Word: calcuttas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Smith spells his name Psmith, that's his business, but it's a nuisance to telephone companies. The Calcutta phone company decided last week to take a strong line with variant spellings. Its trouble was not with Smiths (everybody in Calcutta knew the billboarded Smith Bros., Dentists) but with Mukerjees. They spelled it Mookerjee, Mookharjea, Mookarjie, Mocurgey, and a dozen other ways. The Chatterjees and the Bannerjees also went in for whimsical variations...
Hereafter, each name would be listed only one way in the phone book. But which way? That was left up to Calcutta University (which already standardizes its students' names). A faculty board found that the high-caste ancestors of present-day Mukerjees, etc., had all been imported from Benares 600 years ago by a Bengali king who wanted to increase the number of Brahmans in his realm. When the British East India Company came to Calcutta, the Brahmans' descendants flocked to work as babus (clerks). Their employers promptly shortened the babus' names and made them more pronounceable...
...university decreed a return to the pre-British forms. Mukerjees, Chatterjees and Bannerjees would find themselves listed as Mukhopadhyaya, Chattopad-hyaya and Bandopadhyaya. Anything simpler, Calcutta nationalists swore, would be a British imperialist corruption...
...what the Nizam will do next. Not much was known about the man upon whom the fate of India might depend. The 62-year-old Nizam has never traveled out of India, has left his domain only twice in the past 15 years-once to Delhi and once to Calcutta. Now he ventures out of his palace only on two occasions: each afternoon at 4:20 he visits his mother's tomb, every Friday he prays at a public mosque...
Saigon (Paramount), where Alan Ladd turns up with Veronica Lake after his fatiguing operations in China and Calcutta, concerns a lot of Amerasian hugger-mugger over a stray $500,000. During the film, at least three well-paid players die for the purpose of bringing Alan and Veronica together. It seems a shocking waste of life until, doubtless referring to all the money Saigon is sure to make at the box office, Paramount has Veronica explain: "All this happened because it had to happen...