Spin doctors and cock 'n' bull stories

DURING cricket matches between Australia and India and the euphoric reporting in India's press following the win over a strong rival, several writers called Indian bowlers "spin masters" and "spin doctors." Such quaint and typical usage in Indian English, like "jhuggies gutted in slum fire," often leave readers in other English-speaking countries perplexed and amused.

Spin - this hardly needs explaining in India - is a sporting metaphor for the twist given by a bowler that makes the ball "break away" from its apparent trajectory. In North America where baseball is the king, the ball that veers away from the batter is called a "curve" ball, similar to the cricket ball that swings while air-borne. "Throwing a curve (ball)" is an Americanism for deliberately making a misleading statement. In countries where cricket is neither a pastime nor passion as it is in India, a spin doctor is a politician or an advisor employed to promote a favourable interpretation of the political developments to the media by putting a slant on information presented to them.

Taking a cue from baseball, the tag was first used in The New York Times in 1984 during Ronald Reagan's campaign for re- election as U.S. president. Googly, the term for an off-break ball bowled with apparent leg-break action to deceive the batsman, is sometimes used colloquially in India in a similar context, as in "His explanation that mollified the boss was a real googly."

Doctor is now commonly used in the figurative sense for someone who mends or patches up. Or who tampers or falsifies, as in "doctoring a document." Although it is considered archaic as a term for a teacher or a learned person, doctor is still used when conferring a doctorate or a degree of expertise: Ph. D. (Doctor of Philosophy), D. Sc., D. Litt. Therefore, even if seemingly quaint, spin doctor can be a suitable term for an expert spin bowler. And, by a similar extension of logic, if a prankster is a person putting a slant to a seemingly innocent activity and a punster puts a spin to the obvious meaning of a word, then why a spin bowler cannot be called a "spinster," a term that has lost its original connotation to a spinner and is now almost exclusively used for an elderly unmarried woman.

While debating what to call a spin bowler, the question may be asked why an umpire - a word unrelated to any cricket activity - is called so. Umpire came from 14th Century English word "noumpere" which meant "one who decides disputes between parties," which in turn was derived from Old French "nonper" - meaning not a peer, or not equal. The idea was to have an impartial arbitrator as a third party who was not a peer, i.e. not equal to either party in dispute.

Through a linguistic process called "metanalysis," in which letters from one word are transferred to another word, "a noumpere" became "an umpere" and finally, by the early 17th Century, "an umpire." The metanalytic process can be seen in action in the transformation of "a napron" (related to "napkin") to current "an apron," of the snake "a nadder" to "an adder" and "an ewt" becoming "a newt," a lizard-like aquatic amphibian, types of which are also found in parts of India.

One final word from cricket that has a totally different meaning in North America. In the U.S., "to stump" means to travel the countryside during an election giving campaign speeches, and "stumping" is to climb on to tree "stumps" to address the audience. The adjective "stumped," meaning at a loss or baffled, evolved out of the difficulty in ploughing or planting a stump- ridden field or the likelihood of stumbling over a stump, and not from the dismissal of the batsman if the wicket-keeper touches the stumps with the ball when the batsman is out of crease.

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Another story to hit the headlines along with cricket victories was that of the roller-coaster stock market, and one report described the stock market upheaval as a "Bear 'n' Bull story."

Even readers who have never delved in stock market probably know by now that "bulls" are speculators, and "bears" are cautious investors. A "bull market" is one in which stock prices are rising, a "bear market" is one marked by falling prices. The writer of the Bear and Bull story had put the spin on another phrase - a Cock and Bull story - that, as one British edition of The Readers' Digest explained, has nothing to do with the vagaries of financial market:

In Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire, England, The Cock Hotel and The Bull Hotel were staging posts on the London to Manchester route during the 18th and 19th Centuries... News and anecdotes were exchanged both by passengers and by coachmen seeking to impress travelers with their knowledge of current affairs. Stories inevitably were embellished in the telling and the two establishments vied to furnish the most outlandish tales, which became known as Cock and Bull stories.

ANAND

E-mail the author at anand@journalist.com

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