lexicon
All about words
Deepti

Play a while

YOU will be happy to know that the phrase ‘don’t worry, be happy’ was born in India in the late 1960s. A spiritual guru called Meher Baba, who was very popular in the West, is credited with this message. Posters that carried the Baba’s picture were printed by his disciples and his smiling face carried the caption: ‘Do your best. Then, don’t worry, be happy’. In 1988, Bobby McFerrin used this catchy message in his Grammy-winning song. It later became the unofficial campaign theme song of George Bush.

Learn a little

The rule is simple: if you want to write well, write well. Puzzled? Your confusion is justified. In school and college, teachers teach all kinds of things to do with language, but nobody tells you to write a lot. Every examination tests you go through writing but how much of writing practice do you put in? Before an examination, candidates say, ‘just learning up a few important points yaar’; nobody says, ‘just practising writing my answers within the time given.’ In an examination, being able to write completely and correctly within the space of a timeframe is impossible unless you have written well, well, earlier.

Intriguing words

The meal enjoyed outdoors, ‘picnic’ from the French pique-nique was ‘loaned’ to English in the middle of the 18th century. It started off and stayed on for quite sometime as a fashionable social occasion to which each participant contributed provisions. Today it is a very informal and casual meal outdoors. But it has taken on another layer of meaning, thanks to our cyber life. PICNIC in IT lingo refers to a situation in which the IT people are called in to fix a computer-related problem but there is nothing wrong with the computer. In such an eventuality, most of the time, the problem is due to the user’s inexperience or incompetence. Hence the term PICNIC: Problem in Chair Not in Computer.

Precise usage

Repetition of message is a common problem in Indian users of English, leading to grammatical problems too. For instance: ‘repeating again’, ‘return back, ‘wrong mistake’ and ‘enter into’.