Relax, Refresh your English knowledge 36
176. What is the meaning and origin of ‘give short shrift'?
When you give someone ‘short shrift', you pay little or no attention to the individual; you try to get rid of him as quickly as possible. Very often, the treatment given to the person or thing is rather unsympathetic. By the way, ‘shrift' rhymes with the words ‘rift' and ‘lift'.
*Rajeevan's proposal was given short shrift by his boss.
*Any mention of overburdened students gets short shrift from the Principal.
In the old days, when the court found someone guilty, he was immediately taken to the gallows to be hanged. Before the noose was placed around his neck, the prisoner was allowed a few seconds to confess his sins to the priest who was present. This brief period in which the prisoner confessed and asked for forgiveness was called ‘short shrift'. The word ‘shrift' comes from the Old English ‘shrive' meaning ‘to impose a penance upon'. With the passage of time, ‘short shrift' began to be used to refer to any short period of time.
177. How is the word ‘malaise' pronounced?
The ‘a' in the first syllable sounds like the ‘a' in ‘apple', ‘ant', and ‘pants', while the ‘laise' in the second syllable sounds like the word ‘laze'. The word is pronounced ‘ma-LAZE' with the stress on the second syllable. Malaise comes from the French ‘mal' meaning ‘bad' and ‘aise' meaning ‘ease'. This rather formal word is used to refer to one's physical condition: when one feels out of sorts, but is unable to figure out what exactly is wrong. The word can also be used to refer to one's mental state — the feeling of unease or dissatisfaction that you have, but are unable to figure out the cause.
*The rampant corruption is merely symptomatic of a wider malaise in society.
*Aparna could sense there was a serious malaise among the students.
178, What is the difference between ‘get dressed' and ‘dress up'?
All of us get dressed every day, but it is not very often that we dress up. When you ‘get dressed', you put on your clothes; the clothes may be new or old — there's nothing really striking about them.
*It took Suchi nearly half an hour to get dressed.
When you dress up, you put on your best clothes; you dress very smartly. You look very different from the way you normally do. This phrasal verb can also be used to mean to put on a costume.
*For the costume party, Hema dressed up as a kangaroo.
*Sarita enjoyed dressing the kids up for the big event.
179. What do you call someone who works only when the boss is watching?
The expression that was frequently used in the old days was ‘eye servant' — he was the type of servant who worked, and that too reluctantly, when the master's eyes were on him. This term is considered rather old fashioned and is not listed in most dictionaries. A person who pretended to work while he was being watched was said to provide ‘eye service'. This expression is used in the Bible as well. “Not with eye service, as men pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.”
180. In movies, why do pilots keep saying ‘Roger' when they are on the radio?
I understand that the expression ‘Roger' has been part of a pilot's lingo since 1927. You must remember that radio communication then wasn't as advanced as it is now. Pilots used the word ‘Roger' to let the person they were talking to know they had received the message. In fact, the name ‘Roger' was chosen to represent the letter ‘r', which of course is the first letter in the word ‘received'. You may wonder, why the pilot just didn't say ‘received' — the reason was not all pilots spoke English! When a pilot said ‘Roger', he actually meant ‘Roger wilco', meaning ‘received, will comply'. This was the pilot's way of letting the person know that he had received the message and would follow the instructions. In the 1950s, there was an attempt to replace ‘Roger' with the much more romantic ‘Romeo' — it didn't catch on.
A collection from the Open Page Supplement of The Hindu Newspaper
Courtesy: Sri Upendra, the writer of the above
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