Uma on Rethinking Secularism

Congratulations to Uma Dasgupta of Indian Writing for winning third prize in the Indian Express essay competition. She's posted an edited version of her essay at her blog, and I would encourage people to go check it out.

(Note: I looked for the winning essay at the Indian Express website, but couldn't find it. If anyone has the link, I would be grateful for it.)

Uma's essay is a literary and ethical approach to India's experience with secularism, with quotes from Saadat Hasan Manto, Amitav Ghosh, and yes, Aamir Khan (!) along the way.

The part that really stands out to me as worth underlining in triplicate are the following proposals for strengthening Indian secularism:

(a) Punish the guilty. Whether or not the victims seek revenge is not relevant; they have a right to seek justice, and the State has a responsibility to see that those who are guilty must be punished.

(b) We all know that the Babri Masjid was systematically broken down on 6 December 1992. Is it entirely appropriate for the State, if it is truly the secular guardian of its people's interests, to leave the matter to the courts? The ethical thing for a secular State to have done would have been to rebuild a structure that has been pulled down during its tenure; if, on the other hand, the time for rebuilding the mosque is long past and the matter now pending court settlement, the answer is in not letting the wounds fester as they have been festering for so long, but in working towards a firm and fair closure.

(c) Follow the rule of law in every case. Under the present legislations, there are more than sufficient provisions to suppress the incitement of hatred. The State should invoke these provisions swiftly in every case, until such activity subsides altogether.

(a) and (c) should be obvious, no-brainers. But in India, with its troubled judicial system, they are not.

Rebuilding the Babri Masjid -- point (b) -- is a more questionable proposition practically speaking, as I think Uma knows. But her emphasis on the necessity of pursuing some final alternative ("firm and fair closure") has not been widely considered even by secularists. Thus far, it seems even the Congress government is mainly dedicated to maintaining the status quo, so that the problem of Ayodhya (among many other problems in Indian secularism) lingers on like a hot coal at the bottom of the stack.

Explainer: India, Iran, and the IAEA

I've been trying to understand how India's vote against Iran at the IAEA on September 25 led the Indian left to call a general strike in India four days later. I supported India's vote against Iran, and I was shocked to see the Left parties calling a strike as a response. What could the justification possibly be?

The issues are complicated and interlocking, so let's break them into three parts.

1. Iran and the IAEA

As I read it, the IAEA's September 25 vote was a kind of warning to Iran from the UN. Here is Fox News:

The watchdog agency's 35-nation board approved the resolution, which could lead to Iran's referral to the Security Council for violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty unless Tehran eases suspicions about its atomic program.

The Security Council could impose sanctions if it determines that Iran violated the treaty, but that is unlikely since China and Russia, which wield Security Council vetoes, oppose those efforts.

The vote was 22 in favor of the resolution, 12 abstaining, and one opposed. So India's vote wasn't, strictly speaking, essential for the success of the resolution (Pakistan, China, and Russia were among the abstainers). A second resolution will likely be floored in November, at which time Iran -- unless it does something dramatic about its nuclear energy program -- is probably going to be "referred" to the UN Security Council.

That said, it seems pretty clear that no sanctions (or, for that matter, military action) will be imposed on Iran by the Security Council because of opposition from veto-wielding powers. So in some sense this vote is symbolic, though I can imagine how in Iran this might look like the beginning stages of the next U.S. invasion in the middle east. (Seymour Hersh notwithstanding, I don't think anyone is seriously talking about that now.)

One could legitimately question whether the UN should be in the business of stopping sovereign nations from developing civilian nuclear energy, which is what Iran says it is doing. But that question leads to two obvious responses. One is, if that is indeed all Iran is doing, why not invite UN inspectors in to see? Secondly, given that Iran is a net energy exporter and an oil-rich nation, why is it in fact so determined to develop nuclear energy? It seems fishy; you don't have to be Paul Wolfowitz to doubt Iran's motives here.

2. The Congress Party and the Bush Administration

Before the September 25 vote, the U.S. exerted a fair amount of pressure on India to vote against Iran on the matter of the UN Security Council referral. Early on, the government indicated that it would not vote against Iran, but at the last minute changed its mind.

There is even some talk that India allowed its vote to be bought in a quid pro quo arrangement with the U.S. It may be true -- certainly some Indian newspapers are reporting it that way (see Kuldip Nayer in the Deccan Herald) -- though at this point I haven't seen any direct reference to what specifically India hoped to gain by voting against Iran. A new arms deal? An economic package? It's not been made clear. There is some indication that the U.S. Congress is going to go forward with a bill soon (see this blog), but the contents of the bill haven't been specified yet.

One could argue that Iran might be even more important than the U.S. to India, because Iran is one of India's principal suppliers of oil and natural gas. By voting against Iran, India jeopardized that strategic relationship (fortunately, Iran has signaled that it has no intention to cut off energy supplies following India's vote.)

