The other day I was frantic to reach one particular shop before going on a long trip out of station and my frustration turned to fun reading the signboard hung there. ‘The shop shitted to next road.’ I was all smiles on my way to the shop which had been ‘shitted’ recently. Such word-catastrophes can pounce on us from unexpected quarters. My tiredness after a long shopping spree did a vanishing act when I saw the print-out of the bill reading – ‘red bowels’ – 4, ‘bras’ wear’ polish – 1.’ Trust me buying those ‘bowels’ and ‘bras wear’ again and again just for the sheer enjoyment of seeing the bill and getting tickled.
English is no more a foreign language per se, as it has seeped well into our ‘system’ to become the emotional language for many. But writing in one’s own mother tongue makes culturally rooted idioms to appear easily and naturally in expressions and the spelling mistakes will be much less.
When my friend sent me an sms that she is going for a ‘sexophone’ concert with her hubby, I immediately called her and told her that I can understand the relationship between the two words there – hubby and sex, but what is the concert all about? She understood the faux pas and laughed out aloud, enjoying the tongue-in-cheek joke. She is the Ms Malaprop of our group, an expert at ludicrous misuse of words, getting confused with similar sounding words. One day when we were chatting over a cup of coffee, she said that ‘she was taking ‘homopathy’ treatment for her functional health problems.
I told her if that treatment continued for long, surely she will have more problems and asked her to go to an expert ‘homeopath’. She blushed deep red and we both still remember how we rollicked in a boisterous way, making many heads turn.
Jokes apart, language is such an important aspect of our lives and is such a valuable product for global network, that we must all try to become good wordsmiths and be conscious of the words we write and speak, literally and figuratively.
