A cruise through English’s cosmos of curiosities and conundrums with Shashi Tharoor

A perspicacious peregrination through the discombobulating gallimaufry that is the English language with its penchant for purloining from other languages, its hermetic spellings, its recondite pronunciation, its abstruse punctuation, and sundry other caprices requires an erudite yet venturous savant. But the Tharoorosauraus is on the case.

The bedrock of all this bewildering expanse is words, in all their glory, their captivating derivations, and the literary devices they fuel. And who better to guide us through all this but the prodigious Shashi Tharoor, whose extensive lexicon had sent thousands of Indians scurrying to dictionaries - and Google - to understand the meanings of uncommon words he bestowed on the unwary. Farrago, an addition to the English language way back in the 16th century was the first, but not the last.

In “A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays” (Aleph Book Company, 470 pages, Rs 999), a wide-ranging and entertaining exploration of the world’s most ubiquitous language, Shashi Tharoor goes on to reveal why late Indian legal luminary M.C. Chagla bit more than he could chew when he ordered sandwiches in a New York hotel, how a single punctuation mark can avoid making a family dinner a cannibal feast, and which punctuation mark made its mark for the world wide web, among other tales.

It is not very difficult for the diplomat-turned-politician, who confesses to being besotted with words and attributes his father’s influence, especially the word games he played with Tharoor and his siblings in their childhood, for being a “logophile”.

Noting that “often, scepticism over unfamiliar words and an aversion to linguistic innovation are ingrained in children from a very early age by uninspiring parents and teachers, he notes that he was “blessed to have a father and teachers who taught me the exact opposite - always uncover the most appropriate word, even if wasn’t widely used.”

This may explain the emergence of words like sesquipedalian, and the hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia this may evoke, gonzo (not a mystery for fans of Hunter S. Thompson), rodomontade, muliebrity, and Snollygoster in the aptly named “Tharoorosauraus” (2020).

However, Tharoor, in his new work, goes deeper into the intricacies of the English language. Delving not only through linguistics, but history, economics, psychology, sociology, and fashion, he engagingly acquaints us with how words are coined, change meanings, fall out of use, or are otherwise shunned - not only because of political correctness, but personal preferences too.

The book’s 100-plus essays, drawn from his weekly column from Khaleej Times, are divided into 13 sections - beginning with various languages English has fattened its vocabulary from and variants of the language, not only the usual British vs American but also Australian and Indian, then moving on to the puzzles of punctuation, and the equally arcane issue of English spellings (watch out for the rule of ablautreduplication!).

Hitting his stride, Tharoor moves on to the world of “typos”, “superfluities” and others, where he deals with crash blossoms, needless words, pleonasms, ghost words and other such issues, and in one of the best sections, deals with the language of love, diplomacy, environment, phobias, money, elections, and so on, enlivened by some personal examples, including a prominent actress (not named though). Other sections go on to deal with inappropriate words, including how great writers dealt with their peers and critics, a nonsense vocabulary - about the word, not in intrinsic value, slang and its importance, and euphemism’s evil cousin dysphemism. A high-octane section on literary tools - not to be read in a single setting but in small doses - deals not only with acronyms, but bacronyms, contronyms, eponyms, and homonyms. Our logophile moves to linguistic acrobatics like eggcorns, malapropisms, paraprosdokians, puns and spoonerisms, among others, and follows it with a part on kangaroo words, kennings, limericks and other oddities.

Sections on lexical evolution, including the legacy of Watergate, the so-called politically correct or ‘inclusive’ language, another must-read brace on the legacies of Captain Haddock and P.G. Wodehouse, and finally, on new words and changing language round off the work. Though the author could do with some fact checks, say the origin of “berserker”, which was a collective noun for a horde of Viking warriors, not one particular hero, and one essay seems inspired by Richard Lederer’s “Crazy English”, it is a tour de force, especially for the key reason of the relevance of reading Tharoor dwells on in his foreword.