Thursday, January 21, 2016

Words, words.

There's a nice Indian restaurant in Birmingham called the Deolali Bar - or perhaps that should be "was" because the internet seems to suggest it is shut, which would be a shame if true.  The name comes from a small village in India close to Bombay - or Mumbai as we now must call it - which back in the day was a transit camp for British soldiers arriving in or leaving the country.  Many of them leaving would be doing so because of medical or psychological problems and so the place name became synonymous with illness - particularly mental illness.  Of course as we always did, we gave it a British pronunciation, and it became our sort of slang word "doolally", meaning "crackers".

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