It was a pleasure to receive, after quite some time, a letter from Prof G B Sajjan, a long-time reader of EFU and a person whose comments I value highly.  Prof Sajjan has a sharp eye for the nuances of the language and a sharper one for my occasional (or frequent?) lapses.

Sajjan’s latest missive is about the sentences: ‘The matter was discussed in committee’ and ‘X is a member of staff’ (Question Box, Aug.30, 2007). He feels that in both cases the definite article is required.

I will not argue the point.  I will merely refer him to the entries under committee in the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (4th ed.) and the entry under staff in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (3rd ed.1995). The ALD points out that it was discussed in committee= ‘by the committee’.

Mr Rao has sent some interesting new words.  (New words appear practically every day. Only those which survive over a considerable length of time, say, three years, find a place in a dictionary.)

If sequel is a book, film, play etc that continues the story from an earlier one, naturally you should have a prequel (telling the earlier part of the story). But what about a sequel to a sequel? It seems the movie world has invented threequel – a film which is third in a series. We had a sequel to Gone with the Wind (with Timothy Dalton playing the role of Rhett Butler). Will we have a threequel? Even if we have I personally would prefer to have it called something other than ‘threequel’. More recently the hugely popular Da Vinci Code hade a prequel, Angels and Demons.

Another interesting word sent by Rao is smeet.  Now-a-days you can meet people online. But when you meet the person face-to–face, what is it? What kind of meeting is it? A smeeting, it appears. I hope this will have a well-deserved early demise.

Naveen (He is a B.Com student in Bangalore), it seems, has been discussing the finer points of usage. In this ‘vocabulary mood’, as we may call it, he has begun to wonder why we speak of ‘under garments’ instead of ‘beneath garments’. Any suggestions?

Commenting on my remarks on some words of Indian origin in our variety of English (A coinage, Aug. 2, 07) Mr Sudarshan writes: ‘I had spent a few years in Iran and had perforce to learn Persian.  There are many words common to Urdu and Persian and bandobust is one such. It is a compound word combining band and bust.  ‘O’ in Persian means ‘and’; bastan is the past participle and ‘band’ is the present tense of the word. The compound word means what it has come to mean now, namely, making arrangements for maintaining law and order.  So possibly the word is of Persian origin’.

Next: ‘Aren’t words in IE such as co-brother and co-sister abominable? They are in use only in south India.’
Sundaram is right about the origin of bandobust (also spelt as bundobust).  Yule and Burnell in their classic Hobson-Jobson relate it to band-o-bust, literally ‘tying and binding’. Apparently the word had a much wider meaning then than now.  YB gloss it as ‘any system or mode of regulation; a revenue settlement.’

Whatever the original source, the word was in use in India when the British came. It was freely used by British officers both among themselves and in their interaction with the ‘natives’.

Cousin-sister /brother are indeed abominations.  When you say: ‘Rahul? Yes he is a cousin of mine’ or ‘Sanjay is getting married to my cousin Geetha’, the sex of the persons in question is quite clear.  No need to add ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. The worst and most ridiculous instances of the use of cousin-brother and cousin-sister are in sentences like:  She is my cousin-sister /He is my cousin-brother. / Shyam is marrying my cousin-sister.

G Nagabhushana wants to know if I have archived my articles on the Web.  The column began a long time ago, in 1989, when there was, I think, no Web. Anyway Deccan Herald has its archives from 2000 onwards on the Web.  Articles published since then can be accessed by going to DH Archives. Further, many of the articles have been incorporated into my two books: Current English—A Guide for the User of English in India (OUP 2001, 2003), and Structure, Style, and Usage (OUP 2005).  The books, of course contain a lot of additional material not found in the Columns.

In the DH Archives the earlier articles will be found under Articulations. The column was moved to its present position in the supplement DH Education a few years ago.

The writer can be contacted on ksyadurajan@yahoo.com