Saturday, April 28, 2007

RUMBUM - Is it English?

Please correct me if I am wrong. Is RUMBUM an English word? Aren't there better words to express this in a sentence?

I can't believe what I read in THE HINDU these days.

I wrote a few days back about the mistakes in a report. A lot of you commented on how THE HINDU used to be the benchmark for English those days. I have a feeling that those days are gone !

This is what I read today:

16 comments:

Unknown said...

It is NOW!!

:)

Ravi said...

Very true Venkitu sir, Even my dad used to frown the same way as you do about the deteriorating English standard in Hindu. Hope they wake up soon.

Rama said...

That is interesting, "rumbum" an English word?
I am reminded of my Kannada Professor in Class 12 who used to say that adding a 'u' after a word will make it a kannada word like "apple-u" or "bus-u" incase there are no equivalent words in Kannada. But ofcourse, I can think of atleast a couple of equivalents for "rumbum"

Jo said...

LOL!

What are you doing there in the USA? Come back and apply for the post of proof reader at The Hindu. :-))

Shades said...

i liked this..!

tt_giant said...

i thought hack-saw blade was rumbum.. hmmm..

Anonymous said...

Using english words in a tamil sentence is fashion!! But using tamil words in an english sentence is wrong?? I cannot understand this logic. It is kozhappifying!!

When you can accept 'hundi', why cant you accept 'rumbum'??

Thiru said...

wow... did this really happened in printed version of Hindu?! my gosh... anyway aravind (above) has raised another interesting issue lol...

Kavi said...

LOL ! Sundar referred me here ! Rumbum in Hindu ! Well, that would be interesting !!!

LOL !!!

J said...

OMG, thats really bad.

Lumbergh-in-training said...

standards are really falling - maybe ramadoss is trying to sneak in his "engum tamil" agenda through the backdoor. one word a day, and suddenly you find hindu is a tamil paper written in western script... ;-)

Ashish Waghray said...

hhmmm... it could be a coloqial word, but however, i think a newspaper "should" be known for its news rather than its impeccable english... and i find hindu does a lot better job than many other main stream english dailies in bringing the news from the grassroots. i used to love reading those articles in sunday magazine by P. Sainath, Kalpana Sharma, and many others and also the Open Page on thursdays(?) provides such an indepth analysis of various issues concerning our country... it's been a whle since i gave that up... i think educated indians should shed their loyalty to the english language, this is intricately linked with our thought process of our loyalty to western ideas... nobody gives a damn about how grammatically correct their english is in germany, france etc, etc, as long as they can communicate their ideas... this is just my opinion - no hard fellings!

Anonymous said...

Yes.. Indians are too loyal to English than to their respective native languages. They ridicule and deride incorrect English, but they give a damn to correct pronounciation in, say, Tamil.

But at the same time, Indians cannot compare themselves to French and German when it comes to English. All said and done, Indians need English to survive, while the other two don't.

Doctor Bruno said...

I second Aravind's opinions..

However, a "Saw" would be still better.

Vinesh said...

narayanan,
why this alaichal and mana uLaichal.
not everyone can speak in impeccable English like ungaLa and enna maadhiri.. :-)

Vijay said...


OMG! What Aravind mention'd s 'hundi' not hindi :P