As if cricket’s byzantine “Laws” weren’t enough, the lexicon is becoming a potent weapon in the wars of words that have enveloped cricket in recent months.
Down under, the use of labels like “monkey” and “obnoxious little weed” by rival players sent cricket correspondents scurrying to their dictionaries. Back home, the use of a three-letter word in a blog critique of a newspaper editorial seems to have stirred a semantical tsunami in an oversensitive editor’s teacup.
Commenting on an editorial in The Telegraph, Calcutta, on the auction of players in the Indian Premier League, Darius Nakhoonwala wrote on The Hoot that the “poor sod”—the “usually sensible” leader writer—seemed to have been stung by a bee in the proprietor’s bonnet midway.
The paper’s editorial page editor Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Mastermind finalist and historian of standing, has no problems with the critic imputing proprietorial injections in the leader. He doesn’t have any problems either with the guesstimate of the leader writer’s financial status.
Instead, he gets into a slanging match with the blog editor, Sevanti Ninan, and the critic on whether “sod” is a permissible epithet or not.
Read the full exchange: Is ‘sod’ permissible?
IJR 