READERS WRITE
F Madhwani, a businessman with a keen interest in the English language writes: ‘The other day I heard on the radio ‘climb into the well’. I was wondering how the announcer could use the phrase because (usually) you climb out of a well.’
Yes, indeed. Climb suggests upward movement: climb up a tree, a hill, a mountain. Planes, these days, climb up to astounding heights in no time. Figuratively you climb up the social ladder.
But with down, climb can be used to suggest a downward movement. ‘to crawl down; to descend with the help of your hands’. You can climb down a slope.
Figuratively, to climb down is ‘to abandon a position one has held earlier’ (in an argument, for example). The government was forced to climb down on the question of workers’/ compensation. Used as a noun the word is climbdown. It was a climbdown for the government.
2. Madhwani has noted another peculiar (humourous) usage. ‘In lieu of Teachers’ Day an essay competition was held.’ Is there a printing mistake here? Can it be In view of Teachers’ Day….?
‘In lieu of’ used here seems inappropriate to me’ says Madhwani. It would be inappropriate indeed if the school authorities had decided to hold an essay competition instead of observing Teachers’ Day. But if the competition had been held to celebrate Teachers’ Day, in lieu of is an incorrect phrase. It should have been in view of / in connection with, etc.
3. Vekateraman, K.V. writes: ‘A proper division of assets can make the difference between living in comfort post-separation and scrambling to meet your lifestyle expenses.’
This piece of worldly wisdom is not offered as sage advice for those who have chosen to break out of wedlock but as a grammatical puzzle for the expert. Should the conjunction be and or or?
In the context of two alternative choices one would normally use or. You can take a walk in the woods or go fishing. / Take it or leave it. But and has a usage where it substitutes for or; a matter of life and death.
I leave it to the interested reader to work out the precise case where this usage is admissible. Is the usage limited to just this phrase, an idiom? There is also the phrase touch and go. But this is even more of an idiom than life and death.
In any case the use of and in the sentence cited by Vekataraman cannot be faulted.
4. Atma Ram wants to know whether the following sentence is correct. I used to take a lot of leaves.
Many plants shed their leaves in winter. But leave (‘official permission to be absent from work’) is a different thing altogether. Leave is used both in the sense of ‘permission’ and the consequent ‘absence from work’. In both the senses it is an uncountable noun. There is no plural form.
The notion of plurality has to be conveyed indirectly as in: I have to be on leave for about 5 days/ I need to take leave for a couple of weeks, etc.
5. K Sundaram wonders why it is always ‘at this point of time’ instead of ‘now’ and why ‘conditionality’ instead of ‘conditions’. Why should treaties be ‘operationalised’ instead of being ‘put into effect’?
This jargon began several decades ago and was held to ridicule by William and Mary Morris in their Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (second ed.1988). Use of technical terms is a mark of the expert. And so in such fields as Diplomacy (hardly a technical subject in the sense of Maths and Physics) we find pseudo–technical jargon proliferating. Our own Jaswant Singh, when he was Foreign Minister in Vajpayee’s government came out with the astounding additionalities, as I noted in my column dated June 24, 2001).
The tendency to ‘technicalise’ obvious and commonplace notions is a game in which the B-school people have excelled others. Decades ago Fowler lamented this pretentious use of words, especially by people who had, in fact, nothing much to say — sociologists and political science ‘experts’. (Stephen Leacock has some home truths about ‘political science’.) The most hilarious of this hollow eloquence is to be found in a passage on ‘the family’ cited in the revised edition of Fowler by Gowers (quoted in my Structure, Style, and Usage, 2005).
6. Apropos the meaning I had given for the word cusp (EFU March 6, 2008) Sundaram points out that in structural engineering the point where the curvature changes is called ‘the point of inflection’ and in structures such as beams, it is called ‘a point of contra flexture’.
I thank Sundaram for throwing light on this word from a technical point of view. I gave the meaning as I found it in the New Oxford Dictionary of English.
The writer can be contacted at ksyadurajan@yahoo.com
