I recently heard someone explain her Sunday morning ritual; I had a head bath (= washed my hair), she said. Now how long has it been since I heard that phrase? It made me think of other such phrases, unique to (South) Indian English that I used to hear all around me but make me smile fondly now, those rare times I come across them.
Love marriage (as opposed to arranged marriage), good colour (of a fair complexion – applies to both men and women), tension party (one who gets tense easily and about nothing)…
Family planning (are you doing family planning? why no children?), eve teasing (pan-Indian, not just South), co brother (or co-sister – to indicate a sister in-law’s husband – or some such)
Put up (to mean stay – where are / have you put up?), nose cut (humiliation – as in Shurpanakha?)
One personal favourite is ‘modern dress’ – anything that is not a sari or pavadai-davani (or ‘half sari’) – I still hear this phrase occasionally on Tamil TV channels patronised by my parents, usually in the course of some debate about Tamil women and the notion of chastity or some such burning topic that seems attached to the Tamil psyche indelibly.
And then those words combined and uttered rapidly to form a phrase –
coolddrinks (trnnng trnnng coolddrinnnks, idlivadaaappeee), shakeand (give shakeand to uncle), tolet (there is a tolet board on that house).
Ha ha, nice post. Yes, one doesn’t hear a lot of these phrases now. We used to use the phrase “head bath” regularly in boarding school, when one got a few extra minutes in the bath only on “head bath” days!
I remember having a conversation once in school.. on similar lines… whether we ought to say “hair bath” or “head bath”.. and finally came to the agreement that none of the words suited the action, and anyway both sounded weird by themselves……. but guess we still stick to the same old words… just too much a part of us..
What about fair skin = light/pale skin? Is dark unfair?
nalla personality – referring to the physique of a tall and well built person!
Simple – meaning he/ she has no airs
“show’ a irukkum – meaning it will look good.
A one – very good
‘OC’
From On Credit
glad to see this post resonates with people 🙂
“What’s your good name?” is another. Why would a fellow intentionally have a “bad” name??
Very nice post. I was new to a lot of the words actually since I did not grow up in the South. Was surprised to hear the words for the first and they do very much exist even today 🙂
This is too funny. It made me smile. I hadn’t heard some of these things in a long time.