Scotland Yard assures me that the codenames they use to describe operations are randomly selected these days — Bumblebee, for instance, didn’t have any obvious connections to burglary — but the one for President Barack Obama’s first state visit this month has still raised eyebrows.
It is, Mandrake hears, Chalaque. In Punjabi, the word is used to describe someone who is cheeky, sharp, crafty and too clever for his or her own good.
One Punjabi speaker tells me that it carries mildly disrespectful connotations and adds it hardly helps matters that it sounds so much like “macaque”, which she had initially thought I had said.
America canÂ’t reasonably take umbrage, however. The codename that the Secret Service chose for Ronald Reagan during his period in the White House was, after all, hardly reverential: Rawhide. |