3. The Indian Left

I find it odd that Indian Communist leaders have registered their disappointment with the government's vote with references to the Non-Aligned Movement. Here is Gurudeb Dasgupta, a Secretary for the CPI, in an interview with the Hindustan Times:

It was the previous Congress government’s endeavour to brand India a non-aligned country. By voting at the IAEA on the Iran issue, the same Congress has now abandoned its foreign policy and had diluted its faith in NAM. In fact, all this has happened under US pressure. Like Iraq, the US wants to grab Iran’s oil wells. If China, Russia and Pakistan could abstain from voting, why could India not follow suit. We would continue with our protest on the issue.

Isn't it odd that the left is still talking about the non-aligned movement fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union? It seems to me they are using very old rhetoric, and to some extent reacting in a knee-jerk way: one shouldn't agree with the U.S., just because they are the U.S. and we don't like them. People like Dasgupta aren't considering the possibility that India's vote might have actually been a principled one: it's in everyone's best interests to discourage Iran's nuclear weapons program.

The Left parties in the UPA government are currently very powerful, but the most strident criticism of the Manmohan Singh government has come from Communist factions that did not join the current coalition. As I understand it, it was those parties outside the government who called a successful general strike to protest the anti-Iran vote on September 29. The strike shut down airports as well as many public sector industries, and hit especially hard in West Bengal (where the Communists are especially powerful). Here is the Hindustan Times article:

Industrial and commercial activities as also air services were affected in large parts of the country on Thursday as the day-long strike by Left trade unions crippled work in public sector banks and insurance companies and government undertakings to protest the UPA government's economic policies. The impact of the strike was the maximum in the Left-ruled West Bengal where life almost came to a standstill with public transport, including train services, remaining paralysed.

Only two flights - one each from Delhi and Mumbai - landed at Netaji Subhaschandra Bose international airport which was the worst-hit by the Airport Authority of India employees' protest against privatisation of Delhi and Mumbai airports.

Not a pretty picture: such events are bad for India's economy, as well as its image abroad.

The governing UPA coalition is still holding together, but with rising oil prices and extremely limited economic reforms, I think both sides are pretty frustrated with the arrangement.

We'll see whether this internal pressure will be enough to cause India to change its vote on the Iran/nuclear vote in November. I have a feeling it will.

Born to Kvetch

Busy, busy, busy; tired, tired, tired. Grading, writing conference papers, trying to publish stuff, teaching, commuting... Oy vey.

Yeah, I know -- no one wants to hear it. But it's my blog, and I reserve the right to kvetch when necessary.

* * *
Speaking of which, I've been reading a book called Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods, by Michael Wex. It's a mixture of cultural history and light sociolinguistics, with some reference to Jewish theology as well as migration patterns in the Jewish diaspora thrown in for good measure. I'm interested in this stuff partly because it's part of my interest in dialects and slangs (see several recent posts, including this one).

I would review the book more properly, but I am, as previously mentioned, too busy and tired (and the second half of the Sox vs. the other Sox beckons). So here is Michael Wex explaining the Yiddish word "kvetch" -- complete with some surprising, er, digestive connotations:

Yet the entry for kvetshn (the verbal form) in Uriel Weinreich's Modern English-Yiddish Dictionary reads simply: "press, squeeze, pince; strain." There is no mention of grumbling or complaint. You can kvetch an orange to get juice, kvetch a buzzer for service, or kvetch mit di pleytses, shrug your shoulders, when no one responds to the buzzer you kvetched. All perfectly good, perfectly commong uses of the verb kvetshn, none of which appears to have the remotest connection with the idea of whining or complaining. The link is found in Weinreich's "strain," which he uses to define kvetshn zikh, to press or squeeze oneself, the reflexive form of the verb. Alexander Harkavy's 1928 Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary helps make Weinreich's meaning clearer. It isn't simply to strain, but "to strain," as Harkavy has it, "at stool," to have trouble doing what, if you'd eaten your prunes the way you were supposed to, you wouldn't have any trouble with at all. . . . A really good kvetch has a visceral quality, a snese that the kvetcher won't be completely comfortable, completely satisfied, until it's all come out.

All rightie then: something slightly wicked to dwell on next time you're stuck listening to someone kvetching about all their non-problems!

First Take on Harriet Miers

For those who missed it somehow, the President has nominated someone named Harriet Miers to take Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The item on Harriet Miers' resumé that caught my eye was her work for the Texas Lottery Commission, between 1995 and 2000. Here's the New York Times profile:

In 1995, Mr. Bush, then in his first months as governor of Texas, appointed Ms. Miers to a six-year term as chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission. Ms. Miers unexpectedly resigned after five years that were marked by controversy and the dismissal of two executive directors of the commission. The first executive director, Nora Linares, was fired in 1997 when it became public that her boyfriend had worked for the company that held the contract to operate the lottery. Ms. Linares's successor was dismissed after only five months when he began reviewing campaign contributions of state legislators without the commission's knowledge. Despite the problems, as well as the lottery's declining sales, The Dallas Morning News praised Ms. Miers when she resigned in 2000 for ''preserving the operations' integrity.'

