Note 2484 — SECTION III. HINDŪSTĀN (continued 4)

Clearly what recalled this joke of Banāī’s long-silent, caustic tongue was that its point lay ostensibly in a baffled wish—in ‘Alī-sher’s professed desire to be generous and a professed impediment, which linked in thought with Bābur’s desire for wine, baffled by his abjuration. So much Banāī’s smart verbal retort shows, but beneath this is the double-entendre which cuts at the Beg as miserly and as physically impotent, a defect which gave point to another jeer at his expense, one chronicled by Sām Mīrzā and translated in Hammer-Purgstall’s Geschichte von schönen Redekünste Persiens, art. CLV. (Cf. f. 179-80.)—The word mādagī is used metaphorically for a button-hole; like nā-mardī, it carries secondary meanings, miserliness, impotence, etc. (Cf. Wollaston’s English-Persian Dictionary s.n. button-hole, where only we have found mādagī with this sense.)