"... she slept with her head pillowed on my arm”

                                             "... she slept with her head pillowed on my arm”

I am sure many readers of mine would recall from their reading the heading of the post, particularly if they are fans of science fiction. But, the point I am going to try to make here is about the English language.

The long phrase appears in a book that was written immediately prior to the year 1895. I do not claim to have read thousands, or even hundreds of books in English, fiction, non-fiction, anthologies, biographies, commentaries on politics, social, and economic issues. Yet, I am going to confidently assert that verbal usage of the noun “pillow” is an almost a unique instance, repeated rarely, if ever. I had not come across it anywhere else. I am not going to Google to find out as that would make the impact the phrase made on me nothing special, which is untrue.

This is how a language could claim to be living, going beyond mere surviving, as I had written earlier. The flexibility that a language affords its users to change it, that is living. One lives only by changing, discarding not with any intention to discard but as a natural development and similarly accepting new usages for words; no one tells you. It just happens.

French language is juggling itself between surviving and living. Historians can correct me, the reason the British became a successful colonizer and the French did not could be attributed to the flexibility their languages carried intrinsically.

To end this post, Sanskrit should become more like English; adopt new words, grammar, and present itself to the world as something new, for it to switch itself from surviving (merely liturgically, in epics, puranas) to living.

Raghuram Ekambaram