WHILE new words like geotagging, soz, scratchiti and LARPing are admitted every quarter into the language colossus that is the Oxford English Dictionary, there are hundreds more that have disappeared from popular use.
Words that owe their origin to the 19th-century Indian subcontinent don't appear to be just as easily forgotten.
Imagine, for example, that you wake up in pyjamas in a bungalow, wash your hair with shampoo, eat kedgeree for breakfast and throw on a pashmina and some bangles before conversing in a little mumbo jumbo and going doolally.
These are all examples of words that have been adopted into everyday English thanks to the first Anglo-Indian dictionary.
The glossary of more than 2000 colloquial phrases, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, has a title that doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. The 1000-page dictionary has remained in print since its publication in 1886, and has proved a useful and amusing companion to writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Tom Stoppard, Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, the latter describing it as "the legendary dictionary of British India".
Stoppard's 1991 radio play In the Native State, which became Indian Ink on stage, has a scene full of dialogue that borrows heavily from the tome.
This work of maverick scholarship, which records not only the vocabulary but also the culture of the Raj, was compiled by two India enthusiasts, south Indian languages scholar Arthur C Burnell, who died before the project was completed, and East Lothian-born geographer Colonel Henry Yule.
Yule was schooled in Edinburgh and then appointed to the Bengal Engineers, he served in the Sikh wars and was fascinated by the culture, geography and history of central Asia. The pair ploughed travel texts, memoirs and novels to document the words that entered English from Arabic, Persian, Indian, and Chinese.
The malleability of the English language to adopt and adapt foreign phrases is what continues to give Hobson-Jobson an authoritative and playful charm.
Its definitions slip into anecdote, reminiscence and digression, and they offer insights into Victorian attitudes to India and its people and customs.
The title was borrowed from British soldiers in the Punjab who used it to describe festivities, it was their take on cries of: "Ya Hussain! Ya Hassan!" made during the Mourning of Muharram, the first month of the Muslim lunar year.
An Oxford World Classics abridged edition of Hobson-Jobson, due to be published next year, features an introduction on its significance for the English language by Indian literature specialist Dr Kate Teltscher of Roehampton University.
"We tend to think of Empire in terms of domination and control, the way power was used and abused," she said. "But we can also think of it in more intimate ways and I think Hobson-Jobson allows us to do that."
.... Hobson-Jobson
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