Shashi Tharoor
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Tharoor’s English
The Prime Minister’s speech in the Lok Sabha was just a “farrago of misrepresentations”, said Shashi Tharoor. He was, of course, playing to the gallery that hooted and clapped the last time he used those fancy words. “An exasperating farrago of distortions,” he had called a television channel’s ‘investigation’ into his wife’s death, in a tweet a few months ago.
Farrago? Hain? His wordiness immediately became the new thing about Tharoor, crowding out the unpleasant associations. Then he joined them at their own game. “I choose my words because they are the best ones for the idea I want to convey, not the most obscure or rodomontade ones,” he clarified.
The high-calorie ‘rodomontade’ made it to an Amul butter advertisement. Then Buzzfeed did a quiz on Shashi Tharoor’s vocabulary, and the word ‘snollygoster’ enjoyed a blip of attention. And Tharoor isn’t letting up either. A few days ago, it was ‘troglodyte’ that amused his followers. He seems to talk like this in real life too; I heard him use ‘desiderata’ on a chatty books panel.
Long words are usually a liability for public speakers, in other countries. They make you look like an out-of-touch elitist, and a show-off. The Roman poet Horace coined the term ‘sesquipedalian’ — meaning ‘a foot-and-a-half’ — to describe these words. It’s a joke because the word itself is that long, get it, get it? Modern politicians in Western democracies try their best to avoid sounding posh, and using words that alienate common voters.
So why does Tharoor’s English charm and impress dorky middle-class Indians? Because we are still Macaulay’s misfits and mimics, some of us. Also, because English is the language of aspiration and advancement in India. Not so long ago, children were told to circle difficult words in newspaper editorials and learn them. This is why Indian kids abroad regularly win spelling bee contests. They notice language, having grown up with more than one. Their parents usually come from an elite fraction of Indians who converted their social privilege to educational capital and professional skills. They’re primed to strive in this particular way. Whether abroad or in India, this is also the narrow set that Shashi Tharoor comes from and speaks to, most strongly.
A third reason could just be cultural — we are not plainspoken Anglo-Saxon types, we like verbal bling, we enjoy the sound and feel of words and all they can do. Our love for fine-sounding words is not just about English. Look at the way Tamil politicians deployed an old, highly literary ‘Centamil’, to convey Dravidian grandeur. Someone told me about a Kerala satirist who wrote poems to the queen in homely Malayalam: ‘annottha pokki, kuyilottha vakki’ — comparing her gait to a swan, her speech to a koel. But she turned up her nose at the rustic sound of those words. So then he wrote her an ode in ornate Sanskrit — ‘Gajamukhavahanaripunayane, Dasharathanandanasakhavadane”, which basically boils down to insults like cat-eyed and monkey-faced. She preened happily.
When it comes to the English language, long words are a clear enemy, say most of the style guides. They tell you to take out every extra word, starve your sentences, murder your pet phrases. They remind you that concrete words like ‘stony’ evoke the thing itself, while abstract words like ‘lapidarian’ convey nothing unless you know them.
For writers like George Orwell, there is a whole honest politics in lucidity. Cloudy language is just a cover for insincerity. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink,” Orwell wrote.
But I like big words and I cannot lie. There’s no benefit to using them, you have to enjoy them for their own sake. Some people conflate verbal fluency and mental acumen; that the more words you know, the more subtle and rich your thoughts can be. That’s why Philip Roth described Donald Trump’s “77-word vocabulary” as a sign of his human impoverishment. But this is probably wishful thinking. A recent Princeton study suggests that you sound smarter when you use short, effective words.
Of course, political language doesn’t have to obey style rules, it just has to resonate with some section of the public. And in this country, we don’t speak English as it is, we speak it as we are. It is made over to our needs, it conveys many ways of being Indian. It is delightfully diverse; the verbal styles of some politicians deserve their own study, from Narendra Modi’s acronymania to Venkaiah Naidu’s rhymes and inversions, to Manish Tiwari’s malapropisms.
So let’s allow Tharoor his wordly vanity. As Anthony Gonsalves would say, he’s just a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of his own verbosity.
