarly, when it comes to my weight, I would like to lose it as much as I can, not loose weight. You can’t afford to be a looser all the time!

Such goofs are commonplace in our everyday life. We might take pride in claiming that we walk English, talk English and eat English, but many a times what we end up doing is talk shitty English. So what if there’s an extra ‘O’? The point is to communicate and that’s what we all do, you might argue. That’s precisely the commonest — and the lamest — excuse I always confront. I mean, what’s so cool about speaking wrong English?

Reading so far, if you are wondering who the hell am I to give so much gyaan on English speaking or whether you’ve by mistake logged in to a ‘learn proper English’ site, please stop wondering and read on.

I, by no means, assert myself as Shakespeare’s godson or the next-in-line editor of Oxford’s dictionary. Nor do I proclaim that I speak impeccable English. However I try to stay away from committing such faux pas, though not quite successfully always. A few days back I had a similar foot-in-your-mouth situation when my friend asked me whether I was leaving for home early. I replied, “No dude, I’m here only.”

Here only! How on earth could I say that! Not that it’s incorrect, but perhaps we Indians will never be able to get rid of the habit of using an unnecessary only at the end of the sentence. Need more proof? Sample this: once while travelling with a friend I asked him to take a particular route, to which he replied, “Dude, that will be a long cut. Let’s take the other way.” Here’s another one: “The outing has been preponed to next Sunday,” I heard a friend of mine saying. I could never make them understand that there are no English words as long cut and prepone, and they ain’t in any way opposites of ‘short cut’ or ‘postpone’.

That’s Indianised English, goes the popular defence. And it’s true in a way. After all, these words have blended so profusely in our lingo that we hardly get amazed when someone asks us, “What’s your goodname, Sir?” Ask this question to any gora and all you’ll get in reply is protruding eyes! Then there’s the vernacular practice of saying ‘Mention not’ in response to ‘Sorry’, which ideally and grammatically should be banned from our vocab. So next time, you hear the word ‘Sorry’, you know what you ought not to mention!

Use of plurals is our forte, anywhere and everywhere. That’s why the bus conductor shouts ‘Aaste, ladies’ (Stop, the ladies is getting down!) even when there’s a single woman getting down from the bus. That’s why we unhesitatingly say ‘this toffee costs just one rupees’ without noticing that there exists a fine difference between Rupee and Rupees. That’s why we use the word ‘anyways’ so confidently that we’ve forgotten it actually doesn’t need an ‘S’ for support. That’s why we pop up in the middle of a conversation ‘yaar, ek jokes sunata hoon’ and everybody ends up LOLing (at the jokes, not the goof) Anyways, who cares?

Finally comes the googly — stressing words. We are so fond of emphasising whatever we are saying that we don’t shy away from putting two dispensable (and at times contradictory) words in the same bracket, giving some of the funniest combinations. Sample these: real fact, clearly misunderstood, exact estimate, act naturally, found missing, fully empty. I bet you must’ve heard the backbencher guy in the college saying, “Sir, can you please repeat the last line again?” Or one of your friends asking you angrily, “When will you return my Step Up DVD back?”

If you are still wondering what’s wrong with the above sentences or words, may your soul rest in peace.

P.S. – This is something is googled the other day. Remember we used to chant the numerical tables in our childhood? Two one za two, two two za four blah blah blah. Ever wondered what does the word ‘za’ stands for? The multiplication sign of course, would be the unanimous answer. Boy, here lies the catch. It’s actually supposed to be read as ‘two ones are two’, ‘two twos are four’. Now before you decide to guillotine me for this pakau post, think over it (the za theory I mean, not the guillotine thingy)!