SHASHI THAROOR
Tharoorosaurus
Illustrations by Mihir Joglekar
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Preface
1. Agathokakological
2. Apostrophe
3. Aptagram
4. Authorism
5. Brickbat
6. Claque
7. Contronym
8. Cromulent
9. Curfew
10. Cwtch
11. Defenestrate
12. Epicaricacy
13. Epistemophilia
14. Eponym
15. Farrago
16. Floccinaucinihilipilification
17. Goon
18. Hyperbole
19. Impeach
20. Jaywalking
21. Juggernaut
22. Kakistocracy
23. Kerfuffle
24. Lethologica
25. Luddite
26. Lunacy
27. Lynch
28. Muliebrity
29. Namaste
30. Nerd
31. Opsimath
32. Oxymoron
33. Pandemic
34. Panglossian
35. Paracosm
36. Paraprosdokian
37. Phobia
38. Prepone
39. Quarantine
40. Quiz
41. Rodomontade
42. Satyagraha
43. Snollygoster
44. Spoonerism
45. Troll
46. Umpire
47. Valetudinarian
48. Vigilante
49. Whistleblower
50. Xenophobia
51. Yogi
52. Zealot
53. Zugzwang
Follow Penguin
Copyright
VIKING
THAROOROSAURUS
SHASHI THAROOR is the bestselling author of twenty books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist. His books include the path-breaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), the bestselling An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, for which he won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, 2016, for Books (Non-Fiction), and The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India. He has been Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He is a three-time member of the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram and chairs the Parliament Information Technology committee. He has won numerous literary awards, including a national Sahitya Akademi award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India’s highest honour for overseas Indians, in 2004, and honoured as New Age Politician of the Year (2010) by NDTV.
ALSO BY SHASHI THAROOR
Non-fiction
The New World Disorder and the Indian Imperative (with Samir Saran)
The Hindu Way: An Introduction to Hinduism
The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India
Why I Am a Hindu
An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India
India Shastra: Reflections on the Nation in Our Time
India: The Future Is Now (ed.)
Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century
Shadows across the Playing Field: 60 Years of India-Pakistan Cricket (with Shahryar Khan)
India (with Ferrante Ferranti)
The Elephant, The Tiger, And the Cell Phone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century
Bookless in Baghdad
Nehru: The Invention of India
Kerala: God’s Own Country (with M.F. Husain)
India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond
Reasons of State
Fiction
Riot
The Five Dollar Smile and Other Stories
Show Business
The Great Indian Novel
To my father Chandran Tharoor from whom I inherited my love of words
Preface
The title ‘Tharoorosaurus’ was coined by Meru Gokhale, the publisher of Penguin India, who proposed the idea for this book in the rear seat of a taxicab in Jaipur as the two of us were heading to an event of the famed literary festival there. It was her idea of pitching me a book whose title would combine my name with the words tyrannosaurus (since so many are terrified of difficult words) and thesaurus (since people want to be able to look them up).
I laughed it off then, but she persisted, I began to think it might
be fun to do after all, and here is the result.
This is not a scholarly book; I am neither a trained linguist nor philologist, and I have no pretensions to being a qualified English teacher either. It is rather the work of someone who loves words, has loved them all his life, and whose cherished childhood memories revolve around word games with a father who was even more obsessed with them than I am. My father instilled in me the conviction that words are what shape ideas and reflect thought, and the more words you know, the more precisely and effectively are you able to express your thoughts and ideas. In addition, he delighted in the way words could be put together, their origins and the letters of which they were made; there was no word game at which he did not excel, from Scrabble to Bingo to jumbled acrostics in the newspaper—and several guess-the-word games of his own devising that kept us busy and distracted on car journeys throughout his life. If Tharoorosaurus imparts to its readers some of the pleasure and delight that words have long afforded me, its purpose will have been amply served.
In 2019, I had begun a ‘Word of the Week’ column every Sunday in a major newspaper. These began initially as lightly-tossed-off paragraphs, of some 200 words or so, on each word chosen, but as interest grew and readers sought more, I began to take the exercise more seriously, turning out 500–800-word columns instead that delved into the etymology of each word and came up with anecdotes about its usage, literary citations and nuggets of history. This book uses the latter format, so that most of the short essays in this book have not appeared anywhere else in this form.
The original idea was to publish fifty pieces in this volume; inspired by my weekly column, I suggested fifty-two, one for each week of the year, in the hope that people would dip into it and keep going back for more. In the end, this volume includes short essays on fifty-three words, since the book is being published in a leap year and we thought we may as well add an extra word for the extra leap day!
A profound word of thanks to Prof. Sheeba Thattil, without whose tireless research, creative thinking and timely assistance, this book would not have been possible. My thanks, too, to the Hindustan Times, for whom I first began to explore many of these words. Though this volume stands by itself, independent of the columns, I am grateful to the Hindustan Times, and in particular Poonam Saxena and Poulomi Banerjee, for setting me off on this journey.
