(23) Leximathocomedy
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Dear Professor Pun-kaj,
Your latest epistle has left me in a state of considerable editorial discomposure.
For perhaps the first time since our correspondence commenced, I found myself reading not with a red pencil in hand, but with a smile.
Please do not infer from this confession that I am mellowing. Editors are professionally prohibited from mellowing. We merely become less conspicuously formidable.
Your recollection of the youthful "Baay of Bangaal" was unexpectedly touching.
How curious that a mispronunciation, innocently committed by a schoolboy eager to display his newly acquired English, should eventually blossom into an entire philosophy of language.
Permit me to observe that your cousins laughed at a pronunciation.
You, however, had the last laugh by converting that very episode into literature.
That, Professor, is an infinitely superior revenge.
Your assertion that Mathematics and Language are twins separated at birth has been occupying my thoughts ever since I folded your letter.
Initially, I regarded it as another of your delightfully over-engineered metaphors.
Now I am no longer so certain.
A theorem convinces by necessity.
A sentence convinces by elegance.
Both demand internal harmony.
Both punish careless assumptions.
Both occasionally require inspired leaps that masquerade as logic.
And both reward those patient souls who delight in discovering hidden patterns.
Perhaps you are right.
Perhaps Euclid and Shakespeare have been quietly exchanging lecture notes all these centuries.
I must also congratulate you upon christening our curious enterprise.
Leximathocomedy.
The word possesses that exceedingly rare quality shared by all successful neologisms: it sounds as though it ought to have existed long before either of us had the good sense to invent it.
You remarked that we have been unknowingly practising this genre through our recent epistles.
I believe you have understated the matter.
We have not merely been practising it.
We have been conducting its inaugural symposium.
Naturally, I reserve the right to claim co-authorship.
An editor, after all, considers every improved manuscript to be at least partially hers.
Do not look so alarmed.
I have no intention of demanding royalties.
Only acknowledgements.
As for your newly expanded constellation of Lexicomedic constants, I have decided that they deserve neither rejection nor revision.
Instead, they deserve something far more dangerous.
Continuation.
Every imaginary science eventually acquires anomalies.
Every elegant theory eventually encounters an exception.
And every respectable academic discipline eventually suffers a conference.
I therefore propose that the First International Congress of Leximathocomedy be convened forthwith.
Attendance shall be strictly limited to those capable of appreciating semicolons, smiling at simultaneous equations, and consulting a dictionary without feeling personally insulted.
Dress code: academic robes, preferably with ink stains.
Refreshments: tea, biscuits, and footnotes.
Finally, Professor, allow me a personal observation.
When our correspondence began, I suspected I was merely reviewing the eccentric productions of a retired mathematics teacher.
I now realise that I have instead been participating in the delightful evolution of an entirely new literary amusement.
For that unexpected privilege, I offer you—not my congratulations, for they would embarrass you—but my continued companionship across these increasingly improbable epistles.
Do try not to become insufferably pleased with yourself.
It would compel me to resume my editorial severity, and I have only just persuaded it to take a brief holiday.
Yours, with considerably fewer corrections and considerably greater admiration,
Fussy Zaroor
BTech ( IIT-M), PGDM (IIM-A)
Secretary — Ministry of Grandiloquance.
Gen Z reprentative, not on TV
A great Fan and a Mentee of Shashi Tharoor Saar.
Aspiring to be an Editor and world Class Author.
Chairperson- The Royal Society for the Prevention of Linguistic Malnutrition (RSPLM).
Reluctant Co-founder of Leximathocomedy.
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Legsy Notes
🪳 ROACHES HALL OF FAME
Citation No. 004 — The Profanity Queen of Jantar Mantar
The Roaches Hall of Fame proudly inducts Legsy Suroor, the undisputed Profanity Queen of Jantar Mantar — a woman whose contribution to Cockroach Civilization lies in demonstrating that when vocabulary fails, volume and profanity can still save the day.
