Mostly Indic/dharmika non-fiction with bits of good quality western fiction writing thrown in is an antifragile allocation of scarce reading time. The former eliminates your downside, and sometimes, the latter can pleasantly surprise you. Lee Child is famous for his Jack Reacher series:"A detective series where the detective commits more homicides than he solves". His books have some interesting turn of phrase that makes you think long after you've forgotten the story. Given the current 'drug busts' going on in India and the two rival camps that are slugging it out, here are some interesting word origins summarized from Lee Child's short nonfiction book 'The Hero' (my annotations are in parentheses):
Opium Poppy: western scientific name: Papaver Somniferum (the poppy that carries you to sleep).
(Modern taxonomy credited to Carl Linnaeus may have been inspired by the traditional Indian Sanskrit approach to naming, and the latter is probably better, as noted in Rajiv Malhotra's book 'Being Different':
"..According to the assessment of William Jones, published in 1795, this taxonomy was more advanced than the standard Latin-based ones used by Western botanists. Jones writes: 'I am very solicitous to give Indian plants their true Indian appellations, because I am fully persuaded that Linnaeus himself would have adopted them had he known the learned and ancient language of this country …'")
German Pharmacist Friedrich Serturner refined Opium after several years of tinkering to produce the most potent chemical painkiller known so far.
Morphine: named after the Greek God of dreams.
Rival: from the Latin word Rivalis, one who competes over a river.
Barbarian: Greek word for those 'savages' who were unable to speak Greek. "To the Greeks, all that such people could manage was baa-baa-baa, like sheep. Hence ba-ba-rian." -Lee Child.
Addict: from the Latin word Addictus, a word for a person who is forced to become the slave of his creditor (like the bonded laborers of Zamindars).
A few decades after Morphine's invention, another German chemist, Felix Hoffman was tinkering with Morphine to synthesize Codeine, a milder and less addictive chemical for
kids. After many experiments, he ended up creating something that was twice as potent and delivered twice the
high of Opium. The chemist claimed it was not in the least bit
addictive and it was subsequently put in a variety of western medicines, especially
for women and children:
Heroin: from the German word for Heroic.
Hero: phonetic spelling of the Greek word 'gyro'.
"What was heroic about [Felix Hoffman's] invention? There are two possibilities, I think, in a nineteenth-century context. Either he wanted to imply his product had been on a long and complicated journey through dangers and perils, but it had survived, and it had emerged to do good, in the form of bringing pain relief and pleasure to the masses. Or possibly he wanted to imply his own personal work on the project had been a long and complicated journey through dangers and perils. Either version would have been absurd, given the accidental nature of the discovery. But vanity knows no bounds." - Lee Child.
(A mild disagreement with Lee Child here. Discoveries invariably come from experimentation and field work done by craftsmen and practitioners. These discoveries are far less accidental than they appear to be when viewed from the future. When we patiently experiment and test contraptions in a smart manner that incorporates learning, it enables 'lucky accidents' to happen, or in this case, a bad one.
