Thanks to the gentleman deferred to as ‘VC’ at the TOI empire, I came to know that my fun with words experienced the grand label of ‘neologisms’. Many thanks to my pal, Shashi, I’m putting down a couple of she had been soon after me to ‘make it recognized some way that you believed of them first’. Inventers have patents, hacks only have their columns. If there’s any dispute in excess of my primary authorship, I can also solemnly swear that, like Roger Bacon’s gunpowder vis-à-vis historic China’s, my built-up word was an independent invention.
‘Foeticide’. As the person assigned to crafting the edits on Population at The Statesman by the 1980s, I was the a person keeping the child when the lid blew on this predated edition of female infanticide the scientific software of amniocentesis experienced develop into a murder weapon. So I came up with the admittedly evident expression. In defence of my initially-mover claim, why would anyone anyplace else have required to coin a phrase for a heartless follow which began in India? Not like ‘selfiecide’, which I had occur up with more a short while ago, only to be told that I’d been overwhelmed to it. Similarly with ‘netarati’, in lower-case describing ditto politicians.
‘Doberwoman’ returned to bite me. That’s how I experienced referred to the secretary guarding JRD’s interior sanctum. Decades later on, a lady came up to me and reported in injured tones, “I was Mr Tata’s PA.” Mercificully, my homeopath didn’t dose me with Arsenic Alb soon after being known as a Hahnewoman.
When the city was renamed in 1995, I conjured up ‘Bom-babe vs Mum-bai’, and retained making use of it as handy shorthand. Till this April, when it induced vicious trolling and threats. That column was on how much we were being lacking our element-time help during lockdown, but it was misrepresented as branding all Maharashtrians as domestic ‘bais’. No, ‘Cele-babes’/ ‘Glitzens’ hasn’t unleashed the identical ‘Rabid Action Force’.
Covid facilitated ‘panicdemic’, Pujo-time ‘pandalemic’, ‘pharmoury’, Corona-dhona and the mourning flagged by ‘half-mask’. Social distancing deprived us of ‘friendsing’. Similarly, ‘himmuno-deficiency’ was an absence of access to BFs. Trump’s all-effective rampage by way of a stricken US, created him ‘OmniPOTUS’.
Obstacle me on my statements, I like wordy opponents.
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Alec Clever mentioned: “Jihad? Make like not war, or laws.”
DISCLAIMER : This article is supposed to bring a smile to your deal with. Any link to occasions and figures in true everyday living is coincidental.