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In our Pre-University year in 1958 we had to mug up at least one example of every figure of speech, of which there were half a dozen. The canonical example of a hyperbole that was taught to us was the Wordsworth's line "ten thousand saw I at a glance". Our teacher was very particular to emphasize that the poet didn't stand there by the lake counting the blooming daffodils but he just meant 'very very many'.
I guess Americans would say that he was in the 'right ball park', as good a euphemism as any to mean 'roughly ok'.
This 'roughly' thing reminds me of a hilarious teaching experiment in math in our schools in the 1970s. They called it 'new math'. As everything else Indian, the idea was imported from the US and discarded when it was discarded there...both a decade later.
Here is Feynman talking about it:
"I was giving a series of freshman lectures at that time, and after one of them, Tom Harvey, who assisted me in putting on the demonstrations, said, 'You ought to see what's happening to mathematics in school books! My daughter comes home with a lot of crazy stuff!'...I understood what they were trying to do. Many people thought we were behind the Russians after Sputnik, and some mathematicians were asked to give advice on how to teach math, by using some of the rather interesting modern concepts of mathematics. The purpose was to enhance mathematics for the children who found it dull..."
At about 1970 my colleagues in maths at IIT KGP were indulging in a strange lingo called Boolean Algebra and Symbolic Logic. And after a few years my friends in physics who had school-going kids complained that their wives were unable to do their kids' homework...it had Venn Diagrams and Set Theory which the poor old math teachers in their schools were trained to teach...and everyone got bored stiff.
The whole experiment collapsed soon as satirized in a Tom Lehrer song:
Tom Lehrer wrote a satirical song named "New Math" which revolved around the process of subtracting 173 from 342 in decimal and octal.
The song is in the style of a lecture about the general concept of
subtraction in arbitrary number systems, illustrated by two simple
calculations, and highlights the New Math's emphasis on insight and
abstract concepts—as Lehrer put it with an indeterminable amount of
seriousness, "In the new approach ... the important thing is to
understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer." At
one point in the song, he notes that "you've got [thirteen] and you take
away seven, and that leaves five... well, six, actually, but the idea
is the important thing."
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Coming back to euphemisms, we were taught the example, "he passed away" for the slang "he croaked"...death has so many of them. The other day my niece conveyed the death of her uncle (not me) by the sms: "Uncle is expired"...which almost sounded like a bottle of medicine sold by Hyderabadi pharmacists to unsuspecting customers like me.
This 'pass' has several meanings in dozens of idioms. The first euphemism I heard in school for asking leave from our teacher for a couple of minutes' visit to the loo was:
"Pass, sir, please, Pass!"
When I went to my University at Vizagh, I was living with my MD uncle in a locality by the King George Hospital and the Andhra Medical College. And I had many friends doing their MBBS. And I heard what sounded like medical euphemisms to me...hi-fi Latin terms for simple things. The first was the boast of the graduate wife of our ENT neighbor, "My husband is an Otorhinolargyngologist".
For common cold they say rhinitis. And for common cough, bronchitis. And for a blood clot, thrombosis. And many '-ma's in their biopsy reports. Not to be confused with Kalima or Durgamai. On the whole it is better not to read their biopsy reports: Lypoma is just a benign fat globule, while a misprinted Lymphoma is much more dangerous...it is cancer of the lymph glands.
And the benign thing during its 'duty' that often turns malignant after its retirement (like profs) is the 'prostate'...the wife of one our physics profs used to call it 'prostrate', just as she used to say that her hubby had a 'spacemaker' inside him.
And the wind we 'pass' through the other outlet was called 'flatus', instead of 'gas'.
This 'gas' we first heard of in our schools was the 'gossip' we indulged in. But Americans mean by it either our petrol or the one that was used in NY to inflict death on their prisoners in their gas chambers. The other term was 'juice'...this time the 'electrical chair'.
For prison we had the euphemism, 'Sri Krishna Janma Sthanam' in Telugu. Brit Eng has many like 'cooler', 'jug', and 'clink'.
And so on and so forth...
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The Impersonal 'It'
The other day I was getting out of my small car after parking it in its slot in our basement. And saw that its neighbor was not the usual big sedan but a smallish one like mine. And its owner-driver, a nice young techie who calls me Uncle, was busy cleaning it. And as he saw me smile and walk past, he came forth and inquired kindly about my cataracts and I assured him that they have been removed and that I now see more than what I should. After this pleasant exchange I thought I should ask him about his new car and this is how it went:
"You changed your car?"
"No, Uncle...this is my friend's car...my sedan is in its workshop....it had an accident"
"Hmm!!!'
"It hit an auto"
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