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During the utterly frustrating two years of my research scholar-hood between 1963 and 1965 at my university in Vizagh, I did many weird things on the side just to beguile my ample leisure. Like learning to cook on the kerosine stove, a bit of sanskrit, a bit of music (oh, no!), a bit of coaching (most boring), a bit of reading English novels, and a lot of useless thinking.
One day I was scared that my scholarship would soon be terminated and I would be penniless. So I went to the nearby Siva Typing Institute to learn a bit of typing so that I could keep the wolf from the door when needed.
The graying teacher there took Rs 30 as registration fees and led me to the nearest available typewriter, seated me on the stool before it, and helped my fingers to the keyboard....four on the left and four on the right.
And asked me to hit: asdf and jump to g and jump back to f on the left side. And then come left with my right fingers hitting ;lkj and jump to h and return to j. It all looked so weird. And I asked the old man why the keyboard is so funny and why not abcdefghijkl...
He smiled as if I were a moron and replied this arrangement is user-friendly (we didn't trade this word till 3 decades later). Well, if you thought I didn't know it...it is supposed to be 'ergonomic'.
User-friendly, my foot! It is actually supposed to be typewriter-friendly. Google tells me that the earliest mechanical typewriters had this problem that when you hit neighboring keys too fast (like I in a hurry), the jumping hammers used to get jammed up and stick to each other.
Like for instance, when you type an 'a' and then a 'n' the most-likely next letter would be 'd' to make it 'and'.
Google Help tells me when I type 'a' and then 'n' I better type the next letter 'd' alright, but in these four possible combinations:
but not the simple 'and'! Google knows that I am hitting my keyboard from Hyderabad. The first help it offers is the most popular bank in Hyderabad, the second one is a much-hyped news portal, the third is my alma mater and the fourth is a Telugu newspaper-cum-TV channel.
While all I wanted was just to type 'and'. To hell with Google Help...
Anyway, when you want to type the most popular word 'and' and want to keep the mechanical typewriter from jamming up, you want to separate the key for 'n' from 'a' and 'd'...that is why the letter 'n' in the QWERTY keyboard is pushed into the right basement while 'a' and 'd' are next neighbors in the left home row.
Mechanical typewriters are now museum pieces but not the QWERTY keyboard...it is there everywhere, even in Ishani's cell phone...like sin.
I had a rather weird thing with 'and'. When I was walking along the Trunk Road of Nellore holding my father's little finger so I didn't lose him, I used to see the wooden board over a bookshop:
"Venkatarama & Co"
I ignored it for a while but one day I asked him about this &. And he replied:
"It is short for 'and' and is called ampersand"
I left it at that but wiki now tells me:
To hell with wiki too!
Anyway, in 1970 when I had this new idea how to teach the abrupt Lorentz Gauge Condition to my students at IIT KGP, I wanted to write it up as a Note and send it to the American Journal of Physics...my first foreign attempt.
I wrote up the article in long hand and was looking for a typist and was told that our junior office assistant does job typing in his leisure. And I gave my manuscript to him and got it back the next day. I was very glad that he was so efficient and paid him and took the typescript home for inspection. And to my horror, I found that he had replaced about a dozen 'and's in my manuscript with a dozen '&'s.
He was in a hurry.
I wanted to strangle him but I was puny and he was a football fullback.
I was then living in the faculty hostel which had a Remington in its office. I requested our friendly hostel clerk to lend me his typewriter for a night and typed the manuscript myself overnight...it took all of 5 attempts to get it the way I wanted, and about 8 hours.
It went through...thanks to my Vizagh sidekick typistry.
I have this habit of using 'and' dozens of times while blogging. I picked it up from our girl students at IIT KGP. During their grand vivas, they used to demur and try hard to think on their feet and keep talking meanwhile and wave and weave their hands in the air and fill in their gaps by saying "And"..."Like"... "And"... "Like"....