It looks like she came out of her work with the lottery untouched by the scandals. The Houston Chronicle has more details on the Texas Lottery Commission scandals, and ends with this interesting nugget:

Miers resigned as lottery commission chairman in 2000. She said her resignation had nothing to do with lagging sales in its biggest game, Lotto Texas.

Miers resigned from the Texas Lottery Commission, in short, because she managed it poorly. She joined Bush's staff in 2001, and held such luminous positions as "White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy" (2003-2004) before winding up as White House Counsel last November.

She's a notch less embarrassing than Michael Brown, in the sense that she does have some experience in politics. But it's still pretty underwhelming.

Gunner Palace


We finally saw the Gunner Palace documentary on DVD over the weekend.

It's every bit as good as Chuck Tryon's review from several months ago suggested. Many readers will probably know what this documentary is about: filmmaker Mike Tucker was unofficially embedded with a U.S. artillery division (known as the "Gunners") in Uday Hussain's bombed-out palace in Baghdad in September and October of 2003.

There are a number of interesting things about the way Gunner Palace is filmed and narrated as well as some mild combat sequences, but for me it is the unfiltered look at what Americans soldiers are doing and feeling when they're at leisure that makes this film worth seeing. It's American pop culture -- Burger King, rap music, and video games -- mixed up with a dangerous, poorly planned military occupation. The guys joke around in the daytime, doing freestyle raps and messing with (Uday's?) electric guitars. But at night they go out on raids and kill -- and are themselves injured and killed.

(Watching this film after the Abu Ghraib photos were released, one is a little less sympathetic to all the clowning around: it seems like that same cocky attitude was in play in the thoughtless humiliation of captives. Perhaps an update from the post-Abu Ghraib moment might have been in order...)

I agree with Chuck that this film is deeply ambivalent about the war/occupation of Iraq. While Gunner Palace is at times quite critical of Donald Rumsfeld, it is so invested in getting the 'grunt's eye view' right that it's not really asking the question of whether these young men and women should be in Iraq to begin with. I tend to think it's a smart approach to take, and I don't really know what the point of making a decisively "anti-war" documentary might be at this point in time, especially given that this will be a long-term occupation no matter who is in the White House: there's no point mimicking Michael Moore.

Other links:

The directors of the film have a kind of blog/diary up at the film's website, with many stills from the film here.

The military blogger Blackfive talks about the film here.

And A.O. Scott's review positive of Gunner Palace is here (not 100% sure if that link will work; if not, try it via Rotten Tomatoes).

Aishwarya Rai Holds Book, Poses For Photo


(Via Beth Loves Bollywood.)

It's part of the Celebrity READ poster series, which also includes everyone from (the incomparable) Bernie Mac (holding Armed and Dangerous) to Britney Spears (holding Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone). My favorite in the series has to be Coolio, who poses with Frankenstein. I'm thinking of ordering one to put up in my office at school...

So why is Aish holding a deeply annoying book like The Alchemist? It really doesn't say much about her taste in literature.

Well, at least she didn't pose while holding The Mistress of Spices, which would be both annoying and crass -- as she's starring in the as-yet unreleased film adaptation of it.

Even DeLay's Replacement is Questionable

Let me just echo Unfogged, and say that I hope Texas Attorney General Ronnie Earle really has the goods on Tom DeLay. From the charges that have been filed, and the arcane structure of campaign finance law, I'm not really convinced that there's a very strong case there. They have to prove not just that money changed hands, but that DeLay knew the diversion of corporate campaign contributions to the RNC was designed to circumvent state law. Tall order.

Meanwhile, I'm surprised that the person chosen to replace DeLay as Majority Leader in the House, Roy Blunt, is being investigated for ethics charges himself.

As he worked to unite the party and turn its attention back to the legislative agenda, Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, DeLay's successor as majority leader, faced ethics questions himself.

Records on file with the Federal Election Commission show that since 2003, Blunt's political action committee has paid $94,000 in salary to the consulting firm of Jim Ellis, a longtime associate of DeLay. Ellis has been indicted in the same case as DeLay, for allegedly conspiring to illegally influence the outcome of Texas legislative elections by channeling corporate money to Republican candidates.

Congressional watchdog groups and Democrats pointed to Blunt's employment of Ellis' firm, J.W. Ellis Co., as evidence of what they said is an atmosphere of corruption on Capitol Hill.

It's not even a separate case! What, exactly, are the Republicans thinking?

(Another sign of life in autumn: the start of a juicy new political cycle.)

55 Word Fiction

Anna's call for 55 word 'nanofiction.'

My stab at it:

Vikas soon learned how to size up the customers. The couple in the corner booth were whispering about their check, louder than they thought: "Could you take it? I promise I'll pay you back. Niles has my card; he's coming back on Friday."

Her voice broke. "I think." Was it, or wasn't it, a date?

