Mind your language
Image: Roland Tanglao via Flickr (licence)
In conference with a colleague the other day, I noted that the person we were discussing would be unlikely to be attending his son’s parent–teacher interview as he was currently ‘banged up in chokey’.
‘What’s chokey?’ she asked.
‘Prison,’ I replied.
‘Where on earth does that come from?’
I had no idea.
Turns out it’s derived from a Hindi word for ‘shed’ – which also gives a rather chilling insight into the comforts afforded those inhabiting subcontinental prisons. It gets pretty hot in a shed.
There’s a couple of different routes by which a word joins the vast English vocabulary: we enlist a Latin or Greek word to help us describe a new concept or object (the pneumatic tyre, the personal computer); or new words find us, crashing the party uninvited and ready to start meaning things all on their own.
Tom Stoppard in his play Indian Ink manages to cram eight Hindi loan words into a sentence:
I was buying chutney in the bazaar when a thug who had escaped from the chokey ran amok and killed a box-wallah for his loot, creating a hullabaloo and landing himself in the mulligatawny.
But why stop at one language?
If Australian liquor licensing laws didn’t make it verboten, you could cure your Weltschmerz by having a lager with your hamburger at the delicatessen.
In the English language — unlike, say, French, where the old chooks of the Académie Française have been protecting their linguistic purity since 1635 — visitors are always welcome.
