The glossary focuses on "colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases." What does the term "colloquial" imply about the nature and usage of these words, and why would their informal status make them particularly prone to misunderstanding or difficulty for those outside the immediate cultural context?

From the book

e to affect its distinctive character, in which something has been aimed at differing in form from any work known to us. In its original conception it was intended to deal with all that class of words which, not in general pertaining to the technicalities of administration, recur constantly in the daily intercourse of the English in India, either as expressing ideas really not provided for by ​ our mother-tongue, or supposed by the speakers (often quite erroneously) to express something not capable of just denotation by any English term. A certain percentage of such words have been carried to…

lity, however vulgar they may be, neither vernacular nor profane, but phrases turning upon innocent Hindustani vocables. We proposed also, in our Glossary, to deal with a selection of those administrative terms, which are in such familiar and quotidian use as to form part of the common Anglo-Indian stock, and to trace all (so far as possible) to their true origin—a matter on which, in regard to many of the words, those who hourly use them are profoundly ignorant—and to follow them down by quotation from their earliest occurrence in literature. A particular class of words are those indigenous…

Vocabularies of Indian and other foreign words, in use among Europeans in the East, have not unfrequently been printed. Several of the old travellers have attached the like to their narratives; whilst the prolonged excitement created in England, a hundred years since, by the impeachment of Hastings and kindred matters, led to the publication of several glossaries as independent works; and a good many others have been published in later days. At the end of this Introduction will be found a list of those which have come under my notice, and this might no doubt be largely added to. Of modern…

mungoose , pariah , bandicoot , teak , patcharee , chatty , catechu , tope ('a grove'), curry , mulligatawny , congee . Mamooty (a digging tool) is familiar in certain branches of the ​ service, owing to its having long had a place in the nomenclature of the Ordnance department. It is Tamil, manvĕtti , 'earth-cutter.' Of some very familiar words the origin remains either dubious, or matter only for conjecture. Examples are hackery (which arose apparently in Bombay), florican , topaz . As to Hindustani words adopted into the Anglo-Indian colloquial the subject is almost too wide and loose for…

which has been given to this book (not without the expressed assent of my collaborator), doubtless requires explanation. A valued friend of the present writer many years ago published a book, of great acumen and considerable originality, which he called Three Essays , with no Author's name; and the resulting amount of circulation was such as might have been expected. It was remarked at the time by another friend that if the volume had been entitled A Book, by a Chap , it would have found a much larger body of readers. It seemed to me that A Glossary or A Vocabulary would be equally…