STOREHOUSE OF ABSOLUTELY USELESS INFORMATION

 STOREHOUSE OF ABSOLUTELY USELESS INFORMATION

My friend Radhakrishnan Nair posted on his wall: How many words can you think of in a minute without the letter 'a'? Clue: I can think of a hundred in a minute.

He gave the answer soon enough: one to one hundred! Did you know that?

I am sure he was simplifying the question for us. What he did not tell us is that in fact, none of the letters A, B, C and D is present in any of the numbers zero to ninety-nine!

And, if one ignores the A in "and" (as in 101), the letter A first comes in 1000. The first B comes in one billion. For the first C, you have to travel as far as octillion (I followed by 27 zeroes!) [We are, of course, not talking about the Indian system of enumeration where crores and lakhs (also spelt lacs) are used.] D first comes in "thousand".

Of what earthly use is this information? About as useful as the knowledge that the King of Hearts is the only king in a deck of cards without a moustache. Or that the color you'll see when you open your eyes in a pitch-black room is called "eigengrau." Or when you say "I'll be back in a jiffy", you are guilty of extreme exaggeration because a jiffy is one trillionth of a second.

The word "dreamt", apart from "undreamt" derived from it, is the only word ending in MT. And some common words like month, orange, purple and silver have no rhyming words.

Here are some more:

The opposite sides of a die (used in a game of Ludo or Snakes and Ladders) will always add up to seven.

Golf balls have an average of 336 "dimples."

"Spoonfeed" is the longest word with letters in the reverse alphabetical order.

When words with f followed by i (like define, fight, office, difficult) are printed, the little dot over the i (did you know that it is called tittle?) disappears. Can't believe this? Check the words in this paragraph!

My brain is a repository of such useless information. Why do I collect and retain them? The answer is what George Mallory gave when he was asked, "Why do you climb the Everest?" He famously replied, "Because it is there."

FAMILIARITY BREEDS "COULDN'T-CARE-LESS-NESS"

 FAMILIARITY BREEDS "COULDN'T-CARE-LESS-NESS"

I am sitting in the waiting area adjoining an operation theatre where my wife is to undergo a cataract surgery. There are perhaps twenty surgeries scheduled for the forenoon. The patients and the 'bystanders' — in most cases the respective spouses — are all seated on the cushioned sofas. (It beats me why this blessed word — which means a 'mere, passive, onlooker' — is used for referring to someone who is supposed to be at the beck and call of the patient, the doctor, the nurse, the ward boy and the cashier, but let that pass.)

Presently, a nurse appears and announces the names of four patients — all women. She beckons them to follow her to the theatre. They get up, nod to the respective 'bystander' and proceed.

Ten minutes later, the nurse returns with four identical bags and hands over them to the four 'bystanders' of the patients now in the theatre. "It is the clothes of the patients," she explains. The hospital has thoughtfully provided uniforms to the patients for wearing in the theatre, one presumes.

Thirty minutes of expectation pass. A ward boy comes and asks the next batch of four to await the call. The surgery of the first batch must be over, one guesses.

A little later, the nurse reappears and asks the 'bystander' of Mrs N to identify himself. She asks him to hand over the bag containing the clothes of his wife, which he does. The next four, including my wife, are herded in the direction of the theatre.

Post haste, she returns with the bag and tells Mr N, "There seems to have been a mix-up. Your wife says these are not her clothes."

She collects back all the four bags, takes them to the gentleman and asks him to identify which of the four is his wife's. She pulls out the clothes one by one and displays them.

One of the bags has a peach-coloured sari, the second a navy blue ikat kameez and a white salwar, the third a mundu-veshti set and the last a black top and ice-blue jeans.

Mr N looks at the garments, fumbles, scratches his head in embarrassment and admits that he cannot identify his wife's clothes!

The nurse retreats to the theatre with the four bags: the patient would know which is hers.

I ask myself: she could have asked the other three bystanders to identify the clothes of their wives and, through this process of elimination, identify Mrs N's clothes.

Perhaps she was not too strong in the Logical Reasoning department. Or, by then, she had realised that husbands couldn't care less what their wives wore, which seems more likely.

THE CASE FOR (NOT OF) THE ONE-ARMED STENOGRAPHER

 THE CASE FOR (NOT OF) THE ONE-ARMED STENOGRAPHER

The other day, while writing a piece reminiscing my childhood, I wrote something like "... Moideen gave him the colour pencil ..." While revising the draft, a question popped up in my mind: should it not be "... Moideen gave the colour pencil to him ..."?

The more I pondered over the existential question, the more confused I was. So I asked someone who I thought could settle the matter one and for all by pronouncing the semantic verdict.

The expert told me that the problem arises because "to give" is a ditransitive verb: it takes two objects. OutFowlering the redoubtable Fowler, he added that there are five types of verbs: intransitive (Water flowed), monotransitive (The queen knighted him), ditransitive (She gave him the signal), tritransitive (I bet you ten rupees that she will not turn up) and ambitransitive (Usually, he ate — or ate his dinner — before 9 pm).

Though I was edified far beyond what John Collinson Nesfield or Percival Christopher Wren and his inseparable companion Martin had taught me, and I learnt about these nuances, he did not address my pressing problem.

So I asked him the question (Or, should it be "I asked the question to him"?) again. He said, "Moideen gave him the colour pencil" is as good as "Moideen gave the colour pencil to him" and the writer can chose what he considers better.

His reply reminded me of a law firm which the bank I had worked for used to consult. Let us call them Mirchandani and Iyengar. Their legal reports running into several pages — and costing several thousands of rupees — would contain references to Acts, Laws, customs and practices and cite case laws from courts in India and abroad and be replete with legal jargon (mens rea, ipso facto, mutatis mutandis, assentio mentium, and the like). They would discuss both sides of the issue at hand in great and intricate detail and conclude with "the bank may take an informed administrative decision in the matter."

My boss used to say after reading these reports that he suspected that there was an understanding between the two partners of the firm: Mirchandani would say one thing and Iyengar the opposite. The stenographer would faithfully take down both opinions. After typing out Mirchandani's view, she would open a new paragraph beginning "On the other hand," and record the opinion of Iyengar. Then she would add "the bank may take an informed administrative decision in the matter", the mandatory caveat.

"How I wish the steno had only one hand!" he would exclaim, suppressing a chuckle.