A ‘landslide’ is usually associated with something bad. If that is the case, why is it that during elections, a big victory is called a ‘landslide victory’? (N. P. Rajkumar, Chennai)

Landslides are a common occurrence during the rainy season in hilly and mountainous regions. Heavy or continuous rain usually causes mud and rocks to come sliding down the mountain/hill, and in the process, destroy everything along their path. Houses, vehicles, people, trees and animals often get buried in a landslide. While it is true that a ‘landslide’ is usually associated with something bad, a ‘landslide victory’ is seen as something good — at least from the point of view of the winner! When someone has a landslide victory in an election, he wins the contest by an overwhelming margin; he defeats his rivals soundly. What is it that a landslide does? It buries everything along its path. Someone who wins an election by a landslide, destroys everything in his path; in this case, it suggests that the candidate doesn’t just beat his opponents, he buries them!

The young candidate won by a landslide.

The local MLA believes that his party will register a landslide victory.

When it is snow that comes crashing down a mountain and buries everything in its path, then it is called an ‘avalanche’.

Why is the pronoun ‘I’ always capitalised in English? (K Nalini, Hyderabad)

Considering the fact, that the British at one point in time were ruling nearly half the world, it is quite possible that they thought no end of themselves. After all, they proudly proclaimed that theirs was an Empire on which “the sun never sets”! Perhaps, they had big egos and decided to capitalise the pronoun ‘I’. I am only joking. Like all other European languages, five or six centuries ago, this pronoun in English was not capitalised. In fact, there was a time when this pronoun was pronounced and spelt like the German word for ‘I’ — ‘ich’. With the passage of time, however, both the pronunciation and the spelling of the word gradually changed — from ‘ich’, it became ‘ic’, and then later, ‘i’. Once the word was reduced to a single letter, the uncapitalised ‘i’ caused many problems. Readers found it strange to come across a single letter word in the middle of a sentence. Scribes and printers worried that when written separately, the single letter would attach itself to the word before it or after it — thereby, creating more problems for the reader. In order to overcome this problem, writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of the Canterbury Tales, adopted different techniques to highlight the ‘i’. He chose to make it larger than the other letters in the same line — something which all writers and printers were already doing when ‘I’ occurred as the first word in a sentence. Eventually, everyone chose to capitalise the word.

What is the correct pronunciation of the word ‘sew’? (K. Narender, Pune)

There are quite a few people in our country who make this word rhyme with ‘jew’, ‘zoo’ and ‘chew’. Native speakers of English, however, pronounce it like the word ‘so’. The machine that tailors use is not a ‘sue-ing’ machine, but a ‘so-ing’ machine.

Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.

-Joseph P Kennedy

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