“Great minds discuss ideas,Average minds discuss events,

Small minds discuss people.”

Anon.





One should only open any of the articles in some of the present day newspapers and magazines to see how the English language is being abused and misused relentlessly. One of the common sins committed by the so-called new stars in the literary horizon is sesquipedalia. They could be aptly called sesquipedalians. This is a very telling word, which tells the whole story of people who write to impress with words that the common reader does not understand. This tendency had been discouraged even in the olden days, resulting in the birth of the word sesquipedalian. It was coined to describe long-winded words in any communication, where much shorter words would do as well, if not better. It was Mark Twain who once said; “ the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning bug and lightening.” How true!



The idea of writing any literary or communication piece is to convey our thoughts to the reader, and not to show that the writer knows some bombastic words in the English language. R.K.Narayan, in my opinion the best non-Caucasian writer in English, uses such simple words and has a special way of handling them that even a high school drop out could read and enjoy his books. If one compared that with the present day Pulitzers and Bookers, one would get a cultural and linguistic shock.



Let us get to the bottom of the word sesquipedalia. It was the Roman poet, Horace, which first described this word. These are words which are a foot and a half long! The prefix, sesqui, comes from Latin root, one and a half. The word, at times, is used to describe any function got up to celebrate the one hundred fiftieth years, sesquicentennial. Again the word “sesqui” could have come from the Latin semi, that means half. The suffix pedalian comes from Latin root pes, which denotes the foot. Thus the whole thing, put together, becomes one and a half-foot. How did the words foot and foot ruler come about? Could it be that the human foot in the olden days was that long? The other connected words are pedal- something that one presses under the foot to control some machine; pedestrian-one who walks on foot; centipede-one which walks on hundred feet; millipede-one that walks on thousand feet, impede – to obstruct; etc.



Any language should grow by borrowing words from many other languages. English language leads the way here. Original English does not even have a script. It was, probably, an offspring of the marriage between the local Gaelic, spoken by the inhabitants of the English Isles in the eleventh century, when the invading Normans brought with them their French. Gaelic itself came from Hungarian. More than half of the words in the present day English came from other languages. The other half could be rightly called Anglo-Saxon in origin. Many Indian languages will have to learn this lesson from English in not being too narrow minded in using common words from other languages, that the common man understands, instead of trying to find a long-winded new word in their own language.



English tolerates any type of distortion of their language, and rightly so. The Americans, proud as they are, would want to change even the spellings of many English words, in addition to adding words to that language. Even the word sesquipedalian should have been sesquipaedalian in true English style. English language has even borrowed many Indianised English words into their language. While co-brother and pre-pone are the two glaring examples of Indian English now being absorbed into the addendum to the Oxford Dictionary, they have even gone a step further in saying that “ grammar and dictionaries are there to record common usage and not to dictate them.” (Norman Vincent of Cambridge University.)



This is in sharp contrast to our languages, especially that great language of all times, now even accepted as the mother of all Indo-European languages, Sanskrit. The latter was kept under very rigid grammatical rules and regulations that the common man lost touch with the language and its richness. Sanskrit could enrich any man’s existence on this planet. While I am at this topic a very funny incident comes to mind. The incident shows how we blindly adore our languages to the point of being fanatical, and also shows, at the same time, how callous we, as a Nation, are in spending the poor taxpayer’s money.



I was once a part of the Govt. of India’s commission to try and teach medicine in Indian languages, like Hindi. I accepted the assignment thinking that it would be an opportunity to have intellectual stimulation, in addition to getting to know Hindi better. I never realized that I would be in for an unpleasant surprise! The commission had my former Dean at the Stanley Medical College, Madras as the chairman. There were ten Hindi and ten Sanskrit pundits as permanent members. I was one of the five invited members to assist the commission as a medical scientist.



I was paid rupees one hundred fifty per diem allowance, in addition to my airfare to Delhi and back. I would not know how much were the other members paid! It must have been a substantial sum at that time-I is talking of the early 1960s. The first meeting lasted for two full weeks. At every stage the discussion would be mainly on the etymology and the syntax etc. of both Sanskrit and Hindi, and at no stage did the debate take on any intellectual problems. At the end of two long weeks, we succeeded in translating two words only. They were aanthr-brahadanthrakoshtak and aanthra-aanthrakoshtak. The original Greek words were entero-colostomy and entero-enterostomy.



I went up to the chairman, my former Dean, and tendered my resignation from the commission after the first meeting, as I thought it was both foolish and a waste of money to go on with this exercise as we were barking up the wrong tree. Medicine is full of Greek and Latin words, and there are hardly any English words. All over the English speaking world, and also in countries like France, Germany, Italy, and even Russia medicine is taught in their own languages but the words are the same Greek and Latin words. None of those countries tried to change them into their own languages. One could easily teach medicine in Hindi, or, for that matter, in any Indian language using the same Greek and Latin words. In addition to being foolish to search for an equivalent word in Hindi for the Latin and Greek words, one would make the new medical studies very cumbersome with those new long-winded words, the sesquipedalia.



The chairman lost his cool on seeing my resignation; he was feeling sorry that a junior teacher like me should have to refuse to be on an all India Commission- a prestigious one at that. He even told me that I was selected mainly because I was his student and he knew me well. I had to pacify him and eventually got out of it. To cut the long story short, the commission died a natural death after a couple of years. I am told, could not verify though, that they succeeded in translating only a couple of dozens of words in those two years. Each one of that sesquipaedalia should have cost the taxpayer a handsome amount!



This kind of fanaticism in language does not even serve the cause of the language, not to speak of its growth, in the first place. Mankind is but one large family and language, in my humble opinion, is only a vehicle for communication. The easier it is the better for the recipient. The final idea is to convey the thoughts in one man’s head to others. The birds and the animals have their own language, but that is the language of love. Man, with his proclivity for comfort and greed, is turning language into one of the tools to hate another man. We seem to enjoy hating one another in the name of religion, caste, creed, language, geographic boundaries, and what have you. This tendency is the result of our having the present political system of nations and regions, each one hating the other-competing with one another for one-upmanship.



Man is here as a small part of this macrocosm. He can not exist in isolation. He is never independent, but is always interdependent. How could one, then, have differences in such small matters like language? Today man is fighting M.A.N-Man, Animal, and Nature. This can not go on for a very long time. We have to change this tendency. Right thinking people, who have no stakes in politics and power, could only do this. I hope wisdom will dawn on us sooner than late, as the time is running out. Our future generations would certainly hold us responsible for their ills, mainly due to our destroying Nature for our narrow ends. The final remedy for all this is to bring man and man together in this world! Long live mankind on this planet.



“ When your bow is broken and your last arrow spent,

Then shoot, shoot with your whole heart.”

Zen Philosophy.