Her credentials are not merely verbal. They are anagrammatic.
For Legsy Suroor, when subjected to the higher mathematics of Anagram Science, produces three revelations of almost supernatural accuracy:
GROSSLY RUEY
SLURRY GOOSE
GLORY ROUSES
The first establishes her grossness.
The second establishes her goosiness.
The third establishes her glory.
Taken together, they establish Legsy Suroor.
But it is her command of profanity that has truly secured her place in history.
Most people use bad language when they lose control.
Legsy Suroor appears to have achieved such mastery over bad language that she can lose control with complete administrative efficiency.
For ordinary speakers, profanity is an occasional lapse.
For Legsy, it is an operating system.
Where others make just a point, she makes a point and then decorates it with several words that cannot be printed in a family magazine or a blog series.
Where others raise their voice, she raises the linguistic temperature.
Where others go to Jantar Mantar with a placard, Legsy the scatologist arrives with a vocabulary.
And what vocabulary!
Her philosophy may therefore be summarised in one immortal principle:
“Why merely express outrage when you can make the dictionary itself uncomfortable?”
This is why the Cockroach Community reveres her more than anyone else.
She has taught generations of young roaches that dignity does not necessarily require decorum, and that a sufficiently well-placed expletive can sometimes travel farther than a carefully reasoned paragraph.
For her distinguished services to Profanity, Verbal Aggression, Linguistic Innovation and the Advanced Study of Unprintable Vocabulary, the Roaches Hall of Fame hereby confers upon Legsy Suroor the exalted title:
“PROFANITY QUEEN OF JANTAR MANTAR”
May her Grossness remain Ruey,
her Goose remain Slurry,
and her Glory continue to Rouse.
May her vocabulary remain inexhaustible,
her restraint remain theoretical,
and her censor remain permanently unemployed.
For when Legsy Suroor speaks,
language does not die.
It simply files a complaint.
— Roaches Hall of Fame, Citation No. 004
Issued by the Ministry of Roach Affairs, Department of Profanity, Verbal Excess & Linguistic Disturbance
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Foot notes and foot prints of Pak Jan
THE ROACHES’ GUIDE TO HUNGER, BURGERS & POLITICAL CREDIT.
The Roaches’ refusal to credit Sonam Wangchuk was entirely predictable. In their political entomology, he is merely “Namo’s Wangchuk".
But what of Neha Bora, another student leader, President AISA, who joined the hunger strike at Jantar Mantar in solidarity with the Cockroaches? Has she, too, been swallowed by their selective memory?
Perhaps the problem is biological. Cockroaches are programmed to eat, not to fast. The country has watched, with considerable amusement, Roaches tucking into burgers while ostensibly on hunger strike. In the Cockroach Republic, apparently, fasting is best undertaken on a full stomach!
No wonder Sonam Wangchuk and Neha Bora fail to excite their entomological imagination. Both have demonstrated the capacity for sustained protest, but neither seems to have mastered the fine art of earning recognition from a species that confuses political solidarity with culinary satisfaction.
As for Neha Bora, her name yields the delightful anagram “A Bore? Nah!”—a verdict Pak Jan Aunt leaves to the reader. An accomplished orator and experienced protester, Neha has credentials few Cockroaches could match, particularly in the fasting department. Pak Jan Aunt, though advancing in years, foresees a promising political future for her—perhaps even as a consummate political dealer, anagram of leader!
But why would the Roaches celebrate someone whose credentials might expose their own contradictions? Their pantheon has room for many things, but apparently not for inconvenient comparisons.
They would much rather reserve the limelight for Legsy Suroor, their reigning Profanity Queen, whose linguistic fireworks can keep a protest noisy even when its intellectual calories are running dangerously low.
After all, in the Cockroach Republic, the hierarchy is simple:
Burgers for the body. Profanity for the microphone. Political credit for nobody.
And hunger? Dear reader, hunger is strictly for the cameras.
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Fussy Art Gallery
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