Pasindia

[John Burton]

Michael Quinion <http://www.worldwidewords.org>  recently discussed the word
'passenger':

>The first sense of the word in English was that of a traveller on
>foot, a wayfarer. As recently as 1828, Sir Walter Scott wrote, in
>_The Fair Maid of Perth_: "She ... reached the wynd by the narrow
>lanes... Even these comparatively lonely passages were now astir
>with passengers". But the word had moved on by then - Walter
>Scott's use was archaic and outside historical novels you had to
>make clear what you meant by amending it to 'foot-passenger'. The
>standard sense was by that date the one we use now: somebody who
>had paid money to be conveyed by ship, later also by road; very
>soon travel by train would be added to the list.

> ... it began to be applied to somebody who
>contributes nothing to an enterprise. This usage is actually quite
>old: it was first recorded only 24 years after Sir Walter Scott
>perpetuated its archaic sense. It derives from the sport of rowing
>at the ancient English universities: a passenger was a man who did
>little or nothing to help the boat along, who had to be carried by
>the efforts of the other rowers.

It is interesting that TP 'pasindia' appears to have started as a person
conveyed, but to have become idiomatically extended back same way that its
English cousin was. Mihalic lists pasindia meri, 'prostitute', haus
pasindia, 'hotel or motel', and 'parasite'.

Questions:
1. Bus travellers are ol pasindia. Are people who go by other conveyances
pasindias too?

2. Has anybody heard haus pasindia recently? I think most speakers would be
confused by it.

3. Isn't a pasindia meri a woman believed to be sexually promiscuous, rather
than a prostitute? She is accused of going from man to man, and although
this may have been an early manifestation of the sex industry, is there not
now a clear distinction between a pasindia meri and a prostitute?

4. A man who has made a house and gardens on land that he does not own can
be harshly distinguished from a landowner by being called a pasindia,
although there are other expressions that are more common. I recently heard
this said of a group who have been on a piece of land for over 50 years. Is
this covered by Mihalic's 'parasite'?

5. How is it pronounced? Is it not pronounced identically in TP and English,
i.e. pasinja? Is 'pasindia' one of a range of words whose orthodox pidgin
spelling moves the representation of the sound away from how it is actually
said?

John Burton