Tharoorosaurus

by Shashi Tharoor

  There’s a good reason why epistemophilia is considered unhealthy and even looked down upon by many intellectuals. Knowledge is basically of two kinds, broadly defined as procedural and lexical. Procedural knowledge is the kind of knowledge that pays, since it relates to how things are done; the possessor of procedural knowledge has what used to be called ‘know-how’. Lexical knowledge is a collection of facts and details on objects, properties and relations and tends to consist of memorizable information—terms, labels, titles, dates, names and so on. Scholars consider lexical knowledge to be, by definition, static and nominal; that’s the kind of knowledge that describes the world rather like a fixed image, immutable and unchanging, a ‘still’ photo in a frozen timeframe. It’s the kind of information you can easily get these days with two clicks of a mouse on Google. Lexical knowledge is therefore seen as of minor importance, and considered the lowest grade of knowledge.

  Epistemophilia, alas, focuses on lexical knowledge; that’s what quizzes and competitive examinations in our country largely test. It is unhealthy because it divorces knowledge from its true purpose, and because it gives its victims the wrong impression that they are knowledgeable, when all they have done is mastered information of no earthly use outside the rarefied environs of a quiz competition. If we taught more ‘procedural knowledge’, the poor ‘learning outcomes’ coming from our schools and colleges, that educationists lament, would dramatically improve.

  Here’s one more campaign for our slogan-shouting campuses: ‘Down With Epistemophilia!’

  14.

  Eponym

  noun

  ONE WHOSE NAME BECOMES THAT OF A PLACE, A PEOPLE, AN ERA, OR AN INSTITUTION

  USAGE

  This book’s eponymous author keeps protesting

  that he’s nothing like a dinosaur!

  Eponym comes from the Greek eponymos, ‘given as a name, giving one’s name to something’ as a plural noun (short for eponymoi, heroes) denoting founders (legendary or real) of tribes or cities. Thus, the American capital in Washington DC was never the residence of its eponymous first President, George Washington. When you speak of the Victorