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Here's a word that I believe belongs to the vocabulary of upstarts: publically. To start with, I shouldn't call it a word, for it is not one. It is a figment of imagination — usually, those of upstarts. The (correct) word, as we all know, is publicly. Meaning, by/of the public (e.g. publicly owned company), or in front of the public or in full glare of the public (He publicly apologised for his misdemeanour). I found this on NDTV (Suspended Pak CJ addresses rally; March 28, 2007): Pakistan's...

It is now the turn of the Students Islamic Organisation of India to tighten the screws on whosoever talks about sex education. The organisation does not have even 10,000 members across the country, but is big enough to be a mischief-monger. Its activists have already staged demonstrations in a number of cities/towns. Listen to (I mean, read) these quotable quotes: Sex education is teaching pornography and instigating. free sex. When the Indian Constitution declares that a person is an adult only...

Some people have no sense of humour. That's fine if they keep to themselves. But not when they literally coerce the police to arrest someone whose sense of humour may not be the same as theirs. That's what has happened in Mumbai where the so-called Sikh Media and Culture Watch (SMCW) staged a demonstration and forced the police to arrest a publisher of a Sardar jokes book. The Santa and Banta Joke Book is disappearing off the shelves of shops in Mumbai, and an emboldened section of the Sikh...

That's what the Madhya Pradesh government tends to think when it comes to the issue of imparting sex education in schools. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the state has stopped sex education classes for high school students after it found that illustrations in an instruction manual for teachers were "obscene". The sex education classes were part of the Adolescence Education Programme (AEP) for Class IX and above, aimed at creating AIDS awareness among students. The "objectionable"...

Medievalism rules supreme these days. So, when Kerala minister AK Balan made an off-hand remark in the state Assembly last week that "gods are depicted in temples without clothes on," it predictably created a furore — both inside and outside the House. Balan said he was "at a loss to know as to why an issue was being made out of sex education as there was no temple without murals and sculptures depicting scenes from Vatsyayana's 'Kama Sutra' and gods are depicted without clothes on." That got...

Some habits are a matter of concern. I mean habits of some subs. Maybe, many subs. It's about usage of concerned. Concern as a noun is primarily a feeling of worry about/for/over somebody/something. Concern as a verb would mean to involve or affect somebody. Primarily speaking, of course. Concerned as an adjective is concerned with the former. So when you use concerned before a noun, it would mean that the person (yeah, yeah, the noun I am talking about) is quite worried about something. It does...

Ok. that's a bad pun. A bad joke, I admit. But if you go through the cruel jokes that subs inflict on us when it comes to phrasal verbs, you are sooner or later going to lose all your sense of humour, and sense of grammar as well. Just as well. It is now quite fashionable to use mull whenever you can. I am not going to mull the usage of this word, because it cannot be done. I mean, you just can't mull something as you cull dogs these days. The thing is mull as a verb in itself does not stand...

One idiomatic expression which is rampantly, and erroneously, thought of as one word is in spite of. Inspite is NOT a word. As the OED will tell you, if you say that somebody did something in spite of a fact, you mean it is surprising that that fact did not prevent him/her from doing it. As straight as that. Some recent examples of this glaring mistake: The Economic Times (Ore export duty to help in resource conservation; March 11, 2007; PTI creed): State-owned iron export company NMDC has...

Four foreign television channels have been pulled off the air in Jammu & Kashmir after extremist groups demanded cable companies stop airing "obscene" shows. Cable operators, needless to say, have complied. Two militant groups — Al-Badr Mujahedeen and Al-Madina (ever heard of them?) — on March 4 in a telephone call to a Srinagar-based news agency, Current News Service, asked cable operators to drop channels that spread obscenity. The groups did not specify which channels they were referring to...

After the former editor of the Times of India, Sham Lal, died, I closely followed most stories about this "literary journalist", as he was hailed by many. So, when I read through this one about another former editor paying tribute to the columnist, I couldn't but help notice this bloomer (February 23, 2007): We spotted Sham Lal there, having a drink too. This was a rare sight. A lady I knew walked up to me and said she wanted to get introduced to him. Sham Lal spoke to her very courteously, but...