....There are all of 6 'and's in that sentence not counting the 3 under quotes...
To get back to our QWERTY keyboard, the right hand is supposed to start from the middle (home) row letter " ; "...the semicolon. Surprising, since I thought semicolon is much less used than the comma...you have to jump down to hit the comma ' , ' !
There was this weird news item the other day that a renowned Professor of English language recommended that the comma should be abolished forthwith.
Can't imagine English without the most helpful and the most treacherous punctuation mark...the comma...
For instance take this sentence that I read the other day in DC:
"Inquiries revealed that the student was poor, had a failed love affair, was not selected in campus placement, was depressed, and was found hanging in his room by his roommate"
Imagine the same sentence without commas:
"Inquiries revealed that the student was poor had a failed love affair was not selected in campus placement was depressed and was found hanging in his room by his roommate"
I would have taken all of 3 minutes to tease it out.
I remember this sentence for quite another reason. It held me spellbound, with commas, for all of 5 minutes alright. That was because of the last leg of the above sentence:
"(he) was found hanging in his room by his roommate"
As you know, I have a very picturesque mind, and on reading this, I was imagining that the poor lovelorn student was not found hanging by a rope or a dhoti or a wire but by his roommate!
Which led me to imagine that the roommate was the first to hang himself by a rope from the ceiling hook, and the poor lovelorn student caught his roommate's legs and hit the stool away and hanged himself by his roommate. A case of double-grammatical hanging.
G. H. Vallins, my English guru by his 'Good English', quotes several such ambiguous sentences culled from pieces by journalists of repute; and the reader is asked to 'rectify' them of their syntactical errors.
The above sentence, I felt, needed plastic surgery from passive to active voice. I would rather write:
"...and his roommate found him hanging"
thereby eliminating the treacherous 'hanging by'...
Reading Vallins is pretty comforting...showing that even Englishmen write poor English often...
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During the utterly frustrating two years of my research scholar-hood between 1963 and 1965 at my university in Vizagh, I did many weird things on the side just to beguile my ample leisure. Like learning to cook on the kerosine stove, a bit of sanskrit, a bit of music (oh, no!), a bit of coaching (most boring), a bit of reading English novels, and a lot of useless thinking.
One day I was scared that my scholarship would soon be terminated and I would be penniless. So I went to the nearby Siva Typing Institute to learn a bit of typing so that I could keep the wolf from the door when needed.
The graying teacher there took Rs 30 as registration fees and led me to the nearest available typewriter, seated me on the stool before it, and helped my fingers to the keyboard....four on the left and four on the right.
And asked me to hit: asdf and jump to g and jump back to f on the left side. And then come left with my right fingers hitting ;lkj and jump to h and return to j. It all looked so weird. And I asked the old man why the keyboard is so funny and why not abcdefghijkl...
He smiled as if I were a moron and replied this arrangement is user-friendly (we didn't trade this word till 3 decades later). Well, if you thought I didn't know it...it is supposed to be 'ergonomic'.
User-friendly, my foot! It is actually supposed to be typewriter-friendly. Google tells me that the earliest mechanical typewriters had this problem that when you hit neighboring keys too fast (like I in a hurry), the jumping hammers used to get jammed up and stick to each other.
Like for instance, when you type an 'a' and then a 'n' the most-likely next letter would be 'd' to make it 'and'.
Google Help tells me when I type 'a' and then 'n' I better type the next letter 'd' alright, but in these four possible combinations:
andhra bank
andhravilas
andhra unversity
andhra jyoti
but not the simple 'and'! Google knows that I am hitting my keyboard from Hyderabad. The first help it offers is the most popular bank in Hyderabad, the second one is a much-hyped news portal, the third is my alma mater and the fourth is a Telugu newspaper-cum-TV channel.
While all I wanted was just to type 'and'. To hell with Google Help...
