Our class for the Haj has resumed on Sunday mornings after a brief hiatus in which our ustad has been accompanying a group for the Umrah (small pilgrimage) in March. As he was describing the process of leaving for the airport for the great journey I noticed Ustad Haroun using the odd verb formation departuring, as he has done so on previous occasions, the class, by the way, being conducted in both English and Malay, with our teacher jumping from one to another almost sentence by sentence. Today it struck me that there might be some interesting if unconscious reasons behind his neologism. After all, setting out on this occasion is not just a matter of leaving, or even departing. You are on your way to the departure lounge of the airport for what some might see as the ultimate destination, and so the simple action of walking out from the house deserves a grandiloquent polysyllable, and departuring has real weight, no?
Once upon a time mistakes of expression in the English language would, at some level, have grated upon me. Over time I've grown in charity - necessarily so, for the ustad's ability to switch between languages whilst firing off a series of quips in both is deeply impressive and humbling, such that charity is more than in order. But now I find myself actually relishing errors. I wonder how long it might be before our dictionaries find room for departuring?
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