Jabberwocky

Ok. Now. Don't leap at my throat or do other violent things of that nature, but unaware, ...well...uh ignoramus, as I am, never having subscribed to The Statesman, and never having lived in a place where it was in vogue, and also, never having heard of a man called Samantak Das, I hadn't gotten around to reading so much as a single installment of Jabberwocky.

In fact, if it weren't for the mad, Alice-obsessed English teacher foisted upon us in school who, convinced that I spent most of my free time in the library because I cherished a great love for the right books and not because it was the only quiet, airconditioned place around, insisted on having rambling 'discussions' wherein he would proceed to acquaint me with the depth of my ignorance (har har), which caused me to all but abandon the thought of ever picking up another book to read for fear of the vastness of things to read and the utter inadequacy of my intellect to absorb and keep all of it archived neatly somewhere within the reach of memory's retrieval system, I would still, very happily, have been completely unaware of the term Jabberwocky, and would have thought the clever people who started Blabberwocky (the JUDE wall magazine, for the uninitiated) invented /Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burbled as it came./

But thats not the point. There is a point. I'm getting to it, I think.
Yes.
Jabberwocky. Don't you just adore the idea? Of the poem, I mean.

They give a fancy name to it, portmanteau, I think, and (ok i must digress again, but I'll get back to The Point, I promise) we all do it all the time. Especially people in certain social units. Among droogs. Gangs. Communities. Whatever. Make up your own language. Make sense of what seems nonsense to others. Jargon. Leetspeak. Injokes. Lotr spawnages. Newspeak. Nadsat. One of the JU professors I do read, because The Telegraph presents itself wedged clumsily on my door handle religiously every morning, wrote about this phenomenon of a flourishing alternate idiom amongst certain sections of society. This thing created to exclude. Srin said something the other day- people come together under this common presupposition of aamra shob jaani tomra kichhu jaano na. Or something like that, I think. Because aamra tar theke tomra ta ke toh separate kortey hobey, na ki, for a distinct group to form. We're all looking to be perceived as something distinct, tai toh.

Ok. Enough digression. Now I've completely forgotten why I'd started.

But Samantak Das.
Yes.
And the joys of Jabberwocky.
Right.

So I googled Samantak Das within quotes(217 matches) today at random to see if I could read what he might've written about Romanticism and Scholar trawled through the net to present me with an utterly unhelpful page that listed papers on migrants' rights, Indian overland exports and the economy. But gogle was more forthcoming. Led me to The Statesman article about Singur where he asks us to decide which side we are on. This, btw, is quoted in about three dozen blogs. Then Jabberwocky, which(in my humble opinion) should be the stuff of much more idle idolatry than the usual omg-he's-such-a-byapok-teacher-such-captivating-eyes and so on and so forth.

Therefore, the following:

Jabberwocky: Trading in words
Section: Campus Date:Feb 21,2007

Samantak Das

WHAT do these have in common — aspirin, bikini, cellophane, escalator, gramophone, heroin, jungle gym, lanolin, petrol, pogo stick, spandex, trampoline, yo-yo, zipper? These are all examples of what are called “fully generic (or genericised) trademarks”, that is to say, words that started out as proprietary trademarks but have since become so completely identified with generic products that most folks are not even aware that they were trademarks to begin with.
I made up this list from a much longer one in that invaluable companion for all researchers (and columnists hurrying to meet deadlines!), the Wikipedia, when I was looking up “heroin”. Apparently, heroin derives its name from the trademark “Heroin”, assigned to diacetylmorphine, or diamorphine, by Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant, in whose lab the drug was synthesised in 1897 by Felix Hoffman. Bayer named the newly synthesised drug “heroin” because in field trials persons who were given the drug felt heroisch (German for “heroic”).
Even more interestingly, Hoffman had synthesised another drug in the same laboratory just 11 days earlier, which, too, has now become a fully generic trademark – aspirin. While the naming of aspirin is not as intriguing as that of heroin (a combination of “a-”, referring to the acetyl group, “-spir-”, from the plant genus Spiraea, and “-in”, a popular ending for drug names of the time), what is interesting is that of the two drugs – aspirin and heroin – it was the latter that was considered the more effective and “healthier” painkiller!
But let me quit all this talk about drugs, addictive or otherwise, and come back to genericised trademarks.
While the list I started this column with is that of trademarks that have become fully genericised, there are others that seem to be well on their way to so becoming, even though their owners may not like what is happening to their precious marks. Chief among these would be Band-aid, Frisbee, Google, Jacuzzi, Jeep, Vaseline, Walkman and, of course, Xerox. (In deference to their officially proprietary status, I’ve capitalised the initial letter of these words.)
Users of the English language, with typical ingenuity, have made further extensions from these likely-to-be-generic-soon trademarks, turning, or example, some of them into verbs. I’m certain we’ve all, at some time or the other, asked someone to “please xerox two copies of these for me” or have “googled” a name to find out more about a person, place or thing. Some are even used as adjectives, for example a “non-jeepable road” (a phrase I first came across in the mountainous terrain of north Bengal) or a “non-googleable question” (created by that obsessive sub-species of humanity, the quiz fiend, to refer to a question whose answer cannot be found by “googling” it). And it seems only a matter of time before someone describes a wound as “non-band-aid-able”.
Let me leave you with what was, for me, the most interesting discovery in Wikipedia’s list. For many years I’ve wondered exactly why motorcycle mechanics insisted on calling the small angled hexagonal wrench, used to tighten screws with a hexagonal hole on top, an “alanki”. (As in, “Ei, allaki-ta dey to!” – shouted to a helper by the head mechanic in a garage.) Now I know. An “Allen key” or “Allen wrench” was the trademark name given to their hexagonal wrench by the Allen Manufacturing Company, located in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. Taken over and turned generic, such wrenches have now become “Allen keys”, a term preferred to their proper nomenclature of hex key or hex-head wrench.
The next time I go to get my bike fixed, I’ll know just how to impress my usually imperturbable master mechanic pal.

(Samantak Das’ longest love affair has been with the weird and wonderful ways of the English language.)