language on S Anand

Software Naming Has Power

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:08:54 +0530

Software naming has power.

I first became aware of this when a friend commented how much he enjoyed starting Windows 3.

“Win,” he said. “I just love typing that!”

I felt this this again recently with just.

just lint

Can you feel it?

just build

Actually, I just like to say “Just…”

just test

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 03:19:27 +0000

Loved this Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani scene where Ranveer asks, “Chinese ko Chinese bol sakte hai?”

हम बहनदी भी नहीं बोल सकते? आंटी, मैं दिल्ली से हूँ। मैं कैसे नहीं बहनदी बोलूं बहनदी!? कैसा जमाना आ गया है? फैट-ों को फैट नहीं बोल सकते, ब्लैक-ों को ब्लैक नहीं बोल सकते, ओल्ड-ों को ओल्ड नहीं बोल सकते, मुँह खोलने से डर लगता है मुझे! आप मुझे बताओ, चाइनीज़ को चाइनीज़ बोल सकते हैं?

Can’t we even curse “Damn it!”? Aunty, I am from Delhi. How can I not say, “Damn it”, damn it!? What times are upon us? You can’t call fat people fat, you can’t call black people black, You can’t call old people old, I am actually afraid to open my mouth! Tell me, can you call Chinese people Chinese?

अगर मुझे चाइनीज़ आर्डर देना है तो क्या करूँ? फ़ोन करूँ “हाँ भाईसाहब, वह हिमाचल से राइट जो जगह है, हाँ हाँ पड़ोस वाला मुल्क, हाँ वही कोरोना वाला, हाँ, वहां का एक क्रिस्पी चिकन लगा दो” अब आप बोलोगे “कोरोना वाला” नहीं बोल सकते!

If I want to order Chinese, what should I do? Should I call, “Yes bro, that place to the right of Himachal Pradesh. Yes, yes, the neighboring country, yes, the one with Corona, yes. Get me a crispy chicken from there” Next, you’ll say, “You can’t say “Corona”‘!

बचपन से, बचपन से दादी कहती आ रही है, “चाय पीने से काले हो जाते हैं, चाय पीने से काले हो जाते हैं”। अब पता चला है, ये रेसिस्ट है!

Since childhood, Grandma taught us, “Drinking tea turns you black. Drinking tea turns you black”. Now I learn that’s racist!

किसी ने ये भी नहीं सिखाया कि कौन सी गाली देने से मिसोजनी हो जाती है। यह भी नहीं बताया कि गोलू को गोलू बोलने से फैट शेमिंग हो जाती है। हमको तो यह सब नॉर्मल लगता। हमको तो कभी रॉन्ग लगा ही नहीं। हमको पता ही नहीं यह बोलने से सामने वाले की फीलिंग्स हर्ट हो सकती हैं!

No one ever taught us which abuses become a “misogyny”. No one ever told us that calling Chubby ‘Chubby’ is “fat-shaming”. We all thought this was normal. We never had an inkling it was wrong. I didn’t know that saying this may hurt others’ feelings!

Beautifully worded. Lovely acting. Nothing I could add to it.

(Except: Whisper and most transcription APIs handle Hindi poorly. Claude 3.5 Sonnet does better than GPT-4o on Hindi grammar.)

Hobbes on a calculator

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 04:34:55 +0000

I just learned that any word made of just these letters beighlosz can be spelt on a calculator.

That includes Hobbes! 538804 upside-down looks like this:

I’m surprised I never knew that.

The longest, by far, appears to be hillbillies – 53177187714

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 05:16:24 +0000

I built an internal app that nudges people to respond to calendar invites in Gramener.

A colleague replied, “… this is really helpful for improving hobbits”.

#Autocorrect is delightfully serendipitous. I promptly watched all three #films in the Peter Jackson Hobbit series 🙂

Contronyms

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 04:06:02 +0000

Contronyms are words that have two meanings that are the opposite of each other.

Sanction, for example, may mean restricting something (e.g. sanction against imports) or approving something (e.g. sanctioning imports).

Scan may mean to look at cursorily (e.g. scan a document) or look at in detail (e.g. scan an X-Ray)

Fine may mean excellent (e.g. fine wine) or average (e.g. the wine’s fine).

I enjoyed this list of 75 contronyms.

Arrested in Paris

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 12:00:00 +0000

In November 2000, I visited Paris one weekend. Two classmates, Anand Binani and Ram Venkat were studying there, and we roamed around the city.

At around 6:00pm, we went over to Montmartre. It’s up a hill, and there’s a cable car that takes you up there. We went all the way up, and got out when a lady behind us asked:

“Is that yours?

We’d left something behind. Went back to retrieve it. The car was almost leaving for it’s return journey. We just got out in time…

… to be confronted by the French Police.

