RSS

Mumbai man, first per­son to achieve a score of 100 on the Grthbthck scale of lan­guage incom­pre­hen­si­bil­ity

A man work­ing at a call cen­ter in Mum­bai for a Cana­dian finan­cial insti­tu­tion, Vila “Bobby” Jad­hav, is the first per­son to achieve a score of 100 on the Grthbthck scale of lan­guage incom­pre­hen­si­bil­ity.  “We could study his speech at length. Some of his phone con­ver­sa­tions with Cana­dian cus­tomers were recorded, allegedly for ‘qual­ity con­trol pur­poses’,” said Uni­ver­sity of New­found­land at St. John’s lin­guist Dr. Nancy Peters.

“Bobby was respond­ing to a sim­ple inquiry about an auto­mated change to a client’s PIN num­ber.  His answers to that query have been tested and proven absolutely and totally incom­pre­hen­si­ble under any cir­cum­stances or after any num­ber of repeated lis­ten­ings.  Not one word makes sense.  Ever. That is a per­fect 100 score,” says Peters.

Mr. Jad­hav, a 47-year old life­long res­i­dent of Mum­bai, speaks very heav­ily accented Eng­lish.  On the day in ques­tion he was fatigued, drunk and “blitzed” on betel.  It is also thought he had been tak­ing dis­count Ban­ga­lore pain med­ica­tion to com­pen­sate for back alley den­tal surgery under­taken the day before.  His tongue was badly cut dur­ing the pro­ce­dure which was con­ducted by a well known neigh­bour­hood fakir who, as well as prac­tic­ing den­tistry and magic, has stood on one leg since 1978 and reput­edly never has bowel movements.

In an inter­view with urNews and speak­ing of his per­fect score, Mr. Jad­hav said “Cltth prntn ooo eee ooo ah ah trrrrrdit. Muh muh mah muh cltth.” Or some­thing like that.

“We had a 96 once,” says Peters, “but it was later deemed a reli­gious expe­ri­ence.  We haven’t counted glos­so­lalia on the Grthbthck Scale since 2003.”

The Grthbthck Scale is named for Ger­ald Voen­hoethok.  Voen­hoethok was born in The Orange Free State but moved to a small com­mu­nity in Hare Bay, New­found­land as an infant.  He later relo­cated, at the age of six, to New­cas­tle in the United King­dom.  His incom­pre­hen­si­ble speech took many years to be under­stood by cun­ning lin­guists and was set at 50 on the scale.


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