Mental Excursions

  Oh Kolkata! For every visitor to Kolkata, the centuries-old city holds a different meaning. For the religious and the pious, the bamboo framework of the pandals coming up for the annual Durga puja , just a couple of weeks away, hold the promise of elaborate celebrations and intense devotion and fervour. With this, festival-shopping is also picking up which would thankfully provide an opportunity to small businesses to make up some of the losses suffered during the Covid-time. Shoppers too are getting their purses ready for the purpose. I hear from many people that Kolkata is the shopping destination for clothes for weddings and they too are planning their trips for the wedding season soon to start. Photo: The Statesman There are the scholars and music-lovers, who go to the city seeking food for their minds and the soul. For the civic authorities, this is the time to take the brunt of the inactivity and apathy of government machinery which has not found a solution for the tr...

  Adam & Eve, ladies & gentlemen? You may recall last week's post https://anupamaexcursions.blogspot.com/2021/09/sometimes-words-too-want-company.html Let me not keep the list of word pairs started last week unfinished. Funny thing is that once the order is accepted in lexicon, you use it as it is and not reverse it e.g., the bard wrote Romeo and Juliet , but we cannot say Juliet and Romeo and we always say ladies and gentlemen and not the other way round. Yes, I should put a disclaimer. This list is by no means complete. As language grows and evolves, expressions become more and more timely and contemporary. Without much ado I come to these binomial expressions which I have again tried to put in categories. Most of these are nouns. People It all started with Adam and Eve who were man and woman but there was no mention of love and marriage . Logically we are their children, so aren’t we all kith and kin (relatives)? Boys and girls, bride and groom, man / husba...

  Sometimes words too want company Words are powerful tools and humans use trillions of them each day to say what they want to. Although pet-owners painstakingly explain how their feathered or four-legged ‘children’ express their emotions, I daresay it is not the same.     Yet sometimes one word does not seem enough so we have created pairs of words which convey what we want to. They can be nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs or even prepositions, if you please. They can be similar like prim and proper , safe and sound , rest and recreation or opposites e.g. lost and found , love and war , hot and cold , and scores more. We have absorbed them so well that our language becomes more expressive and naturally, more beautiful too.   Earlier I had written about rhyming words: https://anupamaexcursions.blogspot.com/2021/06/lang-reduplicated-words.html   https://anupamaexcursions.blogspot.com/2021/06/reduplicated-words-ii.html   For my own as we...