Sacred Thread.

This morning, I went with Ujwal to a thread ceremony among her relations, the so-called Upanayna, the second birth of the twice-born (dvija) Brahmin, Kshatriya or Vaishya male. The first birth in the womb is followed by the second birth when the gayatri mantra is received. The three-threaded, three-stranded yajnopavitam (sacred thread) worn by him thenceforth is a reminder to the Brahmachari to be pure in thought (Gayatri), word (Sarasvati) and deed (Savitri). The Jewish Bar Mitzwah and the Zoroastrian Navjote are also rite-of-passage rituals (in both cases for both boys and girls) with similar intent. The crowd was naturally Pathare Prabhu, very hip and prosperous folks one and all with a globally spread diaspora and, surprisingly, still sticking to age-old traditions. The family of the new Brahmachari had come from Dubai to get the ceremony performed. Related posts: Breaking News. http://digbig.com/4yppm. Bad boy. http://digbig.com/4yppp. Not my best friend’s wedding. http://digbig.com/4yppn.

Talk to me in Web 2.0.

I am, you could almost say, a man of (few?) words. On my word of honour, boys and girls. Words are my preoccupation. Or, shall we say my occupational accomplices? Playing with words comes to me fairly easily. I revel in it. I am word-friendly. I wish I were Lord of the Words. But I find myself at a loss for words far too often to harbour any such delusions of grandeur. http://digbig.com/4xsfr. My love affair with words is probably why I so highly value Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen and even Seinfeld http://digbig.com/4xsfw & http://digbig.com/4xsfx. My antennae, though, are always out for the meaning of words, even subtle nuanaces. The context and the subtext of word usage http://digbig.com/4xsft intrigue and often amuse me. For me, "There's a blaze of light/In every word," as Leonard Cohen puts it so eloquently in his Hallelujah. http://digbig.com/4xsfn. Take, for instance, the way Gmail insists on calling every exchange of email between two people, maybe a bit coyly and self-consciously, "conversation". That's Web 2.0 talk, dude. Keeping in touch. That's what Web 2.0 and social networking are all about, after all. At least, that's the mantra of the Web 2.0 gurus. Having been in advrtising long enough, though, I am painfully aware that many of the so-called breakthroughs in theoretical thinking are only a new use of old words. Or, the same old words in a new context. http://digbig.com/4xsfs.

English idiom. Spanish origin.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. When Don Quixote, the “first modern” novel by Shakespeare’s Spanish contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), and the most widely published book in the world after the Bible, was rendered into English, several now well-known idiomatic expressions entered the linguistic mainstream. Noteworthy among these are: "sky's the limit"; "thanks for nothing"; "a finger in every pie"; "paid in his own coin"; "a wild-goose chase"; "mind your own business"; "think before you speak"; "forgive and forget"; "to smell a rat"; "turning over a new leaf"; "the haves and have-nots"; "born with a silver spoon in his mouth"; "the pot calling the kettle black"; and "you've seen nothing yet." Where did I find this gem? In the serendipitous ocean that’s the World Wide Web. http://coloquio.com/famosos/cervante.html.
P.S. : I have a rather unusual Shakespeareana of contemporary origin: After-Dinner Shakespeare by Barry Kraft, a set of one hundred parlour cards with questions and answers about the playwright and his works. It is published by Viking. I got it from Strand Book Stall along with a similar product on Freud of which I wrote in the previous post.

Pop goes a vogue. Powered by style?

Words and phrases have fascinated me all my life. I somehow manage to ‘sense’ a coming trend in usage as it’s catching on, more often than not. ‘Powered by’ is a vogue phrase I’ve often noticed in web writing but never really paused to think about. A while back, I read Ken Fasimpaur’s post, ‘Friday Forbidden Phrase: POWERED BY’, where he calls it “a fine illustration of linguistic devolution”. I’ll quote some of the interesting bits: “Some forbidden words are manifestly evil from the moment they're coined, created only as marketing speak or existing only to evoke faux novelty. (Webinar anyone? After all, ‘web seminar’ is so lengthy and unhip.) [A relevant digression with your leave, folks: ‘Faux’ too is a vogue word that ought to be verboten. ‘Verboten’ likewise, for that matter.] “In other cases though, perfectly valid pieces of language are slowly corrupted until there's scarcely any hope left for them,” he argues. About ‘Powered by’, he has this to say: “At first glance, it's a nice functional piece of language. In a statement like ‘Powered By Apache’ where it names the web server software that make (sic!) a site operate, it's quite descriptive.” With ‘Powered By Novell’ and ‘Powered By CNN’, though, there’s quite a serious problem. “Can an entire company truly be said to drive a web site? Is CNN a steam engine or a web server? A news engine?” is his legitimate query. Then, he gives an extreme example from “this wonderful ad from Cisco”: “The main headline, run across a picture of a newborn child and happy mother … [is] …‘8 lbs. 3 ozs. powered by Cisco’, That's right – your child's motive force is a router company who drives smart people into the arms of its competitors!” http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/3574.