Who is the ‘husband' in animal husbandry?
It probably means a husband who has been hung out to dry! Just kidding! The word 'husbandry' has nothing to do with husbands. By the way, the 'y' in the word is pronounced like the 'i' in 'bit' and 'sit'. The word is pronounced 'HUZ-ben-dri', with the stress on the first syllable. When it first began to be used, the word 'husband' meant 'peasant farmer', and we all know that farmers grow crops and raise animals — cattle, goats, pigs, etc. People who cultivate the land or breed animals are said to be practising 'husbandry'. Farmers who practise 'animal husbandry' raise animals, while those that grow crops are in the business of 'crop husbandry'.
When I grow up, I would like to be involved in crop husbandry.
What is the meaning and origin of 'through thick and thin'? (L. Jaganathan, Vellore)
When someone stays with you 'through thick and thin', what it means is that the individual stands by you through good and bad times. He is someone who can be depended on, no matter what the situation is; he will not disappear at the slightest hint of trouble. The individual is not what one might call a 'fair weather friend' — in other words, someone who can be seen in your company only when he has something to gain.
The speaker thanked his wife for sticking with him through thick and thin.
I'm not a fool. So don't expect me to support you through thick and thin.
According to scholars, this is one of the oldest idioms in English. It has been around since the 13th century, a time when much of England, and for that matter, most of Europe, was full of dense forests. The original expression was 'through thicket and thin wood'. The word 'thicket' in this context is used to refer to a group of trees growing close together or a cluster of bushes in proximity. The trees and bushes are so close together that making one's way through them becomes a difficult task. The 'thin wood' in the expression refers to those portions of the forest where vegetation is sparse, thus, making it possible for a traveller to walk quickly. With the passage of time, the idiom changed to 'through thick and thin', and acquired the figurative meaning discussed in the previous para.
What is the meaning of 'toothless wonder'? (Yavinder Bhadaur, Barnala)
The expression has several different meanings. The first one that immediately comes to mind is a child who has lost one or more teeth. It could also refer to an elderly person who has a few teeth missing.
I notice that your son is a toothless wonder. When did that happen?
Toothless wonder has a figurative meaning as well. For those of us who watched the West Indies playing cricket in the 1980s, the current set of players who represent the once formidable team are nothing more than toothless wonders. A team that was once powerful, but is now incapable of performing. A committee that is a toothless wonder is one that has no real authority to perform its duty.
Hillary is the Chairperson, and she herself calls the committee a toothless wonder.
upendrankye@gmail.com
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Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
TN TET recruitment 2025: Notification released, registration underway at trb.tn.gov.in, check direct link to apply here
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Scroll.in
3 hours ago
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How to be Indian in India: In his new book, Manu Joseph tries to make sense of the ‘amateur Indian'
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When I was around ten, during a monthly test in school, I was asked to write 'the opposite gender of ram'. I was baffled when I realised that most of the class had got the alleged answer 'ewe'. My answer was Sita. I still maintain that I was right. No one in Chennai had ever seen a ram, while Ram, or Rama as we used to call him, was everywhere. Everything else about English was like this – it was venerable at a distance but all wrong when it passed through me. It was a medium of study and intellect but to use it in a casual conversation seemed comically arrogant. The act of speaking in English, in fact, was defamed as 'Putting Peter' in my circle. I was among the boys who carried out the defamation. My teachers were not fluent in English. When my parents spoke English, they, like all Malayalis, spoke English in Malayalam. The effect of not being fluent in English was that I was an insider in my home town. I belonged to my city and the place belonged to me. 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Observation is not the act of seeing; it is the act of remembering what has already been seen. Only when I stopped thinking in Tamil did I begin to actually see Chennai. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that the one word we will not find in the Quran is 'camel'. His implication was that ancient Arabs had no reason to mention what was very common in almost every frame of their existence, but an outsider sees what is too ordinary for the insider. (Borges was wrong; the Quran does mention 'camel'. But I accept what he implies.) As a child, I made no special effort to learn to read and write in Tamil or Malayalam. I used them only to think and speak. I could write only in English and Hindi, both foreign to me, Hindi more than English. Then, in 1987, a film called Nayakan by Mani Ratnam was released. I was thirteen and I thought it was the greatest film on Earth. I still believe it is one of the greatest. I decided that apart from being a journalist, I would also become a Tamil filmmaker. I began to write scripts for many Tamil films that I hoped would find takers, but all of them in English. When I was 16, I thought the best way to enter the movie business was as a low-level actor. So when I heard that a film audition was underway for some extras, I went. The queue was long and the men looked impoverished and depressing, and the line had not moved after two hours, so I left, abandoning the idea of acting. I wrote more stories. I co-wrote one with the milkman. Nothing ever came out of them. The Tamil sphere of creativity offered me no prospects. So I let myself be colonised by the English language, by which I also mean a strange condition. 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Nowhere in the malls, theatres, and restaurants can they be guaranteed a degree of refinement. In the theatres they must rise for the national anthem. And what should they do if a man is on the phone throughout the movie? They have heard stories of friends being punched just for objecting to the use of the phone in movie halls. Never before has the uncouth Indian been so empowered, and so affluent. There is no place he cannot afford, or be refused admittance to any more. In any case, some of the richest residential real estate in the country has for long been taken over by fanatic vegetarians. Now there are affluent residential colonies in all major cities where residents demand the construction of temples. What should the lofty people do? Where should the amateur Indian go? They do consider themselves 'global', and everyone knows 'global' does not include Sudan or Mongolia. They will be able to obtain visas of the most advanced economies. But despite everything, all things considered, it is in India that life is the easiest; it is here that they are assured of good spots on the social mountain. What must they do? How can they become as confident as the son of the soil, who has friends in the police commissioner's office and in other government places, who knows when to stand firm during a traffic dispute and when to flee, and how to game the system. How to be Indian in India? Excerpted with permission from Why the Poor Don't Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians, Manu Joseph, Aleph Book Company.
New Indian Express
3 hours ago
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MKU students complain of water shortage, dirty toilets
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