Of Alternate, Unintended Meanings

WARNING: Adult content

My short story Kaleidoscope begins like this:

Expanse of green. Sheer silk…white…flowing. A pearl necklace. Pearl earrings.

I gave it to Mat, our instructor at the British Council for some feedback. Apart from some pretty useless comments (e.g. it's a horror poem!?), he marked on the phrase "pearl necklace" (adult content - think before you click) and asked me to look it up on Urban Dictionary, if I dared. Of course, I had to check it out once he'd said as much, though I wished I hadn't. "Pearl earrings" carried a similar meaning. Even though I found it pretty disgusting that instead of telling me something useful, that was what Mat was doing with my piece, but it is also strangely fascinating with respect to the people's imagination!

Do GODS disintegrate?

When I was in school some 5 years ago, GODS - Group of Delhi Superbikers - used to be a huge craze. Haven't heard of them in a while.

Is the group still active, or have the GODS shunned their godliness? And what exactly do they do in the group?

Hunky Dory!

I've been seeing advertisements for the relatively new Hero Honda bike 'Hunk' for sometime now, and have also, on some occasions, seen the bike, mostly in red.

While it seems pretty good, look-wise, to me, I really wonder why a guy would buy a bike names Hunk. What guy would want to claim with pride that he rides a hunk?!

A Poned Post

A few days ago, some of us were having a conversation with Suchitra ma'am about our convocation and she mentioned that a student had emailed her saying that he was about to be 'convocated'. She said that she hadn't thought of the word before but that it had a lovely feel to it, as if someone was going to be beheaded. Sice then, she said, she was having visions of the convocation with a lot of decapitated heads lying all over the auditorium. I completely share her views on the matter.

The conversation then steered to the word 'prepone'. It was her father who brought it up saying that the MS Word editor gave it as an error and that was the first time he realized that the word did not exist, after confirming it with the dictionary. I had known for sometime now that there's no such word as prepone but did not know the reason. Suchitra ma'am ventured to explain it to us based on a conversation she had had with someone else. He had explained to her, as she did to us now that prepone would be a valid word if 'post' in postpone were a prefix so that 'pre'pone becomes its antonym. For that to happen, there has to be an independent word 'pone' with its own meaning (a synonym of schedule) that can take prefixes which alter its meaning.

Since pone clearly doesn't exist (as our flights are never poned at 2 pm and our doctor never pones an appointment), and there doesn't seem a possibility of it happening in the near future, prepone, though a very convenient word, is not a part of the Queen's English, or American English, for that matter. Use 'advance' if you are finicky, or simply prepone your usage of the word till it makes an entry into OED! :)

Edit: Just googled a bit and read through a few discussion thread on the topic. Most Indians think that prepone is a logical opposite of postpone. It certainly does appear that way, I must admit. While the Americans prefer to use 'move up', I came across a really interesting entry where a person claims that a more appropriate and logical antonym to postpone would be, wait for it, antepone, as opposed to prepone. I bow to this person. After this, there's nothing left to write.

Must go to blog: http://weirdbooks.blogspot.com/