“Machesh, you’re as hot as Chennai”
Prom happened recently, and you might have been lucky (or unlucky!) enough to have heard this line. If your reaction was like mine – i.e, left scratching your head and wondering what kids get up to these days – congratulations, you’ve become old! Just like your plans for life after college, insti lingo is unlikely to remain the same as it was when you were a freshie. Don’t worry, this is just how language works, not a sinister Tower of Babel style plot from the admin to divide batches and make uprisings more difficult. In this article, we’ll unearth ancient (pre-WhatsApp) texts to see how insti lingo has changed through the years. But first, here’s a quick primer on slang in general!
Seniors (who have picked up sufficient delusions of grandeur in just one year!) giving ‘fundae’ to freshies sometime before the internet was invented. Did they speak the same language as us?
HS4242 – An Introduction to Slang
The purpose of slang is to help people feel like they belong and identify with certain groups (such as insti students!). Such words are always walking a tightrope in terms of usage. Too little, and the word will die out quickly. Too many adopters, and the word loses its exclusive feel. We’re all used to being addressed as junta by clubs in emails, but wouldn’t it feel weird if the administration used the same term?
Imagine getting this notification
A fun example from the internet is Cheugy, which means ‘out of fashion’. It was a word coined and majorly used by Gen Z to poke fun at older generations. Eventually, the New York Times ran an article to explain its meaning to perplexed Boomers. Once they started using it as well, the word lost its exclusive feel and quickly fell off in usage – Cheugy had become Cheugy itself! Of course, as years of chemistry would have taught you, rules are made to have exceptions. Cool has been a staple part of almost everyone’s vocabulary for a century now! Linguists theorise that its secret to success is generality and adaptability – cool is vague enough to have a wide range of meanings, but when someone says “cool”, it’s easy to figure out what they mean with context.
HS1959 – Language in Ancient IITM
Unless you’ve been living with the third elephant out in the forests, you would’ve heard of the famed thesis on insti lingo. Written by Evelyn Richter in 2006, it provides an accessible breakdown of how words formed, and the functions they serve to the insti community. You can read it here. Its appendices include a lovely peek into the past with chat transcripts and a snippet from T5E’s precursor – T4E (Yes, The Fifth Estate followed The Fourth Estate. No surprises there. Traditional folklore holds that there was once a T3E as well, but the search for evidence is still on). Anyway, consult-enthu kids rejoice, because it’s case study time!
Exhibit A:
“Mind you, ES is NOT a coward. He just isn’t acclimatized to this new environment, and especially, the lingo. He bulbs whenever shady junta put jod-level fundaes about poonding a slysha fufa RG er, buster. He feels like deeshing when such haiffunda level things are put to him. He prefers cupping a quiz to deciphering such cuppax level lingo type things. Peace? Hazaar peace. It’s not very ob-like, but better believe it, Vokay. You can’t expect ES to stoop to such derogatory levels. He DOES NOT like pondy-type-things as he ‘comes from a long line of decent and honorable ancestors’. Period. The truth? Well it is yet “apocryphal”, and what little is speculatively known is rather unprintable.”
Source: The Fourth Estate, Nov 2002 (pg 9-10, read it here).
If you were confused, ES here means El Sarayuite and not English Studies. Sarayu at the time was a boys’ freshie hostel, like Mandak is now. History lesson over, let’s look at the language. It’s fun to see that some words, like RG, fundae, and cupping have been in usage since the turn of the century! On the other hand, words like slysha, jod, and bulb can be interpreted with a little effort, but would you ever use them in a sentence nowadays? Then there’s words like fufa, whose meaning is very hard to decipher without a time machine (tell me if you figure it out) and pondy, whose meaning back then varied HUGELY from now – the thesis’s appendix tells us it was used to refer to pornography rather than the good ol’ weekend getaway of Pondicherry!
Exhibit B:
“Q. Which of these is correct: “Ekta Kapoor is maajarly cup-level” or “Krish Srikkanth is hajjaar warrashsht”?
A: Both are. Also, alternatively, you could use “Ekta Kapoor and Krish Srikkanth are shady junta.”
In the hostels:
Hey, where to put piss?
Bog? Ob, but put fundaes.
Waaarrraaashsht!”
Source: This site, dated 17 years ago at the time of writing
Don’t be afraid of the alien sounding Warrashsht – it’s nothing but a hyperbolic mispronunciation of worst, similar to how maajar is just major. Despite this list being compiled nearly 2 decades ago, most of the words are similar to ones we use today. There’s also a nugget of gold later on in this post:
“Q. I majored in English and I strongly believe that the plural of ‘funda’ is ‘fundae’ and not ‘fundaes’ as you have wrongly mentioned. What do you have to say to that, mister?
A. Whoever put fundaes on English to you was ob cup-level. Now stop paining and pack.”
Exhibit C:
“Students have drifted into IIT-M lingo, “a highly evolved melting pot of a language with some Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, and God-knows-what-else thrown in”. According to campus watchers, most students speak it with relish and for good reason – it is unique to the institution and can well double as a code language understood only by IIT-M students and alumni.”
Source: This blog post from just 6 years ago
Another helpful guide to insti lingo – but this time none of the words are unfamiliar! This shouldn’t be too surprising, since students who joined in 2019 would have graduated only a year or two ago, giving them enough time to pass on the lingo of their time to us young generations. At the same time, there are words we use that aren’t on that list, and that brings us to the next section!
ED2025 – Instish 101
As the last excerpt pointed out, insti lingo serves the student and alumni community. A lot of it describes experiences unique to college life. Look at RG, cup, peace, and fundae – academics and PoRs have been around as long as we can remember, and so have these words! The flipside of this is that insti lingo isn’t as unique as you might think, as a lot of Indian colleges feature very similar vocabularies. What truly makes insti lingo stand out (also insightfully indicated in the last excerpt) is how it’s a melting pot of regional languages. This gives us a wider variety of words to use compared to other colleges, which usually borrow only from English and one dominant regional language.
Out of curiosity, I interviewed a few freshies about their experiences picking up insti slang. All of them had learnt it naturally when talking to seniors informally (at club or contingent meets, and importantly not at fundae sessions or orientations). As one of them put it, “It’s not something you think about,” since most words make natural sense. Of course, there were words that they found confusing at first, thulp and loms being some of the common offenders. More interestingly, they had started using these words when calling home, resulting in siblings (and even parents) starting to use insti lingo teasingly!
The propagation of slang isn’t one way, and freshies can introduce words as well – especially when friend groups carry over from school into insti. Ace is currently going through a resurrection in this manner. Another source of insti slang is verbally stating digital actions. It’s not uncommon for people to say plus plus out loud to indicate agreement and skull in situations where one might react with the skull emoji.
What does the future hold for us? Will HFC eventually be known as IFC, the same way Gurunath became Usha? Will NAC1 be permanently erased from the collective consciousness, to be replaced with KCB (or, as I’d prefer, ONAC – Old New Academic Complex)? Will Skibidi’s unspecificness grant it the same fate as cool? Perhaps readers in 2050 will be as confounded by this article as we were by the one from 2002. Only time will tell how insti lingo evolves, but it feels like a safe bet to say that RGing and fundae will still be around!
Edited by Smriti Athiyarath
