The new custodians of English language

Two very elegant airhostesses, with whom I was passing the time challenged me to a game of Scrabble. The challenge appealed to me as though David, not knowing that Goliath had swallowed his sling while he was not looking, had boastfully asked the giant to engage in mortal combat.

Here was I, a writer of sorts, with some conceit of knowing his way around spellings and English vocabulary, being asked by mere air hostesses, creatures of charm and indefatigable dispensing energy though they were, to battle on my home ground.

The board was brought out, the counters distributed and, unexpectedly, a tome entitled The Scrabble Dictionary was placed menacingly next to me on the carpet where I sat cross-legged waiting to put David’s pathetic armies to flight or, if the metaphor makes more sense, to snatch kulfi from these two lexical infants.

Scrabble is only partly a game of luck — getting six ‘X’s on your rack would be a bummer. It became rapidly clear that it is also a game of skill, practice and the ability to remember words that don’t exist outside the wretched Scrabble Dictionary.

Conceit comes before a fall. I was roundly thrashed. The two young ladies began doubling and tripling their word scores, surveying the board and measuring semantic possibilities as Bonaparte might have surveyed a battlefield. The score sheet was spattered with the blood of my ego. Was ‘Xxilbzk’ really a word? They frequently resorted to their bible to overrule my objections. They knew all the words in it.

Conceding defeat, I asked them how they got so good. The time between flying was devoted, owing to the lassitude that overcame them on the flights, to remaining in their flats or hotel rooms and playing this game.

One imagines, or at least I did, that air hostesses have a jolly old time, being invited by chancing or lonely millionaires onto their yachts or to casinos and the opera; that they see the sights of distant cities and become polyglot princesses, ordering caviar in Russian and knowledgeably perusing wine lists in mountain retreats on the Amalfi coast. No!

They become experts at Scrabble, biding their moment, waiting for the opportunity to humiliate the unsuspecting who fancy themselves as wordsmiths. It was a parable. Sex workers, for example, may not prove to be the best lovers.

The moot question is whether this expertise is particular to Indian air hostesses, which my opponents were, or whether it is a general accomplishment of all of them regardless of caste, creed or nationality. I suspect that a real prowess at exploiting this dictionary is restricted to the relatively senior air hostesses of the English speaking nations.

No doubt the swan-riding hostesses of Lufthansa are experts at the Deutsche version of the game, but what concerns me here is not a competitive assessment of their skills, but nothing less than the linguistic destiny of the world!

Allow me to explain. When in the nineteenth century Bismark, the unifier of German people was asked what the most important influence his century would exert on the next, he said “that fact that America speaks English”.

And now Cambridge University linguists tell us that in a hundred years English will be even more widespread and its dominant world form will be Indian!

I am sure Indian English won’t be represented by the sign-painters who get apostrophes wrong and torture spellings, or even by our journalists addicted to ‘miscreants’ and ‘abscondings’. The group I would nominate as custodians of the verbal flame are of course... but you know the answer.

And if the Cambridge linguists prediction is true and retired air hostesses are recruited by New Delhi to the Super Commissariat for Reformation And Bequeathing of Babu Lexical English (SCRABBLE), we shall all be greeting each other not with “are you good?” but “Xxilbzk”.