WORDSPEAK
Cancer as metaphor
ANAND
AN editorial in the Times of India some weeks ago discussed a statement by the Chief Election Commissioner of India. James Lyngdoh had likened Indian politicians to a cancerous growth in society. Although the editorial writer acknowledged that cancer was "a very evocative metaphor" in this context, he went on to suggest that the metaphor of the parasite would have been more appropriate.
I am one of those who would not quibble over such a fine difference in defining evil. Yet cancer remains powerful not only for the disease it describes but for the broader metaphor: something inexorable, eating away from inside. Perhaps the best-known instance of likening politicians and politics to cancer, an evil influence or corruption spreading uncontrollably was the 1973 statement by John Dean. The White House special counsel told the U.S. Senate Watergate hearings: "I began by telling the President that there was a cancer growing on the Presidency and that if the cancer was not removed ... the president himself would be killed by it."
Cancer is of many kinds, and all are not fatal. The spectre of death is invariably on the mind of cancer patients, and that is why so many of them end up writing about their preoccupation with death. With differing degrees of success of various forms of therapy, the term may have lost some of its terror. George Bernard Shaw saw that terror a long time before, writing in the preface of John Bull's Other Island (1907): "A conquered nation is like a man with cancer; he can think of nothing else."
With eradication of the plague, phrases such as "avoid like the plague" may sound a bit archaic although as a verb it is still used in the sense of afflict or torment. Cancer has all but replaced it, as in the euphemisms "the c word" or "the big C" to avoid using the word. Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1926 in Debits and Credits, "Human nature seldom walks up to the word `cancer'."
Cancer is the Latin word for crab, and the sea creature has no connection to the disease beyond the imaginative association of the Greek doctor Galen, who worked in Rome in the Second Century AD, and thought that the swollen veins surrounding a tumour resembled a crab's limbs. Latin cancer gave rise to two other words. One is canker, referring to a gangrenous or ulcerous sore, usually in the mouth, and hence an area of diseased tissue, as in woody stems. This was loaned to English in the 12th Century and was later influenced by an Old North French word chancre (pronounced shanker in English), which refers to venereal diseases and that itself came from Latin.
For those not etymologically challenged, the word canker is a doublet. A doublet, in the linguistic sense, is one of two or more words in a language that are derived from the same source, especially through different routes. An example is the pair `coy' and `quiet', both from Latin, with coy coming through Old French and quiet coming directly from Latin.
As the disease has nothing to do with crab the crustacean, nor does the term "crabby", meaning sour of disposition, derived from the sour fruit of the crab-apple tree. Confusion mounts because daily horoscope writers will inform that a person under the sign of Cancer is "the nice guy of the zodiac". Astrology borrowed the name for one of its 12 divisions of the zodiac from a constellation of the northern hemisphere, apparently so named because the sun has a habit of travelling sideways like a crab while returning from its northernmost point. The constellation owes its name to a minor incident in Greek mythology, which my space-conscious and frugal-minded editor will not permit me to tell here.
In geography,Tropic of Cancer is the north and Tropic of Capricorn is the south of the equator, marking the limits at which the sun is vertically overhead on at least one day in the year. Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1938), two novels by American author Henry Miller, were suppressed for their sexual frankness in U.S. and Britain until the early 1960s.
The question remains: when the cure for cancer is found, will the use of the metaphor continue to describe politicians, or will it suffer the fate of the plague?
E-mail the writer at: anand@journalist.com
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