Horlicks!

One of the peculiar practices in the Sinha Sadan household in the 90s was that all the 'children', which included middle school going kids like yours truly to my much elder college going cousins, had to have a steaming glass of Horlicks in the evenings before we all sat down to study. Given that Horlicks has always been promoted as bed time drink which induces sleep, this was clearly not a very well researched practice. Effective or not, this was the beginning of my love for Horlicks. Horlicks was also the only malted food which could be had with steaming water instead of milk and given my fashionable childhood distaste for milk, it was but natural that Horlicks was soon my favorite malted food drink.

Horlicks, therefore for me was reminiscent of a time of childhood innocence, Sinha Sadan evenings, my beloved late grandmother and being picked on by my brother and cousins. Therefore, I was amazed to discover, while looking it up last night that it was used as one of the more colorful of profanities. Brits have a way with swear words - Bollocks, Bugger, Bloody! Horlicks for its peculiar parentage and general incongruity stands with the very best of them.

Horlicks, as a malted milk powder was invented in the early 1870s by the Horlicks brothers, James and William. They were Englishmen from Gloucestershire who immigrated to the US settling down in the dairy state of Wisconsin around the same time they came up with the formula for the malted food powder called 'Diastoid'. Soon, the product became extremely popular not just as an easily digestible children drink as it was intended to be but as a soda fountain drink in drugstores and they thankfully dropped the cardiovascular sounding 'Diastoid' for the family name. While the first Horlicks factories were set up in America and in some ways pioneered the malted drink phenomenon, the product attained its real fame and success in Britain and after the Second World War, in India. Not many people are aware that a mountain range in the Antarctica is named after the drink for the nourishment it provided to Richard Byrd's men in the expedition, not to mentioned funding by James Horlicks.

How it became a popular profanity in Britain is not entirely clear. It is believed that it was an upper society fad in the 1980s, given that it appeared in the Official Sloane Ranger Handbook in 1982. It seems likely that it was used in polite societies as a substitute for the more direct 'Bollocks' because of the similarity in the way they sound. Nicholas Sheering wrote in Financial Times that the origin of this expression is 'to make a mess of' for it is very easy to not mix the powder properly and mess up the drink. Whatever the origin might be, the terms was most popular as a swear word in the 1980 and early 1990s, when the company famously tried to use it to their advantage, what seems to be an iconic ad. A housewife has a particularly bad day in which she shuttles from one disaster to the next, settling down with a drink of the malted powder at the end and predictably mouthing Horlicks in a tired, relieved profanity kind of a way.

Jack Straw, the then British Foreign Secretary used the term 'a complete horlicks' in 2003 years after it had gone out of vogue causing reactions from nit just etymologists but also conspiracy theorists who cried foul claiming he had been paid by Glaxo-Smithkline, the new owners of the brand to say so. Considering, in 2004, Glaxo Smithkline hired a PR consultant to help them discourage the slang use of the word, this does not seem likely. Incidentally, if anyone knows where I can find that ad online, please let me know.

Durga's vehicle, cheetah and English words derived from Hindi

A couple of days ago, over dinner, I got into a debate with a few friends over what was Goddess Durga's chosen mode of transport. Bhavya, who is suitably named after the Goddess, pointed out that the fact that she was referred to as 'sherawali' clearly suggested it was the lion. I had always been under the impression that her vehicle was the tiger. A cursory picture search on Rishabh's cool new Blackberry showed her mounted on a tiger, and the question seemed settled.

But, I brought up the matter with my uncle when I went home and the issue got more complicated. My uncle insisted it was the tiger, my cousin Shipra, also funnily named after the Goddess, felt it was the lion and the servant added his two bits stating the issue was redundant as she came on a different vehicle every year. A search on Google proved even more inconclusive with divergent views supporting the two and even throwing Gajasimha, some ancient Oriya mythical animal with an elephant's head and a lion's body into the fray. Finally, we called my grandmother who affirmed that she had nine vehicles in all, but the simha was her prime mode of transport. The simha primarily means the lion but can be supposed to refer to most of the Indian big cats, including both lions and tigers.

The feline debate for the evening wasn't restricted to Durga's vehicle. After dinner, we headed to Prithvi for a play, where the stage was replete with fake leopard heads, which inspired a semantic discussion on the Hindi name for the leopard.(tendua) Cheetah, as we know is also the Hindi name for cheetah, and it is one of the many words which entered the English language during the period of colonization of India. Other interesting ones include the following.

Avatar comes from the Hindi word avatar, derived from the Sanskrit word avatara(root ava = down, tarati = cross over) meaning a descendant of a deity. The sense in which it was used in the movie means online virtual forms which comes from the 80s video game Habitat, popularized by the Neal Stephenson novel, Snow Crash.

