I heard a speaker today who said that "namaste" means "Look at the good in you and look at the good in me." When I look it up in Dictionary.com, the definition is " a bow and gesture of greeting or parting with the palms together in front of the chest; also, expressing respect through this gesture and bow." Does that bow of respect mean what the speaker said, or was she reading into it? I really liked that concept of looking at the good in each other.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

It's used as a kind of all purpose greeting/hello/goodbye word. I remember trekking in Nepal. We wouldn't see a soul while we were on the track. The mountains showed no signs of life at all. But when we stopped for our lunch and started to lay out our food children would appear from nowhere, running down (or up) the hillside with cries of "Namaste, namaste". The other traditional children's greeting seemed to be "Hello, gimme pen." Most of us carried pockets full of cheap biros to hand out.

One day after I had run out of pens a child ran up with the usual "Namaste, namaste. hello, gimme pen."
I told him I had no pens and after a moment's intense thought he brightened up and declared

"Gimme five rupee. I buy pen."

Anyway, re Namaste. There's a wikipedia article here.

In Sanskrit, the two parts of the greeting mean literally 'a bow / obeisance to you': namas 'bow, obeisance' (namati 's/he bows', cf. Latin nemus 'wood with open glades used as pasture-land; (sacred) grove', Greek nemos 'wooded pasture') + te 'to thee' (unaccented dative singular 2 person). (In India, it is one indication that your interlocutor is a Hindu.)

Thanks...it sounds as though the speaker was wrong. She said that 'namaste' literally was translated as: "look at the good in you and look at the good in me." It sounded like such a great concept.

Bob, what a great story about the biros. What is the fascination with biros?

Bob, biro isn't a word we use on this side of the pond. On your side, become a generic term for 'pen', or it still thought of as a trade name?

The fascination with biros is that they don't have any and they need them for school. (Although we did see one lad with a pencil sharpener safety pinned to his shirt - he didn't greet us with "Hello, gimme pencil" though.)

Yes, in general "biro" is used as a generic term now for ball point pen although I suspect that if anyone in the country is holding out for Biro with a capital B it's most likely Richard.

quote:

I suspect that if anyone in the country is holding out for Biro with a capital B it's most likely Richard.

The first successful ballpoint pen was designed by Lazlo Biro just before the second world war. However, his pens were not sold in the USA until after the war, by which time other manufacturers had gone into production and Biro's invention did not become the generic name.

A similar thing happened with vacuum cleaners, invented in the UK by Booth and just afterwards in the USA by Spangler. It was, however, Hoover's name that stuck, especially in the UK.

I prefer to avoid generics since there is no guarantee that the generic will be the best. Thus I have a Vax vacuum cleaner, not a Hoover, since it is more suitable for my needs.

Told ya!

Funny, Bob!

I don't think we have a trade name that we use for pens, do we? I have never heard anyone call a pen a Bic, for example. They are only called "pens."