The Solution

Of all the posts I've written for this blog, the most popular with Google is a little thing I did about the mystery numbers for the American TV show Lost, back in March.

4 8 15 16 23 42

So much for literary criticism, South Asian literature, Bollywood, Bhangra, or the politics of multiculturalism. Apparently more people would rather read about TV.

Not that I'm complaining too loudly. Successive waves of web-surfers come to visit every Wednesday night and Thursday after the show airs, trying (I suppose) to see if anyone has cracked the code. Last Thursday, the spike was about 500 additional visitors (and that's on top of the 100-200 people who visit the site looking for those numbers every single day).

Lost stubbornly refuses to reveal the meaning of the six numbers on the hatch, or how they might be connected to "Hurley's" lottery experience, or the mysterious radio beacon, or the "Others," or the evil black smoke, or the "Black Rock," or virtually anything at all on the island (ad infinitum). Last night, though much was promised, nothing much was delivered: the crazy "Desmond" simply showed us that the numbers add up to 108 on his computer -- woohoo.

Many people have commented on my Lost post over the past few months, but today I think someone might actually have solved it (or at least one aspect of it), with a creative longtitude/latitude reading: 4.815 X 162.342. It points to a spot in the middle of the open ocean near Papua New Guinea (see the Mapquest location here.

Now, as to why those particular numbers have a magical quality associated with them, who knows? The same could be asked about the French chick, or the crazy guy holed up in an underground quarantine for 15 years, listening to the same Mama Cass record again and again ("Make Your Own Kind Of Music").

Can Lost offer a coherent explanation that will satisfy the 20 million or so people who have been waiting for one for more than a year? I doubt it, but I have to admit I'm enjoying being teased thus far.

Autumn Civilizes Us

Autumn civilizes us
Summer's bare arms are sheathed
and the ritual of the cooling air sends us inside
to make schoolwork with sober chalkmarks

And I might say, drily,
"Autumn's softening light adds texture and shadow
to the still-yellow day."

Now analyze the poem.
But my students' eyes are elsehwere, on Autumn,
with its open space and windows
and living, biting insects
all still with us when we talk

And supposedly the famous leaves will don unsober brights
all too soon. But that bomb of color comes too late for Autumn,
verging on the foreshadowed winter.
(Screw the Fall! I'd rather not watch)
I prefer the daylight today, and the twittering, still-green trees,
and you, of course, and the texture of your sweater:
another Autumn, holding in the still-warm air.



Another fledgling attempt at verse. Do forgive the self-indulgence...
Anyway, an earlier instance (a more summery poem) can be found here.

Critiques are always welcomed.

Barbara Ehrenreich Goes Corporate

Barbara Ehrenreich's new book is called Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, and it is the white-collar sequel to her bestselling Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

Where in Nickle and Dimed Ehrenreich spends some months working minimum-wage jobs while also attempting to live on the salaries from those jobs, here her goal is to pose as a white-collar worker in "transition," trying to reenter a changed workplace after taking time off for family reasons. Ehrenreich changes her name back to her maiden name (to avoid recognition), and fakes her resumé to some extent (she gets friends to act as reference verifiers). Most of the chapters of Bait and Switch detail her various attempts to find a real job generally situated in the field of Public Relations or Communications.

The specific trigger for her interest was the spike of white-collar unemployment following the recession of 2001, which disproportionately affected people at middle and higher income brackets. But that's just one event: the general context of Ehrenreich's inquiry is the insecure employment climate that has emerged in corporate America since the 1990s:

Today, white-collar job insecurity is no longer a function of the business cycle--rising as the stock market falls and declining again when the numbers improve. Nor is it confined to a few volatile sectors like telecommunications or technology, or a few regions of the country like the rust belt of Silicon Valley. The economy may be looking up, the company may be raking in cash, and still the layoffs continue, like a perverse form of natural selection, weeding out the talented and successful as well as the mediocre. Since the midnineties, this perpetual winnowing process has been institutionalized under various euphemisms such as "downsizing," right-sizing," "smart-sizing," "restructuring," and "de-layering" -- to which we can now add the outsourcing of white-collar functions to cheaper labor markets overseas.

This world of endless cycles of layoffs threatens to become permanent, partly for the reason that, as Ehrenreich rightly points out, reducing payroll costs is always a quick way for a company to boost its profits.

Ehrenreich details her experiences attending "networking events," and also meeting a series of career coaches, as well as people who might best be described as "employment gurus" (charismatic figures who preach an empowerment message oriented to helping unemployed people feel more employable). She is insightful and often funny on the fallacies of the various employment aids she tries, and I was particularly struck by her take on professional networking:

[Networking] feels 'fake' because we know it involves the deflection of our natural human sociability to an ulterior end. Normally we meet strangers in the expectation that they may truly be strange, and are drawn to the multilayered mystery that each human presents. But in networking, as in prostitution, there is no time for fascination. The networker is always, so to speak, looking over the shoulder of the person she engages in conversation, toward whatever concrete advantage can be gleaned from the interaction-- a tip or a precious contact. This instrumentalism undermines the possibility of a group identity, say, as white-collar victims of corporate upheaval. No matter how crowded the room, the networker prowls alone, scavenging to meet his or her individual needs.

