Deolali camp, 1870. Just looking at it can do bad things to your brain.
Rather than announce their presence cleanly and honestly, some nonsense words sneak into the language looking for all money like the real thing.
Take discombobulate. It sounds reassuringly Latin, doesn’t it? A word used by learned lawyers pleading their clients’ cases in oak-panelled courtrooms. “My client was momentarily discombobulated by her husband’s revelation of a torrid affair with the babysitter, m’lud, and cannot therefore be held responsible for the knife that was mysteriously found later lodged in his back.”
Well, my friend, discombobulate is neither Latin nor reassuring. It’s what etymonline.com calls a “fanciful mock-Latin coinage” belonging on the same screwball shelf as obviously nonsense words like confusticate, absquatulate and spifflicate, all of which were coined, like discombobulate, in the 1800s.
One wonders how our forebears found the time to breed so prodigiously while busily cooking up such verbal confections.
Then there are the nonsense words that not only announce themselves, but do so backed by a 50-piece orchestra, dancing penguins and enough tinsel to scare even the most devoted Judy Garland fan. Such as the cutesy word doolally, which is how cutesy people describe their condition when they’ve gone a bit crazy.
Like doodad and doohickey (the cutesy words for small gadgets we can’t be bothered calling by their proper name), doolally plays on the childish doo sound, which immediately signals that we’re being unserious and you’re invited to giggle along with the joke.
Except, that’s not quite the case with doolally. It’s derived from the name of a small town in the west of India called Deolali.
For about 100 years from 1858, Deolali was the site of a British army camp at which soldiers who’d completed their tour of duty would wait for the next available ship home. The camp was a hot and dusty hellhole and the wait could be months. Overcrowding meant men were often forced to sleep on the ground, where sand fleas were rife. Malaria - which messes with the brain among other organs - was also an occupational hazard.
The nearby city of Nasik provided relief from the camp’s harshness as well as a reliable source of venereal diseases - also known to mess up the brain on occasion. To top it all off, there was next to nothing in the way of mental health services available to the poor souls who passed through the camp.
Unsurprisingly, it soon earned a reputation for being a place where people would develop a type of madness, dubbed doolally tap.
The tap comes from tapa, which means “fever” in Hindustani and “heat” or “torment” in Sanskrit.
So next time you casually say something drives you doolally (but please don’t), you’re leaning on the actual name of an actual place that was the source of actual misery for who knows how many thousands of young men.
I hope you’re proud of yourself, you heartless bastard.
The more perceptive of my readers may be getting the sense that I’m no fan of cute words and phrases. Well done you! I was raised on a farm where if a cow kicked you in the head (which did happen to me) or you chopped your index finger off in the baling machine (which didn’t but could have), shouting “this drives me doolally” didn’t quite capture the flavour of the experience, and nor was it sufficiently cathartic.
Of course that may just be me. I belong to a LinkedIn editors’ group where one of my peers, who I respect unreservedly, did use doolally recently. This is what she is driven, she said, when she sees people misuse apostrophes.
On second thoughts, maybe it’s her. Getting upset about what people do with meaningless little squiggles on a page doesn’t warrant being driven anything - and I don’t care if you’re an editor or not.
In this I’m backed up by some powerful allies (and I realise I’m now straying far from my original topic, but too bad). In 2008, John Wells, Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College London, called apostrophes a waste of time and said they should be abolished. I’m with him and here’s a little experiment you might run to see why.
Take a piece of writing - any one with apostrophes will do - and remove them all. Every one.
Now ask yourself if the writing is any more difficult to understand as a result.
If it isn’t, then what are the apostrophes for? Nothing useful as far as I can tell.
It’s possible, I suppose, that now and again an apostrophe may make things clearer. Even then, why would we go to so much trouble to memorise all the rules for their usage (and there are many) for so little gain?
Ok, so maybe it’s never been much trouble for you. But you’re the kind of weirdo who reads language newsletters, so you’re hardly a cross section of society, are you now? What about your hard-working car mechanic (who may not have lost his fingers in a fast-revving engine, but could have)? Your non-English-speaking neighbour who just immigrated from a blessedly apostrophe-free country? Your innocent five-year-old who’s about to enter an education system that’s dying to have her consume and regurgitate Encyclopaedia Britannicas-worth of information, a huge proportion of which is totally, completely, one hundred per cent unnecessary?
It’s not the misuse of apostrophes that drives me doolally. It’s the fact that we imagine they matter and expect others to get good with them, then use their ability on this trivial matter as a gauge of their education, intelligence or social worth.
Of course I exclude my editor colleague from this. She’s just being passionate about her job (I think), and good on her for that.
Even if she does use words that are too cutesy by half.
Bits and specious
In case you’re wondering, being kicked in the head by a cow really hurts. Don’t try it.
Further to my rant on apostrophes, it’s a little known fact that for about 300 years (from the 17th to the 19th century), using an apostrophe for plurals was considered perfectly acceptable. Check out the Oxford Companion to the English Language if you don’t believe me.
According to Ethnologue, a well-regarded magazine that provides data on languages spoken around the world, India is home to 415 separate languages. One of the challenges of compiling such data is deciding what constitutes a full blown language versus a mere dialect. This is a tough task and the results can be somewhat arbitrary, which led one wit to quip that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy”.
In 2022, the 25th edition of Ethnologue listed 7,151 living languages, an increase of 12 from the 2021 edition.