While there are some who invent imaginative new words thereby contributing to the art of making language richer, there are others who self-appointedly sit on language monitoring committees to monitor the influx of new words and decide which new words deserve an entry in the hallowed English dictionaries. Who gavith them the right?
And then there is the Indian media, suffering from severe lack of sense of discrimination, which starts drooling with excitement whenever anything remotely connected to Indian cultural landmass gets approval from westerners. A press release by a little-known American company that makes money by monitoring new media for mentioning its clients, announcing the crowning of one millionth word should ordinarily have been brushed aside without a thought, but the inclusion of two words having an India-connection (Slumdog & Jai Ho) was enough enticement for our media to treat a publicity gimmick by a private company as yet another shining example of India's cultural impact on the world.
Would we have stopped using the words Slumdog or Jai Ho had this monitoring agency not included these words in its expanding list? Has our national pride suffered a dent because Slumdog is listed at 9,99,997 and not at 10,00,000? If not, why do such crappy crowning ceremonies conferring chance celebritiness to accidental new words become news?
As a response to such senseless pandering to juvenile fancies, I too have created my own list of new words and phrases that deserve an entry in the English dictionary.
Countupation - (noun - Counting clowns) - The silly and absolutely pointless occupation of keeping a count of new inclusions of items in a given branch of knowledge that are indelineatable due to lack of accepted and clear-cut criteria for inclusion or exclusion of such items in that branch of knowledge.
Languappropriate - Attempt to appropriate or assume pseudo-control/ownership of an entire language through insidious means such as setting up a language monitoring company, unauthorizedly taking up the role of deciding which words deserve an inclusion in official lexicon and pompously crowning words arbitrarily with meaningless titles.
Authoreverence - (reverence or worship of authority) Obsessive obeisance by mainstream media to traditional institutions of authority or institutions pretending to be institutions of authority (like Oxford English Dictionary, Global Language Monitor etc) while ignoring the contribution of popular barometers (such as Urbandictionary.com which boasts a dictionary of 4 million words) to the profusion of new words and phrases.
(National) Gloryearning - Excessive yearning or hankering for national glory. Often exhibited by media by giving over-importance to international competitions of no significance, and by treating every international contest featuring any person, product or an abstract idea related to the nation, however tangential the relation might be, as a matter of national pride and glory.
2 Wisecracks!:
What does the press do, dude? One one hand, you are asking the press to come up with the 6 o' clock news, Breakfast news, lunch news and dinner news. On the other hand, you want them to give sensible news items.
The customers want 24x7 news items and they want something new everytime. In this mayhem, all that is rubbish makes it to the headlines.
But, yeah - it is a worrying trend that the Indians yearn for westerners to approve their culture. It doesn't happen the other way around. When words like table, chair or for that matter rock (music) are used in the Hindi vocabulary, do we see the westerners rejoice?
Indians have a unique and eclectic culture - and Indians should be proud of that fact. They don't need to be approved by westerners.
Ok, never call me "dude". I hate to be called a dude. And I also hate the frequent and frivolous use of this expression(though you're not guilty of this heinous crime yet).
On a more serious note, I don't crave for breakfast, lunch or supper or tea-time news or in-between-snack news for that matter. Why? There a million different ways of filling up these slots. Filtering out the news such as the one concerning this post just goes to show that most of the newspapers are mere tabloids(which BTW is a fact they don't accept).
Heck, the word "aloo" was included in some random dictionary sometime back and you had Inzamam-ul Haq strewn all over our 'national' dailies!(This was some two-three years back)
I completely agree. It is a worrying trend, but sadly, not a new one.
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