bungalow

It was past midnight, closer to one in the morning, when the brother and I were driving home from another food mcguyverism adventure to McDonalds (another post for another day).

As we sat at a light I stared at a giant billboard across the street.

“Bungalow,” I said outloud as I read the plain advertisement for real estate. “Bungalow…” I repeated the word to myself over and over again. “You know,” I turned to the brother, “that doesn’t sound like a very English word.”

“It’s definitely not American. It’s British what.”

“That’s what I mean,” I said. “It’s British but the origins sound colonial.”

“They got no bungalows in UK meh?”

“I’m just saying that I don’t remember the word being used in like.. Sherlock Holmes.” Or in any Jane Austen stories that I remember. “I mean, it’s colonial.. you say the word and you picture an English bungalow in some tropical place no?”

“Yea..” the bro said non-committedly.

“Bungalow… bung-guh-loh… sounds Indian, right? Like, Bangla?” I tried to posit.

“Go home and look it up in Wikipedia lah.”

“I will. I will. Just trying to figure it out on my own first mah.” Thinking about how often I use the word I said, “You never hear it in US though hor?”

“Got lah. Very rare but I’ve heard it used,” the brother said.

“Where? In the south?”

“Got lah…”

“Mmm.. I never.”

“Technically, most American houses are bungalows what,” he pointed out.

“Ehh. I never saw it that way. But you’re right.” (dammit, +1 for him in the ‘always right unofficial contest’)

When we got home I was too lazy to mess with the computer. This morning I remembered so I wiki’ed the term bungalow:

A bungalow is a type of single-story house that originated in India. The word derives from the Hindi ba?gl? (or perhaps the Gujarati variant ba?glo), meaning “Bengali”, used elliptically for a “house in the Bengal style”. Such houses were traditionally small, only one story, thatched and had a wide veranda.

Okay. I’m satisfied now.

The point of this story is that my little puzzle would have been solved very instantly and easily if I own an iPhone. But then I wouldn’t have had half the fun working it out and having conversations like that with the brother. I like my little Nokia 1110.