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A foreign tongue is always treacherous. Words have different nuances and it is always a tricky thing. One can land in boiling soup if one is careless.
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During the 1960s, PGW's Penguin Paperbacks used to sell at Rs 2 each and I used to bike to the Railway Station at KGP every Sunday to buy a copy or two at the Wheelers (Is it still there?). And my Collection went up to something like 40 over a couple of years and a few of my friends in the Faculty Hostel used to borrow them, read them, and pass them on...I lost all of them, but no matter.
Dr SGH in the Math Dept was a sucker for Jeeves books and used to sprinkle his speech with the British slang of Bertie.
One day he told me that he was about to be beaten up by his colleague Dr VS. I asked him what happened. Dr VS, although in his twenties like the rest of us, was graying and balding. And we didn't know that he was fussy about his looks till one day SGH met him across the street and hailed him:
"Hello, hello, Old Man, what's up?"
Dr VS happened to be walking with his Girl Scholar (which SGH didn't notice); and, as you can imagine, he turned so red and blue in his face and gave SGH such a drubbing that he turned pink.
A red hot soup from which one can't explain, retract or even apologize...a hopeless case. I guess they stopped talking and SGH was cured of his predilection once and for all.
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Then there was this Dr PD who was fond of badminton and rather fancied he was good at it and hogged one end of the Court in the Faculty Club. One evening Mrs D (just back from five years in London) joined the game at the other end. In his (justified) exuberance, Dr PD was trying to so impress the lady that he was running all over the court so heavily that he jumped and ducked and feigned and finally hit his own foot and fell like a sack of coal, breaking his racket and his specs.
And Mrs D rather instinctively tried to cajole him saying:
"What a shame, what a shame!"
And Dr PD was so upset that he got up limping and yelled at her:
"What is there to be ashamed of? It is you that ought to be ashamed!"
And Mrs D turned so pink and helpless and couldn't go about explaining to the injured soul that "What a shame!" means:
"a cause for regret. It is idiomatic and often used to express sympathy or disappointment"
and no more:
http://malaysia.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100717070140AAdrwZT
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Dr BKR was just back completing his Ph D from Tufts, MA.
And he was narrating to me the story of a newly arrived Uttam Kumar at his Grad School who had a way with girls. His trick was to quietly sit down in the Lounge (or whatever...I read that 'or whatever' is a condemned witless bypass like, well, 'like').
And he would open his palm and pretend to be absorbed reading it. And the Yankee girls of those days were suckers for palmistry and would flock around him asking:
"Can you read palms? Do read mine"
and push their palms towards him. And he would hold them delicately and go about gassing.
One day it was the turn of a rather cute and petite girl and our Uttam Kumar tried to please her saying:
"This long thin line here means that you are very innocent"
And the girl slapped him in his face and withdrew...
BKR told me that 'innocent girl' is a compliment in Bengali, but meant 'dumb' in Yankeeland.
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Talking of angelic looks, here is a passage from Jerome K Jerome:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/308/308-0.txt
"...To look at Montmorency you would imagine that he was
an angel sent upon the earth, for some reason withheld from mankind, in
the shape of a small fox-terrier. There is a sort of
Oh-what-a-wicked-world-this-is-and-how-I-wish-I-could-do-something-to-
make-it-better-and-nobler expression about Montmorency that has been
known to bring the tears into the eyes of pious old ladies and gentlemen.
When first he came to live at my expense, I never thought I should be
able to get him to stop long. I used to sit down and look at him, as he
sat on the rug and looked up at me, and think: “Oh, that dog will never
live. He will be snatched up to the bright skies in a chariot, that is
what will happen to him.”
But, when I had paid for about a dozen chickens that he had killed; and
had dragged him, growling and kicking, by the scruff of his neck, out of
a hundred and fourteen street fights; and had had a dead cat brought
round for my inspection by an irate female, who called me a murderer; and
had been summoned by the man next door but one for having a ferocious dog
at large, that had kept him pinned up in his own tool-shed, afraid to
venture his nose outside the door for over two hours on a cold night; and
had learned that the gardener, unknown to myself, had won thirty
shillings by backing him to kill rats against time, then I began to think
that maybe they’d let him remain on earth for a bit longer, after all.
To hang about a stable, and collect a gang of the most disreputable dogs
to be found in the town, and lead them out to march round the slums to
fight other disreputable dogs, is Montmorency’s idea of “life;” and so,
as I before observed, he gave to the suggestion of inns, and pubs., and
hotels his most emphatic approbation..."
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