Of words and meanings

When you are introduced to a new word, what would be your first feeling? Especially when its thrown as such a commonplace item, about which you had been so ignorant that, such a casual mention of it makes you wonder, why you never came across it in first place, till that time. I’ve had my fair share of such words and each time the emotions were no different.

I wasn’t even introduced to a computer, when during a theory class on operating system, my compskey (school time slang for comp. sci – computer science) teacher casually mentioned about THE word – “version”. It was the first ever time I was hearing about it and even before I could contemplate its meaning from the context or the sentence, he had passed on to several other topics. Yet that one word, kept lingering in mind, like that solitary wet cloth, refusing to fly away in wind, holding on to its clip. I asked my friend immediately after the class is over what the word meant. He was clueless but somehow wasn’t much troubled by it. I somehow sensed a conspiracy, wherein he was able to absorb its meaning by context or simply showing off that it’s not such a big deal after all. I pestered one of the top rankers from my class few days later and asked him the meaning of version for the meaning from dictionary couldn’t satisfy my query. The word assumed monstrous proportions and started bugging my conscious. When I asked for the nth time, he simply said it’s not a big deal and shrugged it off. It began to eat my mind that how one can be so cool about something that he has no idea about. It began to dawn on me very late that, as a student, you always need to take the correct judgment call on what you really need to know and what is nice to know. I was pretty bad at this and was always at a loss to understand which are the things you are supposed to remember by heart and which one are not so important.

The next word that intrigued me no less was “Versus”. Infact the expansion for “Vs” drove me nuts for long and no amount of searching across dictionaries could get me the word. Whenever there is a mention about any two teams in sports section, the newspapers would put it on bold “Team A vs Team B”. After a while, I got to know that the expansion for “Vs” was “Versus”. But again, why that word? What it meant was a constant nag. After a while the context helped a bit and considering that the word always found its place amidst two parties, I kind of understood its meaning. Yet there was a long time longing for someone to approve my understanding. It was a forever fetish of mine that unless someone signed off on my understanding, I never felt complete and as I think about it now, was probably pushing the responsibility on others plate to confirm. Overcoming this block was the biggest of the personal challenges that I had to face across all walks of life.

The last word, with which I would sign this post off, ironically is FAQ. In “Hindu” supplement paper, there would always be this section, which spoke about specific questions and responses for them. Unlike many other papers, “Hindu” always had expansions for abbreviations * mentioned at the end or on the corners of the columns. But to my dismay, FAQ was never expanded full, not even once. I even used to check across age old papers to figure out have they even mentioned it once anywhere. Out of a blue moon, one fine day, I saw the full form of it as “frequently asked questions” and my joy knew no bounds. I memorized it and even wrote it on a piece of paper, only to lose them both and was back to square one. Later that very word become a catchphrase for most of the activities that I did.

P.S: ivlo thedinathuku, simplea oru google adichirukulamaynu varinjikatikitu vara makkas, this was P.G.E – pre google era.