Shashi Tharoor
March 2020
1.
Agathokakological
adjective
CONSISTING OF BOTH GOOD AND EVIL
USAGE
The Mahabharata is unusual among the great epics because its heroes are not perfect idealized figures, but agathokakological human beings with desires and ambitions who are prone to lust, greed and anger and capable of deceit, jealousy and unfairness.
Let’s face it, ours is an agathokakological world, and who knows that better than Indians? We live in an era devoid of perfect heroes, where some who are hailed with passionate admiration are despised with equal intensity by others. Nothing around us seems all good or all bad. Indian philosophical systems have always had room for the theory that two oppos
ite poles of good and evil that are considered contradictory can yet coexist naturally in a person, place, or time.
The perfect word to summarize that is agathokakological, which seems to have been coined in the early nineteenth century by sometime British Poet Laureate Robert Southey, best known for his ballad ‘The Inchcape Rock’, which tells the story of a fourteenth-century attempt by the Abbot of Aberbrothock to install a warning bell on a sandstone reef called Inchcape (I studied the blessed poem in Mumbai in Class 6, which is when I first heard of Southey). So the word precedes Agatha Christie, whose villainous narrators and seemingly innocent murders are not the inspiration for the term. Southey appears to have combined the Greek roots agath-(good), kako-(a variant of cac-, meaning bad), and –logical (which comes from logos, meaning word).
Southey was particularly prone to coining new words, or neologisms; the Oxford English Dictionary cites him as the earliest known author for almost 400 words. Unfortunately for him, very few of his coinages ever caught on, and agathokakological is not exactly in wide use either. The fact is that most of Southey’s compound words were on the hefty side, and few filled as much of a gap in the language as this one arguably does. After all, do we really need other Southey inventions like futilitarian (a person devoted to futility) or batrachophagous (frog-eating), which he came up with? One word which might just see a revival, though, is epistolization (writing in the form of a letter): as abbreviations, acronyms and emojis become substitutes for real words, may we dare hope for the epistolization of emails?
2.
Apostrophe
noun
AN OMITTED LETTER (’)
USAGE
The closing of the Apostrophe Protection Society
because of the ‘ignorance and laziness’ of the
general public strikes a body blow against those
fighting for correct English.
This entry is prompted by the news that, after eighteen years of existence, the British Apostrophe Protection Society has been disbanded by its founder and chairman, retired journalist John Richards, because, in his words, ‘the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!’ Despite his best efforts, he told the media, he lost the battle for proper usage of the ‘much abused’ apostrophe. The apostrophe was introduced into English in the sixteenth century in imitation of French practice; but just as English has dropped the various accent marks that still abound in French, some feel the apostrophe should be dispensed with as superfluous and unnecessary.
This humble punctuation mark is more often misunderstood and misused than any other. Derived from the late Latin apostrophus and the Greek apostrophos, signifying turning away, it first referred to an orator turning aside in the course of a speech to address someone briefly before returning to his audience. But now it stands for a mark showing where a letter has been omitted in a word. In English, the mark often stands in for ‘I’, as in ‘it’s’ for ‘it is’, or indicates possession (‘Modi’s government’), or marks contractions (‘I’ll’, rather than ‘I will’, or ‘’twas’ for ‘it was’). Sometimes, more disputably, it’s used for abbreviations, as in T’puram for Thiruvananthapuram, or to indicate the plurals of numbers (‘three 7’s’), letters (‘there are four s’s and two p’s in Mississippi’), symbols (‘too many &’s and #’s’), acronyms (‘mind your p’s and q’s’) or decadal dates (‘he was stoned through most of the’70’s’). Another distinct function of the apostrophe is disambiguation (to make your meaning clear); more on this later.
However, as grammarians and rhetoricians will tell you, that is not all. We apostrophize when we address or appeal to someone who is not present: ‘Oh Mahatma Gandhi, where are you now when we really need you?’ That too is called an apostrophe. But unless you are given to such overly dramatic flourishes, this form of apostrophe need not detain us much here.
The apostrophe as a punctuation mark, however, poses ordinary users of English a number of problems. The most common is people’s tendency to use ‘it’s’ when they mean ‘its’—a confusion arising, no doubt, from the assumption that the apostrophe is needed to indicate possession (but ‘its’ is that curse of all grammar students, an exception). Also on the list of challenges would be when the possessive use of the apostrophe involves a double s, as in ‘Jesus’s disciples’. Many prefer to leave the second s out altogether, and let the apostrophe do double duty in standing for both a possessive and an omitted letter, writing ‘Jesus’ disciples’. Other exceptions are generally made for familiar phrases like whys and wherefores, oohs and ahs, ins and outs.
