+cumshaw: See baksheesh.

cunchunee/kanchani (*The Glossary): See bayadère.

cursy/coorsy/kursi (*The Barney-Book, *Roebuck, *The Glossary): From the Jack-Chits. 'This Laskari word is not derived from the common Hind. word for "chair" (kursi) as many suppose: it is, in my opinion, a corruption of the English nautical term "cross-trees", for it too refers to the perch that is formed by the junction of a yard and a mast. But the resemblance is not accidental, for it is in this seat that the lascar enjoys the few moments of leisure that fall to his lot.'

+cushy/khush/khushi: 'In Laskari this was the equivalent of the English nautical usage "cheerily". To the lascar, then, goes the credit for inventing the English meaning of this word, which was carried onshore by sailors.'

dabusa (*Roebuck): 'Roebuck avers that any cabin may be so designated, but it is a truism that every vessel is a world unto itself, with its own tongues and dialects – and on the Ibis this term was applied, always and exclusively, to the "tween-deck", which should properly have been the "beech-ka-tootuk".'

+dacoit: 'This word', writes Neel, 'although universally known, is frequently misused, for the term applies, by law, only to miscreants who belong to a gang of at least five persons.'

dadu (*The Barney-Book): 'Strange that this English gypsy word for father should be the same as the Bengali for "grandfather"; no less strange that the Eng. gypsy for mother, dai/dye, should be the same as the common Hind./Urdu for midwife.'

+daftar/dufter: This was another word which had already, in Neel's lifetime, yielded to an ungainly rival, 'office'. This too carried down with it a lashkar of fine English words that were used for its staff: the clerks known as crannies, the mootsuddies who laboured over the accounts, the shroffs who were responsible for money-changing, the khazana-dars who watched over their treasuries, the hurkarus and peons who delivered messages, and of course, the innumerable moonshies, dubashes and druggermen who laboured over the translation of every document. It was the passing of the last three, all concerned with the work of translation, that most troubled Neel; those were the words he would cite when Englishmen boasted to him of the absorptive power of their language: 'Beware, my friends: your tongues were flexible when you were still supplicants at the world's khazanas. Now that you have the whole world in a stranglehold, your tongues are hardening, growing stiffer. Do you ever count the words you lose every year? Beware! Victory is but the vanguard of decay and decline.'

dai/dye (*The Barney-Book): See dadu.

+dak/dawk: Neel believed that this word would eventually yield to the English 'post' even in India, but he was convinced also that it would find its way into the Oracle, not on its own steam, but because of its innumerable compounds – dawk-bungalow, dawkdubba ('post-box') etc.

+dam/daam (*The Glossary): 'Sad indeed that India's currency took its name from rupya (Skt. "silver") rather than the more accurate Hind. dam, "price". I well remember a time when an adhelah was half, a paulah a quarter and a damri an eighth of a dam. A tragedy indeed that the word, like the coin, was driven to beggary by a counterfeit – in this instance, by the misinterpreting of the Duke of Wellington's comment of dismissal ("I don't give a dam"). What the Duke had meant to say, of course, was something in the order of "I don't care a tu'penny" (dam), but instead he bears the guilt of having put into circulation the damnable "damn". At this remove we can only speculate on how different the fate of the word would have been had he said, instead, "I don't give a damri."' On the margins of this note an anonymous descendant has scribbled: 'At least Uncle Jeetu wouldn't have ruined the last scene of Gone With the Wind by shouting at Rhett Butler: "A dam is what you don't give, you idiot – not a 'damn'…"'

+daroga: See chokey.

dashy (*The Barney-Book): See bayadère. 'This word is said to be derived from devadasi (temple dancer), hence the frequent pairing debbies and dashies.'

+dastoor/dastur: Because Neel always gave precedence to nautical usages he assumed that this word would come into the Oracle because of the Laskari usage, in which it was the equivalent of 'stu'nsail/studdingsail' (see also dol). He allowed, as a long shot, that its homo-nym, which designated a Parsi religious functionary, might also stand a good chance of inclusion. He was wrong on both counts: the Oracle unaccountably has chosen to gloss it as 'custom' or 'commission', from which usage it derives dastoori, destoory etc. These last Neel ruled out, because their meaning was so close to bucksheesh.

+dawk: See chit.

+dekko, dikk, deck, dekho: Neel took bitter exception to all attempts to attribute this word to English Gypsy slang, insisting that it was a direct and recent borrowing of the Hind. dekho, 'to see'.

+devi, debi, debbie: 'In English usage, the Hind. word for "goddess" acquired a wholly different connotation (for which see bayadère). The Laskari devi, on the other hand, was a corruption of the English "davit".'

+dhobi: 'The mystery of laundering.'

digh (*Roebuck): Neel was firmly of the opinion that this Laskari equivalent of the nautical sense of the word 'point', as in 'points of sailing' or 'headings in relation to the wind', came from the Bengali word for 'direction'.

+dinghy: From time to time, Neel would inscribe a question mark against words which had been rewarded, in his view, beyond their just desserts. Neel's interrogation of dinghy was scored with an especially heavy hand, for of all the Bengali words for river-craft this one seemed to him the least likely to be raised to coolinhood, the dingi being the meanest of boats.

doasta: 'This is one spiritous liquor about which the good Admiral Smyth is right; he describes it as: "An inferior spirit often drugged or doctored for unwary sailors in the pestiferous dens of filthy Calcutta and other sea-ports in India".'

dol (*Roebuck): Several of Neel's Jack-Chits are devoted to the lascars' words for the architecture of a sailing vessel. 'Dol is what they call a mast, and for sail they use a borrowing from the English serh (though I have sometimes heard them employ the good Bengali word pâl). To these are attached many other terms, of greater specificity: thus trikat (often mispronounced "tirkat") is "fore-" when attached to either dol or serh; bara is "main-"; kilmi is "mizzen-", and sabar is t'gallant. A jury mast goes by the apt name phaltu-dol. As for the other sails: a sawai is a stay-sail; a gavi is a topsail; a tabar is a royal; a gabar is a sky-scraper; a dastur is a stu'nsail; and a spanker is a drawal. By combining these elements they are able to point to the most insignificant scraps of canvas – in their speech, the fore-t'gallant-stu'nsail is the trikatsabar-dastur, and they have no need even to attach the word serh for their intention to be perfectly understood. The most curious words are reserved, however, for the tangle of tackle that projects agil from the vessel's head: the jib, for example, is a jíb, which malums imagine merely to be a Laskari mispronunciation of the English word, little knowing that it means "tongue" in Hind.; their word for fly ing jib, fulanajíb, might be similarly mistaken by those who did not know that it might also mean "anything's tongue"; but most curious of all is the word for the very tip of this spar, which is called the shaitan-jíb. Could it be because to work there is indeed to feel the terror of sitting upon the Devil's tongue?'