Mental Excursions

Can you hear me ? This past week involved a lot of going out for various occasions, events and ceremonies. Naturally, there were food, drinks, exchange of news and gossip, even airing of clothes which had not seen the light of the day due to Covid-caused social distancing. Most of these outings were enjoyable and I had a good time. Yet, on a couple of occasions I did find something to complain about- the jarring music. At one such event, out of love for us, the host seated us in the front row where the makeshift dance floor was set up. Troubled by the blaring music, a friend and I moved to the end of the hall. Someone from the family noticed this, tut-tutted and escorted us back to the front. After a few seconds we got up and went back. Someone came again and started cajoling us to sit in the front. We tried to explain but were inaudible. Finally, after a few similar attempts, they perhaps felt that we were party-poopers and left us alone.     The party-lovers included...

Don’t wix up your mords!   In this heat if you mention a sold calad , drilled chink , song liesta or going to a still hation , I am with you. Let us do it together. No, I have not bitten my tongue, am not drunk or gone crazy. I am not even playing a game of tongue-twisters. I just found some words called spoonerisms. According to merriam-webster.com/words-at-play A spoonerism is a phenomenon of speech in which the initial elements of a common phrase are transposed, usually accidentally. The resulting slip is usually composed of words that are themselves familiar, leading to a humorous expression. Example:  fighting a liar  instead of  lighting a fire , or  keys and parrots  for  peas and carrots . ‘I have a half-warmed fish in my mind’ (half-formed wish). Th e term is named after Reverend William Archibald Spooner, the warden of New College, Oxford (1844–1930), who was said to be notorious for committing these faux pas...

  Petrol, gas on fire Most people I know focus on absorbing the main happenings and events of the day when watching news on television. I can hear the anchor/newscaster or other people on the screen, and they repeat the same news many times a day, so I focus my attention on the ticker creeping quietly at the bottom of the screen, for it is there you can find the germ of what might blow up to hog the whole screen the next or several following days. Yet with petrol prices, it went the other way round. After the quiet of, I am told, 138 days, one evening I saw and heard heated discussions on the increase in the prices of petrol and diesel. But after nearly 15 upward revisions in the last few days, it seems to have become a piece of routine information for the media and now it has been demoted to the level of a few words moving silently on the screen, that too if they are not hidden by advertisements. I saw that m any a times in the last fortnight and suddenly my quest for gyan (kno...