Kis Baat Ko Le Kar
A construction blamed on TV soaps turns out to have Lucknow grandfathers. On le kar, kar ke, and the much-maligned le kar ke.
Tum kis baat ko le kar itne khafa ho? What are you so upset about: literally, having taken which matter. On a language forum, one poster filed this ko le kar away as an annoying habit of television soaps, rampant among the younger generation, the kind of thing elders once corrected to kis wajah se.
Then a native of Lucknow arrived with a correction of his own: the usage is standard Urdu and has been for a long time. We use it, he wrote, and all my elders as well, including my late grandparents and their ancestors. The supposed TV innovation turned out to have grandparents. It happens more often than you would think: yesterday's slang complaint is frequently just a regional standard caught travelling.
The thread kept a sharper target in reserve: the stacked le kar ke and bata kar ke, where kar and ke, two ways of building the very same connective, pile up in one phrase. Some speakers accept it as completely correct. Others reached for the forum's bluntest register labels: paindu and tapori, roughly village-bumpkin and street-punk. Alongside them they filed maine woh kara tha, where kiya gets regularized like any ordinary verb.
The forum's own verdict was the honest one: what is wrong for one speaker may be right for another. Register lines are real, but communities draw them, not grammar itself. Mapping where different speakers draw them is exactly the kind of survey Zubane exists to run.
