Posts Tagged ‘Halima Khan’

Intro:

Random Inklings of Random Expressions of Random Oratory

By Halima Khan

Oratory is a great skill that most conversations we carry out daily lack. Speechifying is a hobby for most of us; however it lacks rhetoric, vocabulary and depth mostly. All that is all the talk now has is words flying in some random order, catch a word of the bantering and start buzzing your own ranting and raving. In all the rambling nowadays there is ‘pet’ vocabulary for everyone that is used to start off the sentence, in the middle of the sentence and to punctuate it as well of course.

This column is all about the slang that has become the language of today! Everyday language is not based on dictionary words any more. Words as we know them now are fast evolving in their spellings as well as usage. Consequently there are slangs that are more comprehensive now than theoretically the most comprehensive words themselves. Every individual is identified with the slang their verbal communication is sporadically ‘tainted’ with.

Week 1:

YAAR

‘Yaar’ is a word that is no where near exhausted. Our conversation might get exhausted of every possible subject but there will still be a ‘yaar’ escaping our mouth. Yaar lets go get ourselves something to eat yaar! Yaar I am not sure what to do about this or that yaar. Yaar could you not begin and end your sentence with a yaar, yaar. Yaar all I can hear is the continuous repetition of yaar, yaar. So please enough with the yaar already, YAAR! Unconsciously mostly we let yaar creep in our tête-à-tête so frequently that the yaar ends up taking a major load of the tone of the chat. There is the whining ‘yaaaaaaar’ there is the more heavily induced ‘Yawr’ there is the yaar that depicts exasperation. The ‘yaar’ is enough to help anyone read through the attitude and pitch of what the speaker is feeling.

There are times when monosyllables are more than enough to explain and to understand. I remember many such afternoons when I would crash down on benches in my college after a class or test and ‘Yaar.’ is all I had to say and that was enough for my friends to figure out what had just happened with me. Then lazy summer afternoons when my friend and I would be steeped down with the heat yaar was the whole chunk of ensuing conversation. Early mornings when getting out of bed was a nightmare and my alarm clock would persistently ring my mother gets greeted with yaar more often than a cheery morning.

Teachers and parents discourage slang as it is but yaar was one that was taken offence to like any curse word. Literally meaning a lover ‘Yaar’ was never looked upon as ‘respectable’ and was frowned upon. However I notice that reprimand has dwindled with time either they have accepted the term which is unlikely or they have just entirely given up on any possible decent improvement in language. Often it gets so bad that a formal speech or discourse gets plagued with an unconscious rush of ‘yaar’ which indefinitely reflects not too highly on the speaker’s communication skills.

With time this colloquial term has also evolved into something like ‘yaari’ ‘yaaro’, hence whatever mood speaker is in language is adaptable to all. Sometimes such flexibility in language especially when it is so recurring in daily chit chat can be rather annoying. But the truth is it is a word that you easily catch if someone around you is using it. Also even before you know it you might hate to hear it but your dialogue is not entirely clean of it.

Could you please try not marking your talk with so much of ‘yaar’, please yaar!