The journalistic
gaffe which was the subject of my earlier blog post reminds me of an
imaginative word derivation achieved by a novice journalist. With a degree in
mass communication from an Australian university, she came to Vijayawada with a
lovely lilting accent at the dawn of this century and started working, at my
suggestion, as a feature writer for an English language newspaper. Within a
month, she did what lily-livered veterans couldn’t do: she introduced quite a
lot of new words into the English language using the national newspaper as a
medium for the purpose. The paper simply printed whatever she wrote – and she
wrote a good deal, unleashing a veritable morphological and syntactical
revolution. ‘The feature articles in your paper,’ I said to the bureau chief,
‘are Bold and Beautiful.’
Then one day, my
wife asked me, ‘Do you know
what “rangy furniture” means?’ I had heard of office furniture, patio
furniture, lawn furniture, outdoor furniture, modern furniture, antique
furniture, period furniture, and secondhand furniture, but never of rangy furniture. But I liked
that expression. When I said I liked it, she began to
laugh. Then she showed me a newspaper article. ‘Your young
friend from Australia has written this,’ she said. ‘The house has rangy
furniture,’ read a sentence in the article. What the author meant
was that the house had a wide range of furniture. But “a wide range of
furniture” would be long-winded and wearisome, so perhaps my young friend added the derivational suffix “y” to “range”
and put life into that tame expression. Quite a stroke of genius!
Rangy! I tried to get my tongue round that
interesting word. It stayed for quite sometime inside the mouth
until the tongue unwillingly loosened its grip on it and let it out with a
vowel to accompany it. And when it came out, it sounded
nice. Besides, it was crisp, laconic – and even Delphic! It made me
reflect on the author who had taken the idea of compression thus far. I thought
she was as inventive as Shakespeare. And her guiding spirit must be
the unforgettable Humpty-Dumpty. Remember what Humpty-Dumpty said
in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: ‘When I use a word, it means
just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
Come to think of it, what is wrong with
“rangy”? Why shouldn’t it be used to mean having
a great range? When Richard Sullivan could talk about “rangy
considerations,” why shouldn't our young newspaper correspondent talk about
“rangy furniture”? 'Besides, “rangy” has an illustrious forebear in
“hopefully,” another describing word. Michael Beresford, in
his Modern English, points out that “hopefully” was originally used
to mean in a hopeful manner. But
in the 1960s, when the word began to be used as a disjunct or comment adverb to
mean “it is to be hoped” or “I hope,” there was a great outcry against it,
first in America, then in Britain. The protesters pointed
out that, in the sentence, ‘Hopefully, the plan will succeed,’ the plan was not
full of hope. But “hopefully” as a comment adverb finally won the
battle, as did “thankfully,” “mercifully” and “sadly” earlier.
“Reliable,” a commonly used word now, had
had a stormier passage a hundred years before “hopefully” began its
journey. The objection was this: you don't rely something, but rely
on it; so don't say reliable but rely-on-able! Fortunately
good sense prevailed soon enough. Otherwise, we would now be using
not only rely-on-able but account-for-able, dispense-with-able,
dispose-of-able and a plethora of others.
Will “rangy” in the sense in which our
inventive writer used it gain the acceptability that “hopefully” and “reliable”
did? Why not? If the national newspaper the writer once represented
doesn't wince at the word “rangy,” and uses it liberally not only in news
stories but in editorials, the word will gain wide currency and become as
commonplace as “prepone,” “bio-data,” “reputed” (in the sense of reputable), “good name” and
“whybecause.” It may not become part of Queen's English, but it will certainly
be part of Rani English. With the emergence of World Englishes, the erstwhile
native speakers have lost the exclusive prerogative to control the
standardization of the language; they can’t tell us “rangy” is wrong.
Heim, in his book, The Metaphysics
of Virtual Reality, says: ‘What is the state of the English
language? No state at all. It is in process… If languages
have states of health, sick or well, then ours is manic.’ Manic
indeed! And rangy!
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