As an academic, I don't have any experience at all with the mid-career transition scenario Ehrenreich is exploring in her book, but I've had my share of demoralizing experiences networking in the academic context. She seems to nail it exactly.

Whether or not you agree with her specific politics, Ehrenreich is certainly a compelling writer, and I liked Bait and Switch, for its analysis of the current corporate climate as well as for the eye-opening exposure of the vast world of career guidance services, resumé-building, and "networking" (all of which are useless, and moreoever seem to be uncannily similar on old-fashioned pyramid schemes in structure).

Still, I'm not sure if the new book will be as influential as Nickle and Dimed, mainly because the world here is so much blander and contained. The stories in Nickle and Dimed were often shocking (especially for a sheltered/privileged academic like myself), but the white-collar version is devoid of interesting characters or gripping situations. "Downward mobility" may be a real phenomenon, but its victims are doing their very best to hide it behind a deadeningly predictable shtick comprised of the following buzzwords: qualifications, objectives, experience, contacts, vision, confidence, and [baseless] optimism.

On the other hand, Bait and Switch might be helpful reading for people who find themselves in roughly the situation Ehrenreich inhabited while doing research for this book (how not to apply for a job that you don't really want anyways). In contrast, Nickle and Dimed, for all its rhetorical power, is not really oriented to the working-class folks whose economic struggles it documents.

In Praise of "Balderdash" (And other words for "nonsense")

The eskimos have a million words -- something like that -- for "snow." We, down in the melted world of "hot air," "hot water," and HOTlanta, have a million words for nonsense. And we need every single one, to truly and precisely describe all the different genres of the useless stuff people say.

The words for nonsense have been in my head lately partly because I've been teaching All About H. Hatterr, and Desani seems to use them all -- often with reference to the speeches of various fake Holy Men who show up in the novel.

So today I thought I would briefly celebrate colorful words for "nonsense," with a mini-tour.

Let's start with the thesaurus.reference.com entry for "nonsense":

absurdity, babble, balderdash, baloney, bananas, blather, bombast, BS, bull, bunk, claptrap, craziness, drivel, fatuity, flightiness, folly, foolishness, fun, gab, gas, gibberish, giddiness, gobbledygook, hogwash, hooey, hot air, imprudence, inanity, irrationality, jazz, jest, jive, joke, ludicrousness, madness, mumbo jumbo, palaver, poppycock, prattle, pretense, ranting, rashness, rot, rubbish, scrawl, scribble, senselessness, silliness, soft soap, stupidity, thoughtlessness, trash, tripe, twaddle

Let's have a closer look at some of the words in bold, shall we? We might also add words like "hocus-pocus" and "blarney," neither of which mean "nonsense," strictly speaking. They are words that describe specific kinds of rhetorical sleights-of-hand -- flattering or deceiving -- and as such they are part of Desani's universe of nonsense. Also, if we were interested in blogging, we might also add "snark," which is a new species: snotty, arch, derision.



Mumbo-Jumbo: Interesting how a number of words meaning 'nonsense' have an ethnic or non-English etymology. Mumbo-jumbo comes from West African religion, where it is the name of a God. Presumably it came into English through the slave trade. The African-American novelist Ishmael Reed played with this word in his postmodern novel Mumbo-Jumbo.

In contemporary usage, it seems to be more or less synonymous with "hocus pocus," and is often used to describe the seeming fakery of religious or quasi-religious rituals:

Mumbo-Jumbo: 2. Obscure or meaningless language or ritual; jargon intended to impress or mystify; nonsense.

1870 L. M. ALCOTT Let. 29 June in E. D. Cheney L. M. Alcott (1889) ix. 238 We..went to vespers in the old church, where we saw a good deal of mumbo-jumbo by red, purple, and yellow priests. 1930 V. SACKVILLE-WEST Edwardians vii. 328 Sebastian..swore loudly that nothing would induce him to take part in the mumbo-jumbo of the imminent Coronation. 1952 A. GRIMBLE Pattern of Islands viii. 165 The moon was above all constraint of sorcery's mumbo-jumbo. 1964 E. BAKER Fine Madness x. 97 Never mind the technical mumbo-jumbo. All we want is a simple yes or no.

Out of cultural sensitivity, one wonders if all this appropriation of "mumbo jumbo" might actually be offensive to some west Africans. I tend to think not, since the God Mumbo-Jumbo is apparently "a god, hobgoblin or boogie man." One doesn't worship these types of Gods, one fears them. (Still, I wouldn't mind knowing where exactly in West Africa Mumbo-Jumbo comes from, and what he means or meant to people there.)

