Word: sea
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...love words, I love languages," says Amitav Ghosh, the award-winning Indian novelist. "It's only when you know many languages that you realize there are few boundaries between them." His latest book, Sea of Poppies - recently short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize - crests along the collision and collusion of tongues found aboard the Ibis, a 19th century schooner plying the Indian Ocean. Its crew speaks a babble of English, Portuguese, Hindustani, Malay, Tamil, Chinese - and yet, through "the alchemy of the open water," as Ghosh writes, they communicate sufficiently well to sail this great wooden hulk...
...Ghosh also knows that there's no easy harmony when peoples and cultures mix. While writing Sea of Poppies, he scoured old dictionaries and almanacs and filled the novel with dizzying dialogues incorporating bastardized Hindustani and lascar words that he claims entered common English parlance in the 19th century. Each character talks with his or her own particular style and peculiar vocabulary. ("Just eat the bish, you gudda," one sailor scolds another. "He was only foozlowing.") The book offers no glossary and Ghosh offers no apology for the difficulties some readers may have. "The first aspect of India's reality...
...Over the last decade, rising sea levels have caused severe problems for Kiribati, including increasing high tides, harsher wave action, and coral breaching. Coupled with the scarce resources, a recent year-long drought, and exorbitant fuel and food prices that have crippled an already unstable economy, the newest crises promise to make the atolls uninhabitable in the near future...
...sea walls as protection, but we do not have the resources,” Tong said. “We just tell people to move back [from the shore], but we cannot keep moving for we are in danger of falling off the other side...
...close off 11 percent of our sea area because we knew we were going underwater,” Tong explained. “It was an opportunity to make that last stand. It was our contribution to humanity...