Peppered Words
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When I was a graduate student years ago in Germany I worked for two semesters with a renowned lexicographer. Austere but kindly, my professor dressed invariably in black suits – which, with his gaunt features and fragile build, gave him a somewhat cadaverous appearance. But despite his diminutive build there was nothing in the least faint or moribund about him when he tackled a lexicographical problem; I quickly learned, in fact, that he had quite a pugnacious disposition. During a rabies scare in the region he remarked to me, “If I develop rabies I know exactly whom I am going to bite.”
But his fiercest battles were with words. Words were unruly, restive, ever prone to mutiny; he was especially wary of what he called “ghost words,” vocables invented by unscrupulous earlier lexicographers and poets and smuggled into the lexicon. Against these my professor was pitiless. When he exposed such a “ghost,” he pounced like a feral cat on a blinkered mouse; he took a savage pleasure in expunging fraudulence. But his greatest joy was to snare that rarest of flitting specimens in the lexical underbrush: the hapax legoumenon, Greek for a word attested once, and once only, in the literature. On such unusual occasions, seized with quiet triumph, he would gloat for a while and then, with a flourish, extract two ripe congratulatory apples from his little desk, one of which he handed to me with the unexpected comment, “Es putzt die Zahne!” “It cleans the teeth!”
Since those distant days, I’ve considered lexicographers to be the wranglers of the literary world, rounding up stubborn mustangs and obstreperous colts and herding them into the strict corrals of their categories, coaxing them sometimes with apples, at others with the lash. My professor worked on Classical Arabic, which constitutes an unusually slippery herd of immense extent. But the direst roundups must be faced by lexicographers of our own English language, that most accommodating, indeed, promiscuous, of tongues. Give us a new word and no matter how far-flung or exotic its origins – whether Samoan, Basque or Ossetic – we English it.
A dictionary that exemplifies this tendency, and one of my own all-time favorites, is Henry Yule and A. C. Burrells’s “Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary.” This eccentric work used to be hard to find and quite expensive but is now available in a ridiculously cheap British paperback (Wordsworth Reference, 1,021 pages, L2.99) and in several variations online. The book first appeared in 1866, when the British Raj was still in full swing. All the words from numerous Indian languages – from Tamil and Malayalam to Sanskrit and Goan-Portuguese – that had entered the language by that date may be found here, often in lengthy entries that themselves comprise small biographies of odd and exotic “English” words. Burrell began the project to while away his idle hours in the Madras Civil Service; after his death, in 1882, it was continued and completed by Yule, whom Burrell had enlisted from Palermo, of all places. Yule referred to their joint achievement fondly as that “portly double columned edifice.”
And what an edifice it is! Here, in rows as disciplined as Ghurkas, you’ll find “cowry” and “cowcolly,” “gong” and “goorou” (guru), “chuckerbutty” and “chintz,” “patchouli” and “pagoda,” not merely inventoried but fleshed out with etymological histories, quotations to illustrate usage, and exceedingly meticulous definitions. Burrell and Yule were both voracious readers and both had solid backgrounds in Greek and Latin, as well as in Hebrew and several Indian languages, and so were able to festoon their entries with learned – and often rather weird – citations from a huge panoply of original sources.
For all the class-consciousness and snobbery of the British in India, not to mention the rigid caste-distinctions of Hindus, and others, words were no respecters of boundaries but intermingled, forged liaisons, staged torrid trysts, and ended up in marriages, both of love and of convenience. Clearly, Burrell and Yule, whatever their pious disclaimers, reveled in this polyglot orgy. “Hobson-Jobson” is a kind of lexical curry, and the entry on that term gives a good illustration of its method.
After noting that curry “consists of meat, fish, fruit or vegetables, cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric,” they remark that “a little of this gives flavor to a large mess of rice” and trace the word to the Tamil kari. There follows a discourse on comparative curries, ranging from Persian pilau to Egyptian ruzz mufalfal or “peppered rice.” The entry then moves on to ancient references, from the Greek Athenaeus to the fifth-century Mahavanso, who wrote in Pali.
A capsule account of turmeric comes next, with a startling citation from an old English poem about King Richard the Lion-Hearted, who is said to have dined on the curried head of a Saracen. Further references to the word and the dish in South India, Java, and Canton ensue; the whole entry concludes with a series of quotes from authors ranging in date from 1502 to 1874. Thus, Blackwood’s Magazine yields up the grandiloquent sentence, “The craving of the day is for quasi-intellectual food, not less highly peppered than the curries which gratify the faded stomach of a returned Nabob” – a proposition that may be quite as apt today as it was in 1874.
What lifts “Hobson-Jobson” out of the merely antiquarian and the fusty is the almost lubricious pleasure its compilers exhibit in exploring their beloved “Anglo-Indian.” Underlying their erudite citations and painstaking disquisitions is a word-lust almost Joycean in intensity and thrust. And, in fact, to plunge into this bizarre trove is to find oneself rapidly dizzied and raddled by the sheer extravagance of outlandish vocables. What words are here! Cavalance and gambroon, kuzzilbash and goont, salempoory and shulwaurs, cheek-by-jowl with such more acclimatized terms as persimmon, opium, muddle, lemon, and jungle. Nor are these mere curiosities of vocabulary: Perusal of “Hobson-Jobson” offers considerable insight into the social, ethical, and religious mores of a vast world now lost to us. As for the religious aspect, the very phrase “Hobson-Jobson” is itself nothing more than a garbled rendition of the Arabic exclamation “Ya Hasan! Ya Husayn!” which Shiite Muslims cry out during their annual lamentations for the murdered grandsons of the prophet.
My German professor used to declare, “Dictionaries are for reading.” He had no respect for those who merely consult the dictionary out of passing need as a sort of verbal flirtation, leading at best to a lexical one-night-stand. Certainly “Hobson-Jobson” is a dictionary to read, and I suspect that like me, you will find it hard to put down. It may not clean your teeth, but it will pepper your palate deliciously.