Anaconda was used for the first time to describe a now extinct South Indian python, known in Tamil as Hennakandya. The Tamil snake was nothing like the South American boas and it was by pure accident that the term came to be applied to the snake we know as Anaconda today

Blighty comes from the Hindustani vernacular for Brits during period of colonization. The Hindustani word for foreign country is vilayat, (Arabic in origin) and for foreigner vilayati, the more corrupted form being bilaiti. It gained prominence during the First World War, when the phrase ‘Dear Old Blighty’ was used commonly by homesick British soldiers. It was used even now more commonly by expatriates Englishmen to refer affectionately to the motherland.

Laconic

Laconic is on my favorite words in English language. Much like its meaning, it sounds cold, distant and aloof. It means a very concise, pithy or terse statement. It comes from the Greek word Lakanicos, which meant to act like a lakon or a laconian i.e. a native of Laconia. Laconia is a region in the southern part of the Greece. It surrounded the famous city of Sparta. Laconic, as we know is the verbal equivalent of the word 'Spartan.' The Spartans were renowned for their military prowess, austerity and pithiness of speech. The Spartans were not big on arts and literature, which may have been responsible of their terse and uncomplicated speech. Socrates was of the opinion that the Spartans were actually highly philosophical people but concealed their wisdom through the terseness of their speech for they wanted to be known for their military prowess.

The famous Spartan dry humor is the sense in which we understand the word 'laconic' now. It is interesting to note that it was in clear contrast to the pointed and delicate wit of their arch-rivals, the Athenians which led to the phrase 'Atiic's salt.'

One of the most famous examples of the dry laconic wit comes from the time of invasion of Philip of Macedonia. Having captured most of the Greek cities, he sent a message to Sparta, stating, "If I win this war, I will destroy your lands, slay your people and raze your city." The famous Spartan reply was the one word, "If."

Another story goes that when Leonidas was guarding the narrow mountain pass at Thermopylae with just 7,000 men against Xerxes' Persian army, he was offered that his men would be spared if they gave up their arms. Leonidas replied "Molon labe", which translates to "Come and take them". Today this is the motto of the Greek 1st Army Corps.

Another famous incident before the Battle of Thermopylae was when the Spartan Dienekes was told that the Persians were so huge in number that when they they would attack in unison, their arrows would bolt out the sun. His response was typcally, laconic. "So much the better, we'll fight in the shade." This is the motto of the Greek 20th Armored Division.

My favorite Spartan example of laconicity relates to Polycratidas. He, when sent as a diplomat to the Persians was asked if he had come in a public or private capacity. He replied, "If we succeed, public; if not, private."

The first recorded appearance of the word laconic in English seem to be in the 1580s when James VI write in a letter "excuis me for this my laconike writting I ame in suche haist." Next, Francis Beaumont used the phrase 'laconic brevity' in his work, The Little French Lawyer in 1625.

Calculus

In 17th century in Italy, a version of abacus was used as a meter in the carriages to calculate the distance traveled. It was an innovative device wherein after a certain number of revolutions of the wheel, a pebble would fall into the lower box of the device. At the end of the journey, the number of pebbles in the lower box would be counted to calculate the distance traveled. The pebbles used for this were typically made of limestone or chalk. Calx is the Latin word for the same. This was the root for the Latin word calculus which meant calculus and reckoning, and also, pebbles.

Incidentally, the word chalk which is derived from the Old English word cealc, has also its root in calx. This path of calx also led to dental term calculus which means tartar i.e. a hard crust of calcium salts and food particles on the teeth. This usage has been traced back to 1732. The root calx, itself goes back to the Greek word khalix which means small pebble which was in use way back in ancient times.

The distict of Chelsea in UK (formerly called Chelchuthe (1300), O.E. Chelchede (1086), Celchyth (789), Caelichyth (767)) is also named so for it was probably here that chalk or limestone was unloaded from Kent, thus, leading to a combination of the Old English roots cealc and hyth (landing place). As per the Online Etymology Dictionary, Chelsea became a female proper noun much later, and gained prominence only from the 1970s. It was amongst the Top 100 names for girls from 1984 to 1998, peeking at No. 15 in 1992, probably something to do with Bill Clinton's acsendedncy to President's office in that year.

Other words from the same root include calcium, crayon, calcarius, calculate. There are other words like calcaneus, calceus which are related to the heel bone which are derived from the Proto-Indo-European root (s)kel which means to bend and led to an entirely different Late Latin word calx.