The Hindu Business Line : The word in cyber space

DID you know that the term, `a Bengali menace,' means `a brilliant, handsome, and charming man,' or that `a Bengal' means a girl who looks good from a distance but less so at close quarters?

Well, improbable as it may seem, they do...

Deadwood media diehards have, in recent times, been growing increasingly strident in their denunciation of the mangling of the English language in digitally intermediated communication modes.

And they may well be justified in feeling exceedingly peeved by the phonetic spelling and sabotaged syntax which mark exchanges carried out through mobile phone text messages, Internet chats, e-mail exchanges and so on.

However, the fact remains that the Internet has simultaneously imparted vitality to English by recording and disseminating the virtually daily changes and innovations that take place in the language as it is used in real life.

Take, for instance, the case of the celebrated online dictionary, www.urbandictionary.com, which meticulously records slang terminology. Parenthetically, the meanings of `a Bengal menace' and `a Bengal' given above are as set out in the postings on the urbandictionary.com Web site.

The accuracy of its reflection of the changes in street sentiment in various parts of the world - as captured in slang - becomes abundantly clear if one looks up, say, `George W. Bush.'

The postings on urbandictionary.com define `George W. Bush' variously as the only man alive to make Forest Gump look smarter, a political puppet of large companies whose main goals in life are getting rich and destroying the planet in the process and a reason why the Founding Fathers would have sabotaged the American Revolution themselves had they foreseen what electoral representation would amount to in the future.

If you suspect that these definitions suggest a bias on the part of urbandictionary.com against the US President and little else, you might try looking up the listings under `B' on www.pseudodictionary.com, a "dictionary for words that wouldn't make it into dictionaries."

Pseudodictionary.com says the word `Bush' means `to attack with little provocation, fabricating an implausible justification after the fact' and goes on to define a `bush drinker' as "an underage drinker who hides in bushes to drink with friends."

It is, of course, possible that the hosts of both the Web sites do not hold a very high opinion of Bush... but not wholly probable. And then again, these definitions are not created by those who host the Web site but by the people who submit them.

The more faint-hearted who find themselves quite unmanned by the almost violent exuberance of slang may seek solace in the vast collection of politically correct terms posted by PCPhrases.com.

PCPhrases.com charmingly describes a crook as morally (ethically) challenged, an alcoholic as an anti-sobriety activist, cannibalism as intra-species dining, fat people as differently weighted, and road kill as vehicularly compressed maladapted life form.

Incidentally, the genteel substitution for `worst' is `least best.' A term can't get more correct than that.

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