Life gets really complicated when you’re dealing with a phrase like ‘do’s and don’ts’. The Oxford Style Guide suggests spelling it as ‘dos and don’ts’, which looks odd and inconsistent—and Lynne Truss, author of the delightful book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, argues for ‘do’s and don’t’s’. So there’s no unanimity on the do’s and don’ts of apostrophizing.
A simple trick is to remember the exceptions: it’s is always ‘it is’, ‘who’s’ is always ‘who is’, and the possessive forms are ‘its’ and ‘whose’. Another is ‘won’t’, which is not a contraction of ‘will not’ (then it would have to be ‘wi’n’t’) but of the archaic ‘woll not’, which means the same thing.
One clear rule of thumb could be to use apostrophes when not using them would obscure your meaning or even confuse your reader. For example, the phrase ‘dot your i’s and cross your t’s’. If you left out the apostrophe, it would become ‘dot your is and cross your ts’. Since ‘is’ is a different word altogether, omitting the apostrophe would require your reader to pause and reread the sentence to get the intended meaning. The rule of disambiguation makes it clear that if an apostrophe will avoid confusion, you should use it.
The usefulness of the apostrophe was made clear when the British novelist Kingsley Amis, challenged to produce a sentence whose meaning depended on a possessive apostrophe, came up with three versions of the same sentence:
‘Those things over there are my husband’s.’
(Those things over there belong to my husband.)
‘Those things over there are my husbands’.’
(Those things over there belong to several husbands of mine.)
‘Those things over there are my husbands.’
(I’m married to those men over there, who are just things to me.)
On the other hand, when it’s not needed, don’t use it. The British speak ruefully of the ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’, an error made particularly in signs on grocery stores saying ‘banana’s by the dozen’, ‘carrot’s for sale’, and so unnecessarily on. But what can one do about the retail trade when chains have inflicted such howlers on the world as ‘Toys “R” Us’ and other examples of punctuation as decoration?
Opponents of the apostrophe have pointed to the maddening inconsistency of its use in everyday life. Take just one common name found in many British cities. While Newcastle United play football at a stadium called St James’ Park, Exeter City play at St James Park (no apostrophe), and London has a St James’s Park (apostrophe plus second s), though it really is a park and not a football stadium!
Many have suggested that apostrophes ought to be abandoned altogether, as the department store Harrods has done, but the grocery chain Sainsbury’s have refused to. The argument is that they are superfluous, and the meaning is evident to most people with or without it. This ‘apostrophe apostasy’ is not new: George Bernard Shaw called them ‘uncouth bacilli’, and many linguists have argued that apostrophes are unnecessary. They may have begun to go out of fashion, as the Apostrophe Society has concluded, but let’s use them till the cry goes out: ‘it’s time’s up for the apostrophe!’
3.
Aptagram
noun
AN ANAGRAM THAT INCORPORATES
THE MEANING OF A WORD
USAGE
She loved coining aptagrams as a hobby, chuckling as she transformed
‘astronomer’ into ‘moon starer’.
The word aptagram is a neologism, coined near the end of the twentieth century from a combination of the Latin word aptus, meaning connected, and the English word ‘anagram’. Creating an aptagram is a fun way of fooling around with words, but there’s surely a limit to how many meaningful coinages you can come up with that both make sense and retain the original sense of the word you are breaking up. The trick is to rearrange the letters of the word into another word or phrase that conveys a related idea or even, as with ‘moon starer’, define the word (in this case, ‘astronomer’) that you are turning into an aptagram. You have to use every letter in the one word to create the other for it to qualify as an aptagram. ‘Tones’ and ‘notes’ (in the musical sense) are aptagrams of each other. So are ‘angered’ and ‘enraged’. One clever phrase I came across turns ‘laptop machines’ into ‘Apple Macintosh’.
The most famously historic aptagram isn’t in English, but in Latin. In a biblical passage, Pontius Pilate asks Jesus ‘what is truth?’—or in Latin, ‘quid est veritas?’ Jesus responds with an aptagram of the question: ‘est vir qui adest’, meaning ‘it is the man who is here’. Brilliant, even if, tragically, it didn’t save Him from the Cross.
Some aptagrams can be pretty witty: only a parent could have converted ‘dormitory’ into ‘dirty room’ and only an exhausted salesman would think of ‘customers’ as ‘store scum’. A conservative would convert ‘revolution’ into ‘love to ruin’. An irritated freelancer might have changed ‘editor’ to ‘redo it’, which editors often ask you to do, and ‘irritated’ itself becomes ‘rat, I tried’, which is guaranteed to offend most editors.
Some come close, but not quite: ‘the evil eyes’ can become ‘vile, they see’, but there’s something artificial about the aptagram. Changing ‘dictionary’ to ‘indicatory’ isn’t grammatical enough to qualify, and ‘laudatory’ to ‘adulatory’ seems too obvious to elicit any applause. ‘Lotus louts’ might be anagrams for BJP-affiliated rowdies, but not aptagrams, since ‘lotus’ and ‘louts’ don’t always connote the same thing!