Skin specialist to leather specialist

Dr albert p’ rayan is an ELT Resource Person and  Professor of English. He can be contacted at rayanal@yahoo.co.uk
Skin specialist to leather specialist

A friend asked me this interesting question: “Have you ever come across writings in which words have been used inappropriately and at the same time in an amusing manner? Do you have some samples of such inappropriate but amusing words?” Very recently, I came across this sentence:

The employee should not have jilted the employer at a time when he was badly in need of her service. 
The sentence, if it is taken out of context, is ambiguous and makes the reader interpret in differently.The verb ‘jilt’ means ‘’to abandon a lover” or “to suddenly end a romantic relationship”. As a noun, a jilt is a person who rejects her lover. The story of the word is quite interesting. When “jilt” was first used in the second half of the 17th century, it meant  “an unchaste woman” or a woman who “capriciously casts a lover aside”. As a verb, the word was used to refer to the actions of such a woman. In modern English, a jilt can be either male or female.

What actually did the student want to convey in the piece of writing? The intended meaning of the sentence was that a particular employee quit the organization and joined another organization at a time when the organization he had previously worked was badly in need of her service. When I analyzed why the student used the word ‘’jilt” instead of “quit” or any other word (resign, leave) conveying the same meaning, I found that it was due to his thinking in his mother tongue and literally translating a word in the mother tongue to English.

Here is another interesting anecdote. About three decades ago, a Chennai-based dermatologist called a painter and asked him to a design a wooden nameplate. He wrote his title, name, educational qualifications and specialization on a piece of paper and instructed the painter that the nameplate should bear the details both in English and Tamil. The painter put the piece of paper in his shirt pocket and left the clinic assuring the doctor that he would deliver the nameplate after three days.

On the third day, the painter searched for the piece of paper but he could not find it anywhere. As he was familiar with the name of the doctor and his specialization, he painted the details in Tamil first. His son, a graduate, checked it and certified that it was perfect. When he was painting the same details in English, he did not get the English equivalent of the Tamil term “thol nibunar” (dermatologist).

When the painter asked his son to translate the term into English, pat he replied: “leather specialist” and the painter neatly painted the name and his specialization as: Dr Dhamodharan, MD – Leather Specialist and sent the nameplate to the doctor. Why leather specialist? The word for leather and skin in Tamil is “thol”.

Dr albert p’ rayan is an ELT Resource Person and  Professor of English. He can be contacted at rayanal@yahoo.co.uk

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