New words for old feelings

At a recent literary festival in Pune, its curator, the author Manjiri Prabhu, challenged me to prove my love of words by coining a few new ones. Inspired by the English language's habit of borrowing freely from the world's languages, I essayed these:

- SHASHI THAROOR

Wheth: This was prompted by the Malayalam expression ethramathe which asks someone to specify the precise numerical position of an object. 'Wheth' is derived from the Old English word hwæt—a precursor, referring to an inquiry into position or place. In the English ordinal system the 'th' suffix, used in words like 'sixth' or 'tenth', has been adapted to give a sense of order or position in a sequence. So 'wheth' can be used to inquire about the specific number position of something within a sequence, line, list, series, set, or event. It represents the state of identifying which exact place or position something occupies within an ordered structure, particularly when the focus is on the question of its location rather than the number itself.

When you ask, 'ethramathe vandi?' in the context of a row of rental cars, you're asking, 'What number position is my car in that line?' With 'wheth,' you would simply seek to identify the car's ordinal number in the line-up—whether it's the first, second, fifth or any other position in a sequence.