Buttish Talk Essay

Buttish Talk

As a child, and I belong to a little after the Victorian era - King George VI was our King when I was born, once when I entered into a little mischievous age, say 12 or 13, I often wondered what, the then most prevalent practice in many parts of the Europe called "Butt Pinching" was?

Since India by then had gained Independence by flag, she mainly was still   dependent on the then England for their educational, medical, 'luxurial' and 'phrasarial' needs - hence "Butt Pinching" stayed back as a phrase in India, and in journals coming into India then, including its usage in popular novels and stories. Those were not the days of computers having information available at one push on the keyboard. We had to educate ourselves the educational way. I sported a Chambers Dictionary as that probably was the only dictionary prescribed in schools in India then. It is possibly also because that Chambers was the only dictionary that was famous with Crossword puzzle solvers and the Scrabblers in that time. Also maybe because India was a bastion base of Cambridge in the field of education, while it was the rival camp Oxford which had come out with the first English language dictionary (OED), Cambridge was still in the British expansionism mode and had a Dictionary of Christian Words (Biblical Words and Phrases). I was disappointed not to have found the word 'butt' there. I wanted to know what it meant because something prankish had to be a part of it since the other part was “pinching” - definitely prankish. I was not the one to give up easily. Couldn't ask the teachers "Ashramites - Each one of those", Aurobindo Ashram School after all, now popularly known as The Mother's International School. What could I do?

As luck used to have it for me then, everything used to fall into place - photo finish - for me those days, a Webster's Dictionary chanced to hit under my fingers one day in the Ashram's main...