chamcha
n.— «Several hangers-on. They are available aplenty everywhere in the country and are often known in the local market as Chamcha.» —“A very political exercise” by Sudhir Vaishnav Times of India Aug. 24, 1997. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Science journalist Laura Spinney’s new book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (Bookshop|Amazon) shows how lots of languages as diverse as Hindi, Italian, and English all stem from a single prehistoric ancestral tongue. A basic word for the...