For Sale in Saudi, Part 2
This box of rat poison is fascinating on many levels. First of all, it is a good example of a cartoon of an animal being used to sell the death of that animal. In this sense, it is in the same category as the barbecue joints in America that have signs featuring cartoon pigs wearing aprons, busily cooking other pigs for supper. In a weird twist, though, the mouse is laughing. At what, I don’t know. Not the inevitability of its own death, surely. That would be a little too Nietzschean. Other mice who have died as a result of this poison? Still too dark for a mainstream product like this.
On another level, this is a great example of the blatant copyright violations that occur in the third world. This mouse is obviously Jerry from the MGM cartoon, Tom and Jerry. If this product were sold in the West, the company would be sued by MGM for copyright infringement and forced to pay a lot of money. But Saudi is more like Africa, where companies can do pretty much whatever they want.
For me, though, the Arabic on the package is the most interesting thing. The name of the product (at the top, in gold) is Dusturaat. Normally, I would read this as the plural of the feminine word dustura. (In Arabic, feminine words ending in -a are made plural by adding an -aat, in the same way that the plural of the Hebrew yeshiva is yeshivot.) But my dictionary doesn’t have an entry for dustura. What it does have an entry for is the very common masculine noun dustur, which means “constitution” (and possibly “rule” or “permission”).* But first of all, the plural of dustur is dusaatir (masculine Arabic plurals are formed irregularly, like foot/feet), and second of all, what does any of that have to do with rat poison?
I asked my students, and they had no ideas (though that is par for the course). But I do know two things that might explain it. First of all, there is a tendency in popular Arabic to do away with the complicated masculine plurals. Adding -aat to the end of a masculine word is much easier than memorizing separate plurals for thousands of different nouns. This is like how Middle English speakers mostly did away with strong inflections of the foot/feet, ox/oxen type and decided to just add an -s or -es to the end of everything they wanted to make plural. So maybe this is a popular plural inflection of the masculine dustur.
But I am also left with the fact that this is rat poison and the Arabic word ends in “-rat.” This could be a coincidence, but it makes me think that this is meant as a winking bilingual pun. They created a portmanteau linking a word for what is done to the word that it is done to, like the American eyeglasses chain “Optimeyes.” This poison gives someone power over rats, the ability to rule rats, right? Maybe I’m stretching things. Maybe the poison’s manufacturer would not reasonably expect that level of bilingualism in their target audience. But it makes as much sense to me as any other explanation.
* Dustur itself is a strange word because of the number of consonants that it has. Arabic words, like Hebrew, Amharic, and other Semitic words, are mostly based on a sequence of three consonants. These root consonants give a basic sense of meaning, and then other letters are added here and there to produce different variations on the basic meaning. So the Arabic root K-T-B indicates a sense of writing, and from it are formed the words kitaab, “book,” kaatib, “writer,” maktab, “office” or “desk,” and so on. But dustur seems to have the root d-s-t-r, which is one too many letters.
After looking around a bit, I found that the Arabic dustur actually comes from the Persian dastwar, meaning “instruction,” “direction,” “grammar,” and so on. Dast is the Persian word for “hand” and is used in a number of different compounds. So the original word means, roughly, “that which is given by the hand” or somesuch. (Like the Latin mandamus.)