Now, this is a scary thing. Foreign country. I don’t speak a word of French. And I was dressed like a thug.

The policemen didn’t say a word. One of them just made us stand right a the corner of the entrance to the cable car – politely at first, and then physically, when he realised we didn’t understand a word of French.

Now he goes on the radio. He hasn’t said a word to us yet that we could understand.

After a minute, he comes back, asking for our passports. I hand mine over. So does Anand Binani.

Ram Venkat doesn’t have his passport on him.

Shit!

While he was panicking and I was rooted to the spot and Anand Binani was trying to explain something to the policeman, he walked away with our two passports.

Busy talking on the radio.

Relaying the names on our passports.

Worried that they were both “Anand"s. (We could here that repeated many times.)

Something about wearing a jacket. (We were all wearing jackets.)

Five minutes pass. In the meantime, we had various theories. Three terrorists had illegally entered the country and were going to blow up Montmartre, and we looked like them. Or, an Asian student group was going to murder a senior polician. Or maybe we just looked like the mug-shots on their Top 10 Most Wanted list and just about like someone who’d end up on the internet on websites like https://www.checkpeople.com/reverse-phone-lookup.

In my case, I didn’t even have a French student visa. Just a standard Schengen tourist visa, with a UK student visa. I wasn’t even studying in the country. If I were deported, would he put me back in the UK or in India? Which embassy would I have to speak to if he arrested me?

Five minutes later, he comes back, hands us our passports, and walks off.

Just like that. No goodbye. No “You’re free to go”. No “Don’t ever do that again”. Just walks off.

We just stood there for a couple of minutes, got our breaths back, promised never to venture without a passport looking like thugs, took a snap as evidence, and went on inside the Montmartre chapel, followed by a far more educative visit to Pigale.

Comments

anand binani 11 Jan 2007 5:11 pm: Amazing stuff ! brought back memories of great small times we had. Hope you are doing great! Do let me know your email id and your whereabouts
somnath 18 May 2007 8:47 am: anand was it you looking like a thug or ram : ). How is the photo at the bottom connected with the whole story. Even if ram and binani have been oogling over there french police should be least bothered …

Quotes from Alice in Wonderland

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 12:00:00 +0000

From Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. These are the quotes I found most… how shall I put it… eye-opening. Paradigm-shifting.

“..the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury found it advisable-”
“Found WHAT?” said the Duck.
“Found IT,” the Mouse replied rather crossly. “Of course you know what ‘it’ means.”
“I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when I find a thing,” said the Duck: “it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where-” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“-so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. Do you grant that?”
“I suppose so,” said Alice.
“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags it’s tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.”

“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” said the Queen in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!”

“I can’t remember things before they happen.”
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else - if you ran fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep you in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master - that’s all.”

“Fan her head!” the Red Queen anxiously interrupted. “She’ll be feverish after so much thinking.”

“Five nights are warmer than one night, then?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Five times as warm, of course.”
“But they should also be five times as cold, by the same rule - “
“Just so!” cried the Red Queen. “Five times as warm, AND five times as cold - just as I’m five times as rich as you are, AND five times as clever!”

Comments

unknown 8 Apr 2007 5:27 pm: could you put the part from Alice in Wonderland where TwiddleDee and TwiddleDum are telling the story about the oysters when the walrus says somehthing like, The time has the walrus said to speak of other things… thanks
jolene 20 Dec 2006 12:00 pm: the time has come, my little friends, to talk of other things. of shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings. and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings, calloo-callay, come, run away. with cabages and kings!
johnna 18 Sep 2008 2:08 am: i adore every quote from this story. my favorite is the Cat. i just had to say how much i get out of reading your quotes. much oblige!
Captain Whitney 17 Apr 2009 5:15 am: Insanity, pure and simple. Isn’t it beautiful?
courtney 14 Mar 2010 4:10 am: Off with his head! I almost love beheadings as much as I love caviar
Moon 1 Jan 2010 8:31 am: Twinkle twinkle little bat, how I wonder what your at. Up above the world you fly, like a tea tray in the sky. But I don’t want to go amongst mad people. Oh you cant help that, we’re all mad here.
Aditya 20 Jun 2012 7:01 am: “Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.” “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep you in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Such is life and inflation!

Non-verbal dictionary

Sat, 13 Apr 2002 12:00:00 +0000

A non-verbal dictionary.

Pravda

Fri, 17 Aug 2001 12:00:00 +0000

To those who’re curious about what’s happening in Russia, Pravda has been online in English for a while.

Cliche site

Mon, 18 Dec 2000 12:00:00 +0000

Cliches. Tells you what cliches like ass backwards mean.