A man wanting to get rid of snakes in his garden decided to buy a mongoose. He went to a pet shop where he saw two of them, put up for sale. He was quite confused – should he ask for two mongooses (that didn’t sound quite right) or two mongeese (after all, the plural of goose is geese). He opted to take the safe way out. He told the shop keeper – “Give me a mongoose….actually, make that two”!!!
Well, the mallu would have actually been actually asking for his simian ancestors, had he said mongeese! And if he has learnt from the school where MG annan did, then surely he knows that adding an “s” to the end of a word makes it plural. So, if you want to refer to one member of the audience, you would say Audien!!! J I almost fell off the chair laughing!!!
In India, we speak Indglish – a language that has as many accents and dialects as there are Indian languages! Like Wardle’s search for the Average Briton, we’d probably end up hunting for a needle in a haystack to find a “propah” Indian English accent! Not that there aren’t any variations in the way the Brits themselves speak - Boycott being our most famous example!
Audience in its strictest sense should refer to something that is auditory or aural. Like the lovely word which Vani’s father used “Shroddha” – the sense it affects “Shravan” is there in the word itself. However, as the language gets vulgarized – we see instances of people using it to refer to other kinds of gathering of people (e.g. spectators). However, I do not expect The Hindu to debase itself thus – not yet! And yet, we had S. Dinakar reporting for the Hindu on the first Test match between India and Pakistan held recently at The Kotla grounds talking about how Tendulkar regaled the audience with his delightful stroke-making! Bathos is the word that comes to mind!
My friend Mohan Ram would perhaps be crying with shame! He recalls with pride an incident that happened in the early 90s when The Hindu had just started their Delhi edition. He was in some small town deep in Uttar Pradesh when he came across an elderly gentleman sitting with a copy of The Hindustan Times and marking out errors – both spelling and typos. Mohan went up to him, handed him a complimentary copy of The Hindu and told him “I’ll come back tomorrow to collect your subscription – I’m confident about the quality of my newspaper”. Surely enough, the man was extremely pleased with the content and quality of paper and promptly switched over to The Hindu. I’m not sure if my friend would venture out now to challenge someone thus!
I guess the advances in technology have brought along with it an equal number of problems too! Where people used to pore over text to make sure there are no mistakes, now we just run a spell check. And so while we end up correcting flavour to flavor (to suit the American dictionary), we oversee mistakes like flower for flour!!! Worse still, people blindly accept suggestions from the speller resulting in humorous situations – Anoop Shekhar allowed his name to get changed to Snoop Shaker!!!
Well, looking at the bright side of things, it at least gives us reason to laugh…after all, English is a funny language, don’t they say!!!

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