Out beyond the ideas of right-doing or wrong-doing there is a field - I'll meet you there.


Saturday, April 07, 2007

A minor wrangle

As a teenager, I was avidly fond of a book called "The Adventures of Captain Wrungel", which documents the fictional fictional (if you catch my drift) adventures of a boastful old sea-dog. In a telling sequence, his beloved boat called "Courage" is mistakenly christened "Rage" when the first three letters are knocked off by the shock of the launching.

At this point in his narrative, Wrungel digresses to expound upon the importance of names and the qualities that they appear to bestow upon their bearers. As a case in point, he recalls the sad case of a schooner called "Tub" that overturned and sank in a very moderate gale.

The reason I bring this up is that I am somewhat irritated by purported authorities on the Web suggesting that the name 'Nisheeth' derives its etymology from Nish + sheet, implying 'coolness of the night'. This unholy conjunction violates all known rules of sandhi AND the tranquility of my Ego. I wish to place a strong rebuttal on behalf of me and all my namesakes.

The name "Nishith" is derived from Nish + ith and means 'the end of the night', or, more precisely, dawn. "Nisheeth" may be considered a variant of the same, but I am reliably informed that this is quite possibly not so.

'Nisheeth', if my authorities, who trace their lineage in the Benarasi Hindi heartland, are to be believed, is a conjunction of Nish + eeth and implies 'the darkest part of the night'. This little nugget of etymological wisdom is my gift to all who bear the name of Nisheeth (I instinctively imagine them to be brilliant, socially inept geeks).

While Nature (and parental whimsy) might have ordained for you a name that simply begs to be rhymed with a scatological term that I will not explicate, the odds are evened here by virtue of the quite dashing metaphor you may associate with it. The next time you're out on a first date, the thing to do is to glower and brood and bring the conversation around to the point where you may break out the "It means MIDNIGHT" line and look properly deep and forbidding.

Peace be

2 comments:

Mohan K.V said...

Or it might even be that 'Nisheeth' does not have anything to do with 'Nisha' at all, maybe the upasarga 'Ni' is used with the noun-form "Shitha"..btw, is the terminal 'th' in your name alpaprana or mahaprana ?

Unkool said...

ah good,you're back on blogsphere!as for the name, maybe it's just "no shit" euphemistically spelt out. would be quite a contradiction though if that is indeed the case!
so what's going down?last heard you were screwing up the field of cognition or something.

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I is a place-holder to prevent perpetual infinite regress. I is a marker on the road that ends in I not being.