#SoCS Oct. 17/2020

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “a word you have to look up.” We all have words we can never spell. Use one of yours in your post and let that word drive your stream of consciousness where ever it goes. Have fun!

When I read today’s prompt I remembered my maternal grandfather. I have very fond memories of him because my brother and I spent our summer vacations at his home every year. My parents settled in the same small town after my father retired from service. One day my grandfather told him he wanted to read a good book in English. And he said he could not understand the meanings of many words. What could he do about that? My father suggested that he should read The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes. And he should keep a note book and dictionary at hand. My grandfather did that. He showed me the notebooks filled with words and their meanings. I have his two volumes of Sherlock Holmes with me 😊.

Coming back to the prompt, recently I came across the word, ELIDES. I was coming across it for the first time. I looked up in the dictionary and also googled it.

It means ‘to omit in pronunciation, to supress or alter, to strike out something such as a written word, to leave out of consideration.

I remember Chupke Chupke, a fun movie by Hrishikesh Mukherjee. It is about Hindi and English. The heroine’s brother-in-law loves Hindi and does not tolerate the use of English words while speaking Hindi. In the course of the movie, the hero keeps asking him questions about the pronunciation of words in English. He asks why k is elided from the word know and pronounced as no? And but and put have the same spellings but pronounced differently. Many such scenes follow and it had been a pleasure to watch the movie. I have seen it many times over the years and each time it has made me smile.

English has elided many words in Kannada. We have become so used to the English words that we have to really think very hard to remember the Kannada words. My husband is writing a Dental book in Kannada for general readers. He has to use the English to Kannada dictionary regularly. We came to know that the tooth brush is called ‘koorcha’ in Kannada. If such words were used people would have to use the Kannada to English dictionary 😊. In our daily use too, English words have elided words in Kannada.  But there are many who speak Kannada without using English words and it is a learning experience to listen to them.

In places near the borders of two states, many words in a language of one state are elided by the language of the other state. Our village in the northern part of Kerala is not very far from the borders of Karnataka. Kannada speaking people use a lot of Malayalam words and it is said Malayalam spoken there is not as pure as is spoken in south Kerala.

Earlier I used to look up words in the dictionary but now I mainly use Google. We get the meanings of words faster but the dictionary has its own charm. My husband prefers to use his old dictionary.