Gotta Stay Grindin'

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Gotta Stay Grindin'

Imam Marc Manley

Aug 27

 

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Here’s a fun #EveryDayArabic.

In English slang we have the term “grinding” whose connotation is to suggest one is “working hard”. Similarly, in Arabic we find the verb qarasha (قرش) whose root means to “grind” or “gnaw”, with qirsh (قِرش) being the word for “shark” (not hard to see the connection). Yet, when conjugated to the morphological form of iftaʿala we get iqtashara (اِقْتَشَرَ) which means to “make money” or “earn a living (i.e., for one’s family)”; in other words, grinding. 

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Also like the English “grinding”, iqtarasha can also mean to be “shredded” or “torn up”, the result of being “ground up”. Just look at this example of a travel log of a family moving to Yemen in which the husband has to stand in the heat of the midday sun, “grinding” for his family:

وَدَّيْتُ (أَخَذْتُ) العَائِلَةَ (إلى) الإِسْتِرَاحَةَ عَلَى أَرْحُلِهِمْ وَطُوبِرْتُ (يعني وَوَقَفْتُ فِي الطَّابُورِ) يَوْمًا وَنِصْفًا حَتَّى اقْتَشَرَ جِلْدِي يُمْكِنُ مَرَّتَيْنِ مِنَ الحَرَارَةِ … وَفِي الأَخِيرِ… الحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ، التَّعَبُ مَنْسِيٌّ. وَصَلْنَا إِلَى الوَطَنِ الثَّانِي

“I took the family to the rest area so they could rest, and I stood in line for a day and a half until my skin peeled off, perhaps twice, from the heat… But in the end… praise be to God, the exhaustion is forgotten. We finally arrived at our second homeland.”

Here we see iqtashara being used to connote how hot the sun was by his skin “peeling off”. NOTE: some of what was written here is in a colloquial dialect is not 100% fuṣḥā (classical Arabic).

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