A TONGUE OF THE SLIP

Continued from the last post Tongue-in-Cheek Trivia

There are people with slippery tongues who call a 'Burning Train' as 'Turning Brain.' A friend of mine has this habit of mixing up words in a spooneristic style. "I hissed the mystery classes", he would say(meaning, he missed the history classes). Or, "I tasted a whole worm(meaning he wasted a whole term). But best part was that each time his tongue slipped, he would apologise saying, "Oh, it was only a tongue of the slip"(sic).

Linguists vouch for the fact that in many languages(tongues) world over, the the tongue is used as feminine gender. In Hindi for instance, the word zuban(tongue) is feminine. Meri zuban, one would say implying that the word is feminine. Same is true of Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French and German. There must be some reason for his ground rule., that came about during the evolution of languages. Is it because the almighty God, to compensate for the deficit of muscle mass, bestowed upon women this highly specialised muscle tissue? Or, is it because women as a class have an inborn skill to put this small bundle of flesh to it's maximum use? Read on, Sir/Madam, for an insight into these premises.

Just listen to what William Congreve, the 17th century English dramatist, had to say about one of his female acquaintances: "She has that everlasting rotation of the tongue, that an echo must wait till she dies before it can catch her last word."

Then, Charles Dickens once exclaimed, 'Tongue, well, that's very good thing when it ain't a woman's". Why, even the great bard of the yore W. Shakespeare didn't lag behind by saying, " You shall never take her without her answer, unless you take her without her tongue. Lucky that in days of Mr Shakespeare, there were no women's' lib activists. Or else they would have lynched him and the world would have poor by one great poet.

(Continued in the next post Wagging Tongue )