The other day we were discussing how this word “thrice” is so very Indian now. And how it has gone completely out of fashion in the West. People in the West laugh at us when we use it – complete with the very Indian pronunciation of the sound “th”.
As my explanation, I said that perhaps it had gone out of fashion in the English speaking western world because most of them don’t do anything more than twice any longer.
For example, unless bitten by a mad dog, no one in England or America will ever dream of saying, “I messaged you thrice without a reply”. And this lady, English-speaking from the Western world, agreed wholeheartedly with a big laughter. They would stop it at twice. She even gave me the American and English equivalent of such a message.
She said, it would be something like, “I messaged you twice, now you can shove it up your ass”. This would be the American version, of course. The English equivalent would be more or less the same except that they would write, “arse” instead of ass.
We in India are obviously more persistent and wouldn’t mind adding “thank you for your kind consideration and hoping to get a favourable response at the earliest”.
Talking about texts and texting, I think some people often use it in a most shameless and intrusive way. The most disconcerting are the thoughtlessly sent SMS jokes. They scarcely make me laugh and they have this nagging habit of arriving almost always at the wrong moment and disrupt my train of thoughts. This is nothing but sheer abuse of the power of modern day digital and electronic communication technology.
I am sure very soon some technology will come up that will make it possible for us to block a particular line or to block messages from a particular number. Until then we will keep messaging – once, twice and yes thrice.
