If you’ve been online on FB/Twitter today, you must have noticed that the Indian part of the inter-web has gone crazy over a supposed screenshot from a Star News telecast. I say supposed because my Facebook feed has been flooded with all kinds of stupidity in the last few days—from images of Gods magically appearing on the top of mountains to claims that Louis Braille was an Italian king—so naturally I have developed a deep distrust of all society.
This is not the first such instance. The media seems to have a thing for Dhoni and what goes on down under.
Of course, the second one’s from India TV, so they might have deliberately put it that way for all you know. For those who don’t know Hindi, the second one translates to ‘Dhoni’s 12-incher will get us the World Cup!’ while the text on the first image says ‘Sabse Keemati Chhakka’, which translates to ‘Most expensive chhakka’. Chhakka refers to the term for ‘6 runs’ in cricket (for those who don’t know about cricket, don’t bother wrapping your mind around it). But Chhakka (also, Hijra) in Hindi also refers to (and I borrow Wikipedia’s definition here) physiological males who have feminine gender identity, women’s clothing and other feminine gender roles and usually live in well-defined, organized, all-hijra communities. In short, it’s the kind of thing that makes an Indian family disown its child and leave it to live its messed up life the way it sees fit. The social ramifications of being a c_hakka_ in South Asia are soul-crushingly cruel, but since this is Linguistrix, and not SadThingsAboutIndiaTrix, I would refrain from talking about them in this post.
Now, the bisemy of the word Chhakka, and the puns that result out of it, are hardly new fare. Any person who’s lived his way through school in North India would have been either on the receiving end or the perpetrating end of such wordplay at least once in his life. This of course does not mean that they are aware of what chhakkas really are—for most, it’s a species that is supposed to be made fun of and the only kind of beggars their parents always give some money to. But, I digress.
The reason I wrote this post was to look at what it is that causes such puns, i.e. when does the interpretation veer enough towards the unintended one to make it funny. Language Log has a category of posts called Crash Blossoms (a kind of Garden Path sentence where your mind keeps going onto multiple interpretations due to the polysemy of the words involved). An example would be the headline Doctor Suspected in Town House Collapse Dies. It doesn’t take much to spot such difficult to parse headlines and correct them, yet they routinely get overlooked by the subeditors.
__I am interested in how much a particular usage needs to be polarized towards one meaning for that meaning to be activated in the listener/reader’s mind. For instance, many other usages of the word _chhakka_ in the context of cricket can also be interpreted in the Hijra sense very conveniently, but they aren’t. This is an actual line from a report I took from a news website—उस एक छक्के ने वर्ल्डकप फाइनल की यादें ताजा कर दी। In fact, now that I think of it, I am not sure whether the first picture was funny when it was actually being shown, or is it only funny now when we look at it in isolation. Would adding a few words around it dilute the one-sidedness of the meaning? Even in isolation? Questions, questions, questions.