The British Plural (Goolies)

Lyrics

[Intro]
You think that word was born in Brighton? 
On some rainy pier?
No. You have to go back.
Further than you think.
Smell the dust. Feel the heat. Bombay, 1855.

[Verse 1]
Private Thomas Atkins, he's barely twenty-one.
His khaki uniform is soaked clean through. Thirty-eight degrees in the shade.
He's cleaning his Enfield rifle, dreaming of the rain in Manchester.
He shares his chapati with a sepoy whose name he can't quite say.
And he listens.
The official phrasebook is useless out here.
The real words are learned in the sweat and the quiet.

[Chorus]
Goli.
In Hindi, it's a bullet. A small, round thing.
A marble for a children's game. Goli.
It’s the word that made the long trip home.
From a cantonment joke, whispered in the gloom,
To the British plural.
Goolies.

[Verse 2]
Sir Charles Napier just wrote home, "Peccavi."
He'd taken Sindh. 1843. The men are restless.
The sun beats down. The air smells of curry and gunpowder.
And in the long afternoons, they play with marbles.
Goli.
The word starts to bend. A joke about the shape of things.
A laugh shared over a tin mug of lukewarm tea.
A new definition, born of boredom and the heat.

[Bridge]
It never made the official dispatches.
It wasn't in the letters to their mothers.
It travelled in the mouths of men on troopships,
a secret souvenir from a land they'd broken.
Yule and Burnell tried to catch it in their book,
their 'Hobson-Jobson' in 1886.
But they missed the whisper. They missed the laugh.
They didn't name the Indian men who taught the word,
who gave it freely.
History forgets the teacher, but it remembers the lesson.

[Chorus]
Goli.
In Hindi, it's a bullet. A small, round thing.
A marble for a children's game. Goli.
It’s the word that made the long trip home.
From a cantonment joke, whispered in the gloom,
To the British plural.
Goolies.

[Outro]
So next time you hear it shouted in a pub,
remember the dust.
Remember the heat.
Remember the long journey a single word can make.
From Bombay.
All the way from Bombay.