Bazaar English

tradition and class in Indian journalism. The Bible here is the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and the copy that serves is well bound and well thumbed.

A veteran is pulling up a trainee sub-editor for allowing a usage that the Oxford does not cite. The novice explains that newspapers reflect current usage whereas dictionaries record new usages by referring to newspapers. So naturally the Oxford, and particularly the copy which has known many summers, cannot record the new usage. The veteran sighs and orders, Follow the dictionary. Writ large on his face is the unspoken lament, What is the world coming to? These youngsters will argue even against the dictionary.

 

The next image is about

fifteen years later in the big hall of the Telegraph which holds both the news and edit page staff. I am by then much older and heading the edit page team on the paper. Before me is Sukanta Chaudhuri, brilliant student and teacher of English and a contemporary of sorts. Sukanta had run a highly popular philological column in Sunday magazine where I had earlier worked. So I suggest, why not do it again? Or better still, why not do something related but different take a look at new words and usages being spawned all the time, things that fall foul of received correctness but communicate very effectively? Sukanta replies that he is rather for correct usage and I beat a hasty and embarrassed retreat.

This time it is a few years later, around the turn of the eighties decade. I am again up against received correctness in the

person of the venerable Dilip Mukherjee, brought in to shore up the quality of the Times of India edit page after the departure of Girilal Jain. The issue is whether I have missed out a hyphen and I argue that I don't like hyphens, and in any case they are going out of fashion. Dilip Mukherjee looks up the dictionary the self-same Concise Oxford finds the hyphen, gives me a withering look and says, Follow the dictionary.

Which is why I was not a little surprised to read in the papers the other day that the latest

edition of the Advanced Learner's Dictionary, from the same Oxford stable, has made a major break with tradition. It has included a supplement on Indian English. And who is its compiler? Indira Chowdhury Sengupta under the guidance of none

other than the same Sukanta Chaudhuri!

The latest Advanced Learner's has naturally fallen foul of the venerable guardians of received correctness. The Oxford dictionary is the high priest of received English and if it acknowledges the existence of bazaar English, no matter how obliquely, through a supplement, then what remains of the inviolability of correct English, lament the purists.

Jonathan Crowther, who has edited the main Advanced Learner's, has an easy answer: We are recorders, not arbiters. The compiler of the supplement has found examples of Indian words and usage from, among other sources, newspapers. And here I have been bearing the cross of my heretical belief for twenty-five years, unable to gain acceptance, but equally unable to give up the idea.

I have always believed that newspapers are something

special. They record not just what makes tongues wag but also how they do.

Newspapers provide the first draft of history and a chronicle of the lives of words from new births through maturity to

eventual obsolescence. To both historians who write the final draft of history, and lexicographers who chart the progress of living languages, newspapers are not just a primary but also a prime source.