Anyway, when you want to type the most popular word 'and' and want to keep the mechanical typewriter from jamming up, you want to separate the key for 'n' from 'a' and 'd'...that is why the letter 'n' in the QWERTY keyboard is pushed into the right basement while 'a' and 'd' are next neighbors in the left home row.
Mechanical typewriters are now museum pieces but not the QWERTY keyboard...it is there everywhere, even in Ishani's cell phone...like sin.
I had a rather weird thing with 'and'. When I was walking along the Trunk Road of Nellore holding my father's little finger so I didn't lose him, I used to see the wooden board over a bookshop:
"Venkatarama & Co"
I ignored it for a while but one day I asked him about this &. And he replied:
"It is short for 'and' and is called ampersand"
I left it at that but wiki now tells me:
The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase "and (&) per se and", meaning "and (the symbol &) intrinsically (is the word) and".
Anyway, in 1970 when I had this new idea how to teach the abrupt Lorentz Gauge Condition to my students at IIT KGP, I wanted to write it up as a Note and send it to the American Journal of Physics...my first foreign attempt.
I wrote up the article in long hand and was looking for a typist and was told that our junior office assistant does job typing in his leisure. And I gave my manuscript to him and got it back the next day. I was very glad that he was so efficient and paid him and took the typescript home for inspection. And to my horror, I found that he had replaced about a dozen 'and's in my manuscript with a dozen '&'s.
He was in a hurry.
I wanted to strangle him but I was puny and he was a football fullback.
I was then living in the faculty hostel which had a Remington in its office. I requested our friendly hostel clerk to lend me his typewriter for a night and typed the manuscript myself overnight...it took all of 5 attempts to get it the way I wanted, and about 8 hours.
It went through...thanks to my Vizagh sidekick typistry.
I have this habit of using 'and' dozens of times while blogging. I picked it up from our girl students at IIT KGP. During their grand vivas, they used to demur and try hard to think on their feet and keep talking meanwhile and wave and weave their hands in the air and fill in their gaps by saying "And"..."Like"... "And"... "Like"....
....There are all of 6 'and's in that sentence not counting the 3 under quotes...
To get back to our QWERTY keyboard, the right hand is supposed to start from the middle (home) row letter " ; "...the semicolon. Surprising, since I thought semicolon is much less used than the comma...you have to jump down to hit the comma ' , ' !
There was this weird news item the other day that a renowned Professor of English language recommended that the comma should be abolished forthwith.
Can't imagine English without the most helpful and the most treacherous punctuation mark...the comma...
For instance take this sentence that I read the other day in DC:
"Inquiries revealed that the student was poor, had a failed love affair, was not selected in campus placement, was depressed, and was found hanging in his room by his roommate"
Imagine the same sentence without commas:
"Inquiries revealed that the student was poor had a failed love affair was not selected in campus placement was depressed and was found hanging in his room by his roommate"
I would have taken all of 3 minutes to tease it out.
I remember this sentence for quite another reason. It held me spellbound, with commas, for all of 5 minutes alright. That was because of the last leg of the above sentence:
"(he) was found hanging in his room by his roommate"
As you know, I have a very picturesque mind, and on reading this, I was imagining that the poor lovelorn student was not found hanging by a rope or a dhoti or a wire but by his roommate!
Which led me to imagine that the roommate was the first to hang himself by a rope from the ceiling hook, and the poor lovelorn student caught his roommate's legs and hit the stool away and hanged himself by his roommate. A case of double-grammatical hanging.
G. H. Vallins, my English guru by his 'Good English', quotes several such ambiguous sentences culled from pieces by journalists of repute; and the reader is asked to 'rectify' them of their syntactical errors.
The above sentence, I felt, needed plastic surgery from passive to active voice. I would rather write:
"...and his roommate found him hanging"
thereby eliminating the treacherous 'hanging by'...
Reading Vallins is pretty comforting...showing that even Englishmen write poor English often...
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