And the winner of the mostest ugliestest word goes to …

… “winningest”!

Seriously, who on Earth (or in America, to be precise, since to my knowledge nobody outside the US actually uses this linguistic abomination) thought that this word makes any sense? Did its coiner pause to reflect, even for a moment, about whether the structure of the word hung together in any coherent way? Or whether the meaning the word was intended to have (a) needed a single word to express it, and (b) was in fact expressed in some sensible way by this word?

And now, the New York Times, of all places, uses it. Admittedly, it’s only its Magazine section, but why oh why would someone use this horrid, cumbersome word at all?

If there was an annual competition for “hideousest word of the year”, “winningest” would be the winningest word.

Grammar and God

One of the most famous verses in Sanskrit is the opening verse of Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa:

vāg-arthāv iva sampṛktau vāg-artha-pratipattaye |

jagataḥ pitarau vande pārvatīparameśvarau ||

Here, Śiva and Pārvatī are seen to be inextricably intertwined like a word and its meaning.

Another verse I came across today expresses a similar relation, but between different pairs of upamānas and upameyas:

rāsa-vilāsa-vilolaṃ smarata murārer mano-haraṃ rūpam |

prakṛtiṣu yat pratyayavat praty-ekaṃ gopikāsu sammilitam ||

May you remember that enchanting form of Mura’s Conqueror,
        dancing around playfully in the Rāsa-līlā,
        united individually with all of the milkmaids,
                like a suffix with flexional bases.

As may be imagined, this is the opening verse of a grammatical text: the Prakriyā-sarvasva of Mēlpattūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri, who is most famous for his composition of the Nārāyaṇīyam addressed to Kṛṣṇa. As to why Kṛṣṇa should be seen as a suffix (which, in English at least, sounds like it’s subordinate somehow to the word to which it’s added), it’s because the Pāṇinian tradition of grammar sees the suffix’s meaning as dominating the word’s meaning. Moreover, a suffix can be added to far more words than a word can take suffixes, and so it has greater “freedom of union” in that sense. Finally, and conveniently, the word for suffix, pratyaya, takes masculine gender, while the word for flexional base, prakṛti, takes the feminine gender.