As Amitabh Bachchan once quoted in Namak Halaal ".....I can talk English, I can walk English, I can laugh English, I can run English, because English is such a funny language....."
Come to the South and you'll find characters from various walks of life murdering English in cold blood as you stand there wondering "What was that?". One can often find the best laughter recipes in Tamil inside as well as outside the cinema hall. This write-up will introduce you to some of the sentences which contain words that actually mean the same and are used twice or more than twice in the sentence which only iterates the purpose behind the sentence.
The sentence, the translation and the situation:
"Frontla yarpa athu munaddi?" loosely translates to "Who's that in front of the front".
Situation: I heard this in a bus while I was going to a client's office near Chennai city center. Thanks to the conductor, it made my day. Fine, he was just finding out if the guy standing at the front had bought ticket.
"Gate kadhava sathu" and "Nadu centerla" loosely translate to "Close the gate door" and "In the center of center" respectively.
Situation: Though the first sentence sounds fine when you hear it the 1st time, a little introspection will make you think otherwise. This gem came up during one of those least productive late night discussions with friends and so did the second one. Okay, the person asked someone to close the door or the gate, oh wait..!
"Mel topla lerunthu edu" and “Salt uppu pass panu” loosely translate to "Take it from the top of the top" and “Pass the salt salt” respectively.
Situation: You can often hear these at roadside restaurants around Chennai which primarily serve Barotta, Dosa and Idli. The subject asks the server to pour some Sambar without stirring as it would disturb the vegetables settled at the bottom of the vessel. Now what in hell’s name is “Salt Salt”…?
A little introspection on what drives them to speak the way they speak:
I would like to narrate an incident which happened here. There was this guy who was trying to explain it to a shopkeeper something pertaining to the exchange of wrong currency notes in English and was failing miserably. He ended up confusing the shopkeeper and the shopkeeper said, “Sir, Is it necessary to speak in English at this moment when there is a queue behind you?”.
While North Indians are famous for their mispronunciations, South Indians as I have seen them suffer from wrong-word-at-wrong-place syndrome. The urge to insert English words here and there stands as the main reason for the birth of such sentences which ultimately become clichés and make people like me write useless blogs about them.
