warm garam masala

Our word of the day is “warm”. Not very exciting or novel, except that if you have eaten any Indian/Pakistani food you will have encountered “garam masala” or “garm masala” (dialects handle the r + consonant differently, some inserting a schwa between the r and the consonant) – the a = a schwa.

garm means warm or hot, so “hot spice mix” is what garm masala means. There was a movie with Denzel Washington some years ago titled “Mississippi Masala” about a Black man and Desi woman romance.

My interesting point in all this is that “warm” and “garm” are the same word, having undergone some changes from Sanskrit to Hindi/Urdu and to Germanic, where it is common among those languages.

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