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We now turn to the more esoteric uses of soft and hard.
When we were in our Class VIII (3rd Form) in 1953 in our village school at Muthukur, we had a wonderful English teacher, Anjaneyulu sir.
One day he wrote on the blackboard: "He worked hard" and asked us to tell its meaning in Telugu. That was a breeze and all of us answered right. He then added a 'ly' to hard to make it 'hardly' and asked us the meaning of the new sentence and we all said it means the same thing. And he laughed and said it means the opposite. And we just couldn't believe him that by turning an adjective into an adverb the meaning turns turtle. And we had lots of fun on it.
Twenty five years later I was at IIT KGP trying to catch colloquial Hindi from my friend, Tyagi from Bulandsher in UP, by listening to him...he reveled in speaking in his mother tongue all the time and it was fun.
One day he was saying: "Eh aasan thodi hai!" and I thought he meant that 'it is a little easy'. And he laughed and said it meant the opposite...'thodi' here meant almost 'no' and 'never'. And that use of 'thodi' delighted me since we didn't have any such fluent construction in Telugu.
A couple of years later I was supposed to be invigilating in a big hall and was browsing the books that the students left on the dais. And there was this wonderful book that I bought that evening: FT Wood's 'Remedial English for Foreigners' (I now have 3 copies of the book...that is a different story).
On an early page of that book Wood was talking about the difference between 'few' and 'a few' and illustrating it by examples and saying that the difference is more of an expectation than reality. Like let us say there are 20 students in the class. And one day 5 attended. If the teacher says: 'There were few students in the class', he expected more, like 15. But a different teacher could say: 'There were a few students in the class', meaning he expected much less like 2.
Delightful like 'little' and 'a little'.
In Muthukur we had our own well in our backyard and used its water for washing and drinking. And it was a pleasure to bathe in that water with soap which released lots and lots of suds of lather when rubbed with water. A few years later I was at another village called Nidubrole for my pre-university year where I found to my dismay that no soap ever succeeded in giving any lather however hard we tried...just a few bubbles and measly froth. The soap lasted forever though.
And then I entered my university at Vizagh and on the very first day a short brown dumbish lady entered our class room and mumbled that she would teach us inorganic chemistry. And mumbled for the whole class (and for the entire year). And we asked her which book she followed. And she grumbled and said in an undertone: "peeseeray".
We couldn't make head or tail of such a weird name and asked her to repeat it and she mumbled ever more humbly: "peeseeray".
And we ran to the library to be the first to catch such a book if any and we found that there was a book on inorganic chemistry by one PC Ray and thought she meant that book and she did. I don't know if there are many PC Rays but when I landed in Bengal a decade later I came to know of one great man of that name who started Bengal Chemicals during the hated British rule:
And very soon our lady lecturer was mumbling about what she called 'hard water' and I couldn't stop wondering how a liquid like water could be hard like a rock. Well, we had to answer a question on it in our exams and it turned out that she was referring to my Nidubrole water. I looked up her peeseeray and read all about it and the last sentence of the chapter read: "Hard water is not bad for health"...some comfort there.
Many decades later we heard of software and hardware and wondered what they meant. Till we were told that our 77 RPM record was the software while our HMV Star on which we played it was its hardware.
And soon IITians were getting recruited in software firms and management jobs by the thousands (like my son) and I heard that the secret of IITs is that they give their students 'soft skills', a term new to me. Here it is:
http://media2.intoday.in/indiatoday/images/Photo_gallery/2-power-centres-copy_650_040313043954.jpg
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We now turn to the more esoteric uses of soft and hard.
When we were in our Class VIII (3rd Form) in 1953 in our village school at Muthukur, we had a wonderful English teacher, Anjaneyulu sir.
One day he wrote on the blackboard: "He worked hard" and asked us to tell its meaning in Telugu. That was a breeze and all of us answered right. He then added a 'ly' to hard to make it 'hardly' and asked us the meaning of the new sentence and we all said it means the same thing. And he laughed and said it means the opposite. And we just couldn't believe him that by turning an adjective into an adverb the meaning turns turtle. And we had lots of fun on it.
Twenty five years later I was at IIT KGP trying to catch colloquial Hindi from my friend, Tyagi from Bulandsher in UP, by listening to him...he reveled in speaking in his mother tongue all the time and it was fun.
One day he was saying: "Eh aasan thodi hai!" and I thought he meant that 'it is a little easy'. And he laughed and said it meant the opposite...'thodi' here meant almost 'no' and 'never'. And that use of 'thodi' delighted me since we didn't have any such fluent construction in Telugu.
A couple of years later I was supposed to be invigilating in a big hall and was browsing the books that the students left on the dais. And there was this wonderful book that I bought that evening: FT Wood's 'Remedial English for Foreigners' (I now have 3 copies of the book...that is a different story).
On an early page of that book Wood was talking about the difference between 'few' and 'a few' and illustrating it by examples and saying that the difference is more of an expectation than reality. Like let us say there are 20 students in the class. And one day 5 attended. If the teacher says: 'There were few students in the class', he expected more, like 15. But a different teacher could say: 'There were a few students in the class', meaning he expected much less like 2.
Delightful like 'little' and 'a little'.
In Muthukur we had our own well in our backyard and used its water for washing and drinking. And it was a pleasure to bathe in that water with soap which released lots and lots of suds of lather when rubbed with water. A few years later I was at another village called Nidubrole for my pre-university year where I found to my dismay that no soap ever succeeded in giving any lather however hard we tried...just a few bubbles and measly froth. The soap lasted forever though.
And then I entered my university at Vizagh and on the very first day a short brown dumbish lady entered our class room and mumbled that she would teach us inorganic chemistry. And mumbled for the whole class (and for the entire year). And we asked her which book she followed. And she grumbled and said in an undertone: "peeseeray".
We couldn't make head or tail of such a weird name and asked her to repeat it and she mumbled ever more humbly: "peeseeray".
And we ran to the library to be the first to catch such a book if any and we found that there was a book on inorganic chemistry by one PC Ray and thought she meant that book and she did. I don't know if there are many PC Rays but when I landed in Bengal a decade later I came to know of one great man of that name who started Bengal Chemicals during the hated British rule:
And very soon our lady lecturer was mumbling about what she called 'hard water' and I couldn't stop wondering how a liquid like water could be hard like a rock. Well, we had to answer a question on it in our exams and it turned out that she was referring to my Nidubrole water. I looked up her peeseeray and read all about it and the last sentence of the chapter read: "Hard water is not bad for health"...some comfort there.
Many decades later we heard of software and hardware and wondered what they meant. Till we were told that our 77 RPM record was the software while our HMV Star on which we played it was its hardware.
And soon IITians were getting recruited in software firms and management jobs by the thousands (like my son) and I heard that the secret of IITs is that they give their students 'soft skills', a term new to me. Here it is:
And then there is this soft power:
http://media2.intoday.in/indiatoday/images/Photo_gallery/2-power-centres-copy_650_040313043954.jpg
...Posted by Ishani
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