An IIM A exclusive - Straight from the horse’s mouth

A collective decision by the IIMs to shun B school ranking polls had come as a real dampener for all these market research agencies, not to mention the magazines-for whom that particular issue has always been a sure-shot best seller. But we at IIMA, being the kind souls we are, present some never-seen-not-heard-before news - the result of a thorough analysis of the frequency patterns of our most recurrent activity – TALKING - and it’s dope straight from the horse’s mouth

And, here are the results

“Arbit” is the most used word in IIM A. It thrashed competitors like RG, mugging, F.R.I.E.N.D.S and MMS by a mile. Interestingly enough, the words sleep, bath and deodorant came last.
“We have been vindicated. This is the result of 2 years of responding arbitly to all arbit things in all arbit situations ”, chorused ****** and ##@@##, a couple of second year students taking a break to exercise their forefingers after playing NFS for 33 hours continuously. (Editor’s Note: Their nick-names have been blocked out as this a PG-13 blog).

“The beauty of arbit is that it is a noun, adjective and an adverb, is totally context independent, and can be substituted for any word having a negative meaning. For example, classmates can be described as arbit, cases yeah, and HR courses definitely.” said Rahul Sabarwal, a dyed-in-the-wool arbit addict who went into a state of epiphanic bliss after the victory.

It was found out that the usage spread, much like viruses, through internal online discussion boards. We questioned Dr. Mayur Chauhan, behavioral psychologist (and a computer geek to boot!) and this is what he had to say
“You should understand the time pressure these people are under. They have so many messages to respond to that it is not feasible to comment in detail.” And they may not be far from the mark-a sample study done a year ago revealed that arbit was an apt description for 97.345 % of all message posts (It was 101.021 % for posts by second year students).
“Part of the reason for its popularity can be explained by the fact that the mean distance between its various letters (that is A-R-B-I-T, for the mentally challenged) in the keyboard is only 1.03 cm - among the lowest ever - enabling the person to type out the word very fast”, he continued. (The only word which has a lower mean key distance than arbit is TT - short for table tennis - for which it is zero).

However, there was a cross section of the populace which openly expressed dissent.
“It was sooo fixed. I demand a recount, dude. This is all the handiwork of that Osama dude. Man, arbit is sooo out, dude!” opined Nara“dude”Hari, who, not surprisingly, was hoping that the word dude might come out on top. It was learnt from reliable sources that “dude” was the odds-on favourite till a fateful scrabble game month ago when a near riot broke out over an argument about how to spell it -dude or dood. The “dood’ faction, which commanded a significant following, walked out as they believed that the “oo” in the middle was intrinsic to their “dood-ness” as it captured their essence to a T (or an O, if you may).

The president of the students’ council - whom we shall call arbit rabri for lack of a better name - has already forwarded the details to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary for consideration. Here’s a portion of that transcript.

arbit

/aarbit

The ninth wonder of the world, after M S Dhoni. Its usage is not constrained by context, accent, vocabulary or a bad attack of the flu.

Usage

Adjective: The giloda masala served in the mess today was very arbit.

Adverb: The professor was talking very arbitly in class today.

Noun: When is arbit coming back from his vacation?

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Also cross posted on my blog