The first time I saw the State Farm Insurance ad on TV I laughed out loud.. “Khakis” has since become a running joke for me and my wife (and probably for thousands of other folks based in the US – Just do a simple Google search on “Jake from State Farm” and see the memes that pop up).

Recently something I read made me think about the origin of words; how they travel across the globe; and end up in the most non-obvious places.

Word #1:  Khaki

The punchline for the joke in this ad (i.e. “Khakis”) in the United States refer to a type of trousers.  Boring, beige, yawn-inducing trousers that are de rigueur in corporate environments.  Named after the dull brownish-yellow color that this breed of pants conforms to.

How that word came to the American shores is unknown.  What I do suspect is that it came via Britain.

The British had stumbled upon the word sometime in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries when they were ruling over India.  It was based on the Hindi word “खाकी” that referred to that very same dull-brown color in the Indian subcontinent.  It became the color of their military clothing back in their Colonial days.  Khaki uniforms draped the British soldiers in World War II.

Maybe the Americans saw the Brits fight shoulder to shoulder with them in WWII and liked the color of their uniforms.  Maybe they liked the sound of the word, as they heard it pronounced, drenched in the British accent.  How it made the transition from the battlegrounds of Europe to the conference rooms of America is anyone’s guess.

The word is derived from the word “खाक”, which means “dust”.  It has an Urdu sound and a solemn feel.  Reminding us what we are made of, and what we will become.  It probably came to India via the Mughal rulers, a few centuries prior to the Brits.

The Persians brought it to India, the Britishers borrowed it, and as it is used in America one can picture dust storms on vast Indian plains… (Except when Jake from State Farm utters it.. Then we just chuckle).

Word #2: “Sicario

Last year one of my favorite movies was this narco drama – Sicario.  It was set on the southwest border of the US and depicted American agencies’ attempts to outsmart Mexican drug rings.  I had written a blog post on it just before the Oscars.

What I had not covered in that post was how the word ‘Sicario’ had sounded like a word from my mother tongue.  It had sounded like “शिकारी” (pronounced ‘Shikaari’), a Hindi word that means ‘Hunter’.  What was interesting was that ‘Sicario’ also meant ‘Assassin’ in Mexican Spanish.

I was astounding that two words that sounded alike in completely different languages, also meant roughly the same thing in each.  Hindi and Mexican Spanish – there was no common thread between the two languages in mind.  Yet, in both the word referred to someone out on a hunt.

In my mind the Mexican region was culturally as far removed from the Indian diaspora as possible.  There were no trade, no immigrations between the two countries, no historic wars or treaties, or any other connection that could have linked the two cultures to each other.  Yet we had somehow used the same word, with the same sounds, with the same meaning to describe something.

Then I came across a book on the origins of Spanish and realized that Spain had once been invaded by the Moors, who came from northwest Africa but had been influenced by the Arabic culture.  These Spaniards had brought their language to Mexico, and with it the Arab influences from the Moors.  In India there had been a Mughal rule for a few centuries prior to the arrival of the British.  During that epoch the Indian languages had been influenced by Persian and Arabic and every other language that had swirled in the middle east.  So there was a possibility that the Arabs and Persians who had influenced Hindi had also influenced Mexican Spanish (via Africa and after a much more arduous crossing of the Atlantic).

Upon arriving in America I had loved the familiarity of Mexican cuisine, as it was very similar to Indian food I had enjoyed growing up.  I was happy to have potentially stumbled on something connecting our languages.

Variations Of A Language

I recently read an obituary about a wonderful gentleman, late Dr. Braj Kachru, a friend’s loving grandfather.  Dr. Kachru’s life’s work was proving that Indian English was not an impure varietal of British English, but a separate language in its own right.  In the 1960s he had gone about the scholarly task of proving it, piece by piece.  He showed that Indian English was a different language which had evolved with influences of Sanskrit, Urdu, and Persian among others.  Dr. Kachru went on to become an editor of the Oxford Dictionary and the President of the International Association of World Englishes (IAWE).

He proved that the languages that had blown across the Indian subcontinent over centuries of its existence had made ‘Hinglish’ what it was.  And the erratic and circumlocutous journey of these two words made me yearn for diving deeper into his research.  It would be fascinating to see some of the threads that he had uncovered to prove his hypothesis.  I’m excited to see what else lies in store…