Palaver: Another word with a West African origin, this word meaning straight nonsense comes from a pidgin used by traders centuries ago. It probably comes from the Portugues word "palavra" (or the Spanish: "palabra"). As it was picked up by English sailors, it became derogatory: palaver. Here's the OED:

This word appears to have been used by Portuguese traders on the west coast of Africa for conversing with the local inhabitants (cf. quot. 1735 at sense 4), to have been picked up there by English sailors (cf. quot. 1771 at sense 4), and to have passed from nautical slang into colloquial use. Cf. FETISH n.]


Hocus-Pocus: Probably derived from the Latin "Hoc est corpus," which sounds like it might be part of the Latin mass. The OED suggests that this etymology is not hard and fast:

Used as a formula of conjuring or magical incantation. (Sometimes with allusion to an assumed derivation from hoc est corpus)

1632 RANDOLPH Jealous Lov. I. x, Hocus-pocus, here you shall have me, and there you shall have me! 1656 HOBBES Lib. Necess. & Chance (1841) 384 This term of insufficient cause..is not intelligible, but a word devised like hocus pocus, to juggle a difficulty out of sight. 1772 FLETCHER Logica Genev. 201 The hocus pocus of a popish priest cannot turn bread into flesh.

Whether or not the etymology is set in stone, people have used "hocus pocus" as a figure for the specifically ecclesiastical brand of "nonsense." (In that sense, it's remarkable how close "mumbo-jumbo" and "hocus-pocus" are to one another.)

Balderdash: Interestingly, "balderdash" started as a word for a frothy liquid before it gained its present-day meaning:

Balderdash. 3. A senseless jumble of words; nonsense, trash, spoken or written.

1674 MARVELL Reh. Transp. II. 243 Did ever Divine rattle out such prophane Balderdash! 1721 AMHERST Terræ Fil. 257 Trap's second-brew'd balderdash runs thus: Pyrrhus tells you, etc. 1812 Edin. Rev. XX. 419 The balderdash which men must talk at popular meetings. 1849 MACAULAY Hist. Eng. I. 351, I am almost ashamed to quote such nauseous balderdash. 1854 THACKERAY Newcomes I. 10 To defile the ears of young boys with this wicked balderdash. 1865 CARLYLE Fredk. Gt. II. VII. v. 287 No end of florid inflated tautologic ornamental balderdash.

"Florid inflated tautologic ornamental baldersash": Wow, you can always count on Carlyle to throw down! (But why isn't he using commas correctly?)

Rigmarole: Early in All About H. Hatterr, Desani describes his own book as "rigmarole English," which has a nice, self-deprecating ring to it. The word usually refers to the nonsense associated with rambling, incoherent statements:

Rigmarole: A succession of incoherent statements; an unconnected or rambling discourse; a long-winded harangue of little meaning or importance.

1736 PEGGE Kenticisms, Rigmarole, a long story; a ‘tale of a tub’. 1757 FOOTE Author II, You are always running on with your riggmon~rowles. 1766 MRS. DELANY Life & Corr. Ser. II. I. 77 How I have run on! Burn this rig-me-role instantly, I entreat your ladyship. 1779 F. BURNEY Diary 20 Oct., That's better than a long rigmarole about nothing. 1814 SCOTT in Lockhart (1839) IV. 274 She repeated a sort of rigmarole which I suppose she had ready for such occasions. 1859 MEREDITH R. Feverel xi, You never heard such a rigmarole. 1883 Times 2 Nov. 2/3 A long rigmarole was told how the journalist's hat had fallen into the Seine.

The OED's etymology of rigmarole is quite interesting. Apparently, it is derived from "Ragman's Roll," the latter being a medieval/Renaissance game of chance. Unfortunately, I can't quite understand the game after reading their definition of "Ragman's Roll":

Ragman's Roll: 3. A game of chance, app. played with a written roll having strings attached to the various items contained in it, one of which the player selected or ‘drew’ at random.

In one form the game was a mere amusement, the items in the roll being verses descriptive of personal character: see Wright Anecd. Lit. (1844) 76-82 and Hazlitt E. Pop. Poetry (1864) I. 68. But that of quot. 1377 was probably a method of gambling, forbidden under penalty of a fine.

1377 Durham Halmote Rolls (Surtees) 140 De Thoma Breuster et Ricardo de Holm quia ludaverunt ad ragement contra p{oe}nam in diversis Halmotis positam 20s. condonatur usque 2s. 1390 GOWER Conf. III. 355 Venus, which stant..In noncertein, but as men drawe Of Rageman upon the chance.

So... it's a roll of paper with strings attached? And you pull on the strings at random? And something happens? I'm having trouble visualizing. (Anybody know what "Ragman's Roll" might look like? Or what the point of it might have been?)

Blarney: Literally means "smoothly flattering talk." But here is the rest of the OED definition:

Blarney: Name of a village near Cork. In the castle there is an inscribed stone in a position difficult of access. The popular saying is that any one who kisses this ‘Blarney stone’ will ever after have 'a cajoling tongue and the art of flattery or of telling lies with unblushing effrontery.'

Flattering nonsense is still nonsense. It is the kind of nonsense a 'guru' speaks to his 'chelas' to entice them to give him their money and attention. And it is what you see in book blurbs and letters of recommendation that praise our friends to the stars. Blarney, pure blarney. (I wonder if the prevalence of Blarney in the world bothers the folks who actually live there; it's not their fault, is it?)

Gobbledygook: More official verbiage. The OED speculates that it probably comes from the sound a Turkey makes: "gobble gobble."

Poppycock: It sounds obscene, but really it isn't. The ever-proper Virginia Woolf, as I recall, used this word all the time. Which is odd, because the OED says that the word is originally American slang (and they don't give an etymology):

1865 C. F. BROWNE A. Ward: his Travels I. iii. 35 You won't be able to find such another pack of poppycock gabblers as the present Congress of the United States. 1884 Pall Mall G. 17 July 4/1 All what you see about me bein' drunk was poppycock. 1892 Nation (N.Y.) 24 Nov. 386/1 Their wails were all what the boys call ‘poppycock’. 1924 M. KENNEDY Constant Nymph iii. 54 Sometimes, you know, you talk..poppycock. 1935 Punch 9 Jan. 30/1, I am not going to..ruin the perfect cadences of my English prose by pointing out to you in courteous and dignified language that your objections are all poppycock and my eye. 1955 Times 24 June 4/5 The peculiar capacity for pumping generals into jobs for which they were never suited continued the poppycock started by the Labour Government. 1973 Nation Rev. (Melbourne) 31 Aug. 1443/6 He was..a ‘dangerous, raving, psychotic, stupid, vicious, sickening writer of poppycock’.

I like the idea of describing the Congress of the United States as a "pack of poppycock gabblers." I also hope I one day have occasion to describe someone as a "dangerous, raving, psychotic, stupid, vicious, sickening writer of poppycock." My current worst insult is simply "troll," and that is basically a weak cliché.

Soft Soap: Means flattery (a synonym for "blarney"). Apparently "soft soap" has some vulgar connotation, though I can't quite figure out what that would be (maybe I'm too timid, or maybe I just don't want to go there). Here's the OED:

Soft soap: 2. slang. Flattery; blarney; ‘soft sawder’. Also attrib. orig.

U.S. 1830 Reg. Deb. Congress U.S. 12 Apr. 774, I will not use the vulgar phrase, and say he has been pouring soft soap down the backs of the New York delegation. 1842 People's Organ (St. Louis) 15 Apr. 2/2 The magnificent bombshell, rammed full of pride, aristocracy,..soft-soap, curiosity, folly, display, nonsense, man-worship and small-talk, was touched off. 1848 BARTLETT Dict. Amer. 320 Soft soap, flattery; blarney. A vulgar phrase, though much used. 1861 HUGHES Tom Brown at Oxford xxxiii, He and I are great chums, and a little soft soap will go a long way with him. 1901 DELANNOY £19,000, xxxix, ‘You're the most sensible woman I've ever met.’ ‘None of your soft-soap, now!’

"Soft soap" is a word Jon Stewart should use, when he's criticizing the media for its softball treatment of political figures. You can't keep on using baseball metaphors forever. Sometimes you have to go with soap.

Hogwash: You might think this word derives from water associated with the washing of hogs, but you would be wrong. According to the OED, it's the wash from a kitchen that is given to hogs. It's fitting, if you think about it. (Human-derived waste, consumed by hogs)

Hooey: Another American slang word for nonsense. (Americans have a special talent, both for dishing the stuff and describing it!) Here are some sample usages:

1924 P. MARKS Plastic Age 100 My prof's full of hooey. He doesn't know a C theme from an A one. 1931 1932 WODEHOUSE Hot Water xiii. 223 Well, of all the hooey! 1934 Discovery Jan. 4/2 The United States of America, whose capacity for new words passes all belief, is responsible for hooey. 1935 Punch 10 Apr. 400/1 You have been misled, Hubert. I see it all. Somebody has been telling you the old, old story... Hooey, Hubert. Boloney. 1935 L. MACNEICE Poems 21 Ireland is hooey, Ireland is A gallery of fake tapestries. 1948 V. PALMER Golconda xxv. 210 All this political hooey..doesn't affect me. 1966 AUDEN About House 21 Lip-smacking Imps of mawk and hooey Write with us what they will.


So there's my list -- hope it was amusing for you to read.

Can you think of other colorful words for nonsense? (Feel free to throw out words from South Asian languages, or any other languages that you know. I wanted to do my own entry on "bakwaas," but thought that might be confusing...)

Happy Birthday Google; Everybody Hates Chris

Google turns seven today. Wow, only seven?

I am almost unbelievably dependent on Google. Virtually every post I write on this blog rests upon Google searches. Google also bought Blogger some time ago, so even the fundamental technology I use to write depends on them. I also use their other services, including Google Maps and Gmail, all the time. If you could implant a Google search machine as a chip in your arm, I would probably go out and have it done -- text ads and all -- because it would be damn convenient.

As part of its anniversary celebration, Google Video is streaming the first episode of Everybody Hates Chris, for free for the next four days.

I'm not sure how Chris Rock is supposed to fit the Google birthday, but anyway, Everybody Hates Chris a good show: both funny and serious at the same time -- "black comedy" in more ways than one. Though Chris Rock is only in the show as a voice-over (the show is about his life in Brooklyn as a boy), it somehow feels a lot like the adult version of Chris Rock -- angry, but often brilliantly insightful about the foibles of life on both sides of Ocean Parkway.

Book Candy: Vikas Swarup, Q&A

I recently read Vikas Swarup's Q & A, which was just released in the U.S. this past summer (it was released in India a bit earlier). The novel has generally been pretty well-reviewed, and seems to be selling well, if the Amazon ranking tells us anything.

Swarup's novel has an ingenious (bordering on gimmicky) frame. It's a picaresque Bombay novel about a poor teenager who wins a fantastic sum at a television game-show (the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?). It's such a fantastic sum that he's immediately arrested on suspicion of cheating; the novel unfolds as he explains how he came upon the answer to each trivia question through a life experience that was precisely salient to the particular trivia question he was asked.

The best passages from the novel are full of details and observations from everyday life. One example might be the following passage about riding trains:

Train journeys are about possibilities. They denote a change in state. When you arrive, you are no longer the same person who departed. You can make new friends en route, or find old enemies; you may get diarrhea contaminated water. And, dare I say it, you might even discover love. As I sat in lower berth number three of coach S6 of train 2926A, with fifty thousand rupees tucked inside my underwear, the tantalizing possibility that tickled my senses and thrilled my heart was that I might, just might, be about to fall in love with a beautiful traveler in a blue salwar kameez.

I like how Swarup starts with a generalization about the experience of traveling by train, and ends with details that are unique to Ram's particular problems (and hopes, including a girl in a blue salwar kameez in his cabin in the train). Unfortunately, there aren't many passages in this vein (and even this paragraph isn't great).

Q&A is strong on energy and its funny, moving stories; I really enjoyed the Australian diplomat episode and the unlicensed Taj Mahal tour-operator chapter near the end of the novel. But the novel also has some episodes that border on the incredible, including a somewhat distasteful sequence with a closeted gay Bollywood actor and a truly far-fetched episode involving voodoo. All in all, it's more like "book candy" than literature; goes down easy, but will be quickly forgotten.

I wish Swarup the best of luck -- I have a feeling this book will succeed in the U.S. -- but I can't strongly recommend Q&A.

Other reviews:

Ron Charles at the Washington Post generally gives Swarup the benefit of the doubt, while making some gentle criticisms: "There are enough horrors here to drain a million liberals' bleeding hearts, but Ram never suggests the solution will come from a different political arrangement, more equitable distribution of wealth or social revolution." True, but the absence of a political critique was the least of my concerns in this novel.

Patrix also reviews it, and gives it a lukewarm, "lazy Sunday afternoon" approval.

Lisa Yanaky, at the improbably titled Book Brothel, gives Q&A a 9/10 rating. She ends her review with this: "[Swarup] doesn't have the same writing prowess as authors like Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy, but he still captures all of the things I love about Indian literature."

As half-concessions go, Yanaky's is straightforward enough. But it makes me wonder: what are American readers of Indian literature looking for?

False Promises and Quackery (What else is new?)

President Abdul Kalam is promising an HIV/AIDS vaccine in India in the next three years:

Anti-HIV/AIDS vaccine will be available in the country within the next three years and its clinical trial is on, President A P J Abdul Kalam said on Friday. "Hopefully in three years, it will be available in the market," he told a conclave on 'HIV/AIDS: A uniformed intervention', organised by Assam Rifles Wives Welfare Association.

I hate empty promises like this one. If it were really possible to guarantee that, why aren't any researchers in the field saying so? As far as I know, there is no effective HIV/AIDS vaccine. Any vaccines that are being tested are being tested because it isn't known whether they work. It's really counterproductive to presume that a trial in progress is going to have a positive result.

In general, I'm not so terribly excited about Abdul Kalam. He may have been a good rocket scientist and engineer in his day, but a lot of what he comes up with these days regarding the status of science and technology in India is pretty nutty. When do we get a new Indian President?

Secondly, I'm really not thrilled about the idea that Indian medical schools are going to be incorporating homeopathic medicine into the M.B.B.S. curriculum in the next few years.

I know lots of people subscribe to things like Ayurveda, but it always makes me cringe when people talk about treating cancer with random concoctions, scented candles, and prayer. If folks want to do Ayurveda, fine. There is something to the placebo effect (if you actually believe it). But when the doctors themselves don't know the difference, their patients are really in trouble.

Fortunately, many in the medical community in India are criticizing the proposal.