My tryst with Word-making!

Word formation is one of my favorite areas of study. It gets more and more interesting as one gets into it. Blending, Clipping, Duplication, Back-formation, Folk etymology etc are real fun. ‘Manufacturing’ words is better perhaps. It’s really exciting, for instance, to know about the new words like ‘bangalored’ or ‘plutoed.’ New words that come up or existing words that gain currency at a certain time do give a picture of the times. Like the interesting word ‘bangalored’ directly holding a mirror up to the out-sourcing that is part and parcel of this era of Liberalisation, Globalisation and Privatisation. Or for that matter words like ‘thumbing,’ ‘slip of the thumb,’ ‘post modem depression,’ ‘textual satisfaction’ giving a glimpse of the internet and sms savvy generation.
This interest in word formation has perhaps given me the impetus to ‘invent’ a few words of my own! My professional life as a College teacher has given me ample opportunity to coin words and phrases, however bizarre they may be, and how ever adventurous I may seem to be. A few of the words and phrases that I have ‘invented’ in different moments of madness (such moments occurring rather frequently!) are ‘ex-voto syndrome’, ‘class-less society’, ‘Much ado about NAACthing’, ‘Seminary’, and ‘cats, dogs and horses.’ Some of these words and phrases are ‘brand new’, and others are already existing ones with new meanings. These words will without doubt revolve around my professional life and will perhaps hold a mirror up to my professional life.
Teaching English-or for that matter, any subject- has its own hazards. It requires preparation even for a lesson that you are doing not for the first time. So I am usually extra cautious not to start any chapter impromptu. But if anything can go wrong, it will-Murphy’s Law! So one such occasion was when I had to start the chapter How to Buy a House by Durrell. It was a cautious start- not of the T20 kind where caution is thrown to the wind. A sedate Test match like start where you first try to get used to the pitch and the swing! Here the fear was that of a monster word that might come up suddenly for I had not read the chapter earlier. It was a sort of an extempore performance. So I was grinding my way, trying not to stumble upon such a word which I shall not be able to explain to my students. I could not bank on the fact that students usually don’t ask many questions which make our task a cruise! You never know, Murphy’s Law could play the spoil-sport. So I could not take a cavalier attitude. I had to employ my peripheral vision to the limit to go on explaining the lines while looking for that devilish word a few lines hence so that I could fool the students by stopping the class much before that dreaded word comes up. Or I had to slow things up as I the middle overs of an ODI just to preserve my wicket. After all I was on a sticky wicket! And then, the scary word did appear-‘ex voto.’ I had no idea as to what this word meant. At the same time I could not cut a sorry figure in front of my students. After all, I am a teacher- I cannot be seen to be helpless! So what I did was predictable- slowed things up to such an extent that no way I could reach that word before the bell rang. The next day I could come back with a vengeance after looking up all the obstinate words in the lexicon. Since that dreadful day I have started calling the fear of starting a new lesson the ‘ex-voto syndrome.’
Then the College academic season has given a twist to the meaning of ‘class-less society.’(My apologies to Karl Marx). NAAC or no NAAC, from December to April with the Board and University exams in between, it’s virtually a class-less society in the Colleges. After the gala ‘Form fill-up’ (or should it be Form fill-in) there’s hardly any classes in the College. The Terminal examination answer scripts attract no student. For, who cares for marks (read Marx) in a ‘class-less society’!
The NAAC experience with institutions -even bringing up overnight gardens to impress the ‘peerless’ Peer Teams- has made me temper with the title of one of the Bard’s play “Much Ado About NAACthing.”
The NAAC phenomenon of course brought about certain activities on the College Campus with a renewed vigor. There was a time around the first visit of the Peer Team that witnessed a hectic holding of Seminars. We had to take things in our stride as these Seminars varied from the good to the utterly boring! But the sword of NAAC was hanging over us! We had to bear with those. But it was a barrage of Seminars and I felt it was my bounden duty to find a word that signifies a place where a lot many Seminars are held. The moment of madness came up with a gem of an answer- ‘Seminary’!
Then, raining ‘cats and dogs’ is commonplace, but I teach ‘cats, dogs and horses’! Being one who teaches Linguistics, I very much have to deal with Morphology much of which is dominated by these cats, dogs and horses! Morphology studies, in addition to other things, how words change their grammatical states like the formation of the plural. Here one can’t evade these cats, dogs, and horses! Not only for plural, but also for the genitive and the third person singular form of the verb. The rule is that when a singular noun ends in a voiceless sound excepting the sibilants, the final sound of the plural form will be /s/ as in ‘cats’. When it ends in a voiced sound excepting the sibilants, the plural form will end in /z/ as in ‘dogs’, and if the singular noun ends in a sibilant, the plural morpheme will be /iz/. Same is the rule for the genitive formation and the third person singular form of the verb. In a word, I can’t escape these cats, dogs and horses which are the most suitable examples for driving home the rules of inflectional morphology in these cases. A lion’s share of my teaching-plan is taken by these quadrupeds. So, it would not be wrong to say that I teach ‘cats, dogs and horses’!
And then, there’s ‘white tapism’-a play on the familiar ‘red-tapism’. But this one delays the evaluation of scripts. Script evaluation is one pain in the neck of teachers especially for those who teach subjects with a humungous enrollment. The scripts assume deadlier proportions if they are ‘white taped’ for those would invariably contain more pages, and, consequently, would eat up more time. So ‘white tapism’ is the monster to deal with during evaluation time!