vadaba or vadabƒ is an indubitable corruption of the Tamil vadavai, ‘Aurora Borealis’, from vadam, ‘north’. It is also called vadavanal, ‘northern fire’ which corresponds to the English ‘northern lights’. Another form of vadavai is vadandai, which denotes both the ‘northern fire’ and the northern wind.

     ‘sŠingavera, m.ginger (undried or dry), lit. ‘that which resembles the horn of a deer; fr, sŠinga, ‘horn’ and vera, ‘body’ or ‘shape’.

     This is another tendentious derivation.

     The Tamil simple word for undried ginger is iji, and the compound words, ijiv„r, ijikkil_aŒgu. and ijippƒvai. Ginger was one of the commodities regularly exported to western countries, by the Tamilian merchants in ancient times. Naturally ijiv„r, the most common compound name of ginger, entered into the Greek language in the form of ‘ziggiberis, and became ‘zingiber’ and ‘gingiber’ in Latin and contracted into ‘ginger’ in English. But, Sanskritists deliberately distorted the word and gave it a curious meaning.

     It is wonderful that the Sanskrit derivation, which is absurd on the face of it is taken as the standard even at this stage, not only by the English dictionaries such as the Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary and the Concise Oxford Dictionary, but also by eminent philologists, like Prof. Burrow and Prof. Emeneau.

     iiv„r is compounded of iji and v„r, root. Iji is composed of iju, to be absorbed, as water, to become thick and i, a singular suffix of agency.

     ‘sƒya, (prob. fr. so, to destroy, kill, finish) the close of day, evening.

     The most common word for ‘evening’ in Tamil is ‘s)ƒyuŒgƒlam’, lit ‘the declining time’, fr. sƒy, to decline, and kƒlam, ‘time’. It has corrupted into ‘sƒyaŒgƒlam’ and ‘sƒyŒgƒlam’ in the colloquial speech. The Sanskritists mistaking the corrupted form of the future relative participle, viz. sƒyam for a noun, have detached it and have been using it as a Sanskrit word for ‘evening’.