Cyclone Dana is expected to strengthen into a severe cyclonic storm with wind speeds gusting up to 120 kph and is likely to make landfall late on Thursday
asia58 minutes ago
I am not doubting the fact of death [why isn’t there an Agatha Christie novel called Death at Harrods?]. Or that Sir Edward had enough clout with the local constabulary to send William and Beatrice up for trial. But could anyone really have had a surname like Horn-Elphinstone-Darlrymple? The answer must be yes. The London correspondent of New York Times might have been forgiven for getting a manslaughter mixed up with a mere tort. But no news editor would have used his copy again if he got a multi-barrelled name from the British aristocracy wrong. And if his spelling is as accurate, then William the writer of many many books has surely forgotten an “r” in his Dalrymple.
Can you rule an Empire with short names? Roman Emperors kept their names terse, but since they promoted themselves into gods, anything above three syllables became unwieldy on the common tongue. How do you worship a Fotheringay-Fotheringay Phipps? You don’t. You just throw bread rolls at him at Drone’s off Piccadilly.
The British ruling class was not alone in puling on the appendices to a Helenora [itself an affected extension of the more working class Helen, I presume]. If you wrote the full name of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, there would not be much space left over for this column. Reasons for longitude varied with culture. The Mughal dad could not stop praising his newborn prince; each additional word was an adjective. When the prince grew up, killed his siblings and plonked himself on the throne, he could not stop exalting himself and added a few pearls of admiration to the already long-winded paragraph that was his name.
The British yardstick for yardlong names was different. It was advertisement of the family tree. So Helenora was telling you that the family fortunes were established by old Darlrymple, and further fattened by Elphinstone and Horn. I don’t suppose they included the failures in-between the genealogical line. There may have been a Barrington, for example, who sold the family castle to pay off his gambling debts at White’s, but you could not keep him on par with Elphinstone, who slogged hard in the East India Company and bought back a country estate. And if Elphinstone turned out to be the chap who governed Bombay in the old days, then it was precisely the kind of family connection that would impress Scotland Yard when you wanted to file a case for manslaughter.
Logically, the lower down you go on the social order, the shorter your surname becomes. The John Carpenters, not to mention the John Smiths, must have been mere Johns until the era when labour was treated with dignity.
In India, Hindu caste names are a dead giveaway of origin. But those promoted to prominence by the British happily traded in the past for the present. “Chowdhury”, or “Malik”, are titles and thus used across the religious divide. Indian Muslims, technically, did not have caste names, but if you were an Ansari from east Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, you could be more or less sure that there was artisan blood in your veins.
Helenora’s tragic appointment with her hairdresser took place in 1909. Five years later the First World War began. It was after this Great War, with its millions upon millions of wasted lives, that the pomposity of the British aristocracy began to dribble away, in my estimation. They had killed working class boys on an unimaginable scale in order to preserve their class-ridden societies, and a reaction was inevitable. The English lords had ruled beyond their sell-by date, just like the Mughals a
century earlier.
The barrels began to drop off the surnames, slowly, piecemeal, but surely. What could not be destroyed by war was surely erased by the floating notes of P.G. Wodehouse’s laughter, although Wodehouse was also in love with the class he teased out of existence. Even a Tobias prefers to call himself a Toby these days. He probably would not get a restaurant booking in the name
of “Tobias”.
Harrods is still there, of course. But if parts of the great English store occasionally look like side lanes of a Cairo bazaar, there is a valid explanation. It is now owned by an Egyptian who is convinced that his son was bumped off by the British secret service because he was about to marry Diana, Princess of Wales and ruin the bloodline of the British ruling class forever. Harrods customers are now more likely to be Asian tourists than the British gentry. The only institutions with long names now are law firms. [There is much anguish in Yale at this moment because the American law firms, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, and McCloy are not hiring. I would have used an ampersand in the law firm names, but I can’t find one on my keyboard.]
The old order giveth way to the new.
M.J. Akbar is Chairman and Director of Publications of the fortnightly newsmagazine Covert
Cyclone Dana is expected to strengthen into a severe cyclonic storm with wind speeds gusting up to 120 kph and is likely to make landfall late on Thursday
asia58 minutes ago
Delhi was the second-most polluted city in the world on Tuesday, a live ranking by IQAir after Lahore in neighbouring Pakistan
asia1 hour ago
Her role encompasses teaching a wide range of scuba divers, from beginners to pro levels, ensuring their students' safety and well-being
kt network1 hour ago
For the first time in a presidential election, the DNC has given Democrats Abroad $300,000 to help register Americans overseas to vote while Trump has vowed to end the double taxation of overseas Americans
americas2 hours ago
A new report by the Government's Media Office showed that 96,631 infants were born in 2022
uae2 hours ago
Musk hands out two $1 million checks to randomly picked people who signed his online petition backing US constitutional rights to freedom of speech and bear arms
americas2 hours ago
Harris' tendency to burst into fits of laughter has featured prominently in broadcasts; by contrast, Trump has been portrayed as sure-footed and imbued with common sense on everything
americas2 hours ago
Both campaigns are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into a final push for any wavering, undecided voters who could tilt the balance in their favour
americas2 hours ago