Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Black isn't black

Queer became gay long ago but New2U in place of second hand?

This is being written in what is nowadays called a studio in London. That artistic word only means it’s a single room with a tiny entrance lobby, a bathroom and a kitchen. It was a bed-sitter in a more honest age when paying-guests were lodgers and the lowest floor was the basement. Though not a blade of green may be in sight, basements have burgeoned into the sylvan glory of garden flat.

Euphemism is the fashion. The parliamentary expenses scandal that exposed the criminal cynicism with which the people’s representatives and peers of the realm fudged their accounts partly explains the rationale for deceptive politeness. It wouldn’t be nice to admit that Gordon Brown censors the news to conceal the misdeeds of his fellow parliamentarians. Nor can one of Britain’s richest men be accused of being economical with the truth about where he lives and the cost of getting from there to Westminster. His achievements make us proud for he is in appearance and nature a true desi under the ermine of his lordly title derived from a district in the heart of London.

Britain being the home of truth, freedom and liberty, deviations must be convincingly camouflaged. So, when the government recently blacked out the most incriminating chunks of information in a report on the expenses charged by parliamentarians, it wasn’t indulging in the old-fashioned censorship with which we became familiar during the Emergency. It was merely ‘redacting’ the document in the public interest.

Similarly, the innocuous-sounding word ‘flipping’ stands for falsifying your place of residence (and all that goes with it). It sounds far pleasanter than saying a noble lord lied about his address to claim the £174 a night accommodation allowance for peers who live some distance away and the £86.50 they can charge daily for transport and meals. “You are a flipper” should be a deadly insult. But many might regard it as a high compliment, proof of ingenuity and inventiveness. “I flipped to Norfolk” one can hear the boast, “and made a cool 50 grand!” “Only?” the coroneted crony shoots back, “My flip to Oxfordshire brought me double that!”

If, heaven forbid, we have another Emergency, the man with the final blue pencil in Shastri Bhawan will be the Chief Redactor. But, of course, we will all learn again to do him out of a job by exercising total self-redaction. We can boast afterwards of how the Chief Redactor was taken for a ride.

People talk with shaking head and wringing hands of how the language is changing beyond recognition. They usually put it down to modernity which is seen as a fad devised by the entertainment industry. But new words have always been invented and old ones reinterpreted to suit the spirit of the times and the user’s needs. The ancient Greeks believed in flattery. They called the Black Sea, notorious for its storms, the Euxine which means hospitable, and the Furies the Eumenides or good humoured ladies. Perhaps the Bengali parting, “Coming”, and matching farewell, “Come”, fall into that category, both holding out the promise of return and reunion. The dictum that “may” means “shall”, attributed to Curzon, speaks of the bureaucracy’s undying hauteur.

Since World War II, however, semantic flexibility has tended more to cater to human susceptibilities. We live in a kinder age where even words like flipping and redacting strengthen the feel-good factor. When post-war British municipal rat catchers, inspired by the welfare state’s egalitarian ethic, demanded better terms, they were redesignated rodent operatives though refused higher wages.

Language has not looked back since. Queer is gay. The descendants of slaves call themselves what pleases them most, Negro, Black, African-American. People become angry if their smart ‘pre-used clothes’ are called second hand. New2U is a shop that stocks only attractive pre-used garments. The poor can draw consolation from belonging to the ‘lower-income group’ even if still poor. The crippled are ‘challenged’. A student doesn’t fail exams, he ‘under-performs’.

Backward countries became under-developed and then developing or pre-development without advancing an inch. Ethnic cleansing is antiseptic enough to drain massacre of bloodshed and take the viciousness out of genocide. Regime change conveys no hint of aggression, invasion, deposition and execution.

India, too, has made some terminological progress. Railway coolies have been elevated to anglicised porters, scarcity has banished famine and the weaker section masks the poor. But there’s some way to go still. At home, I am old; here, I bask in the glory of being a senior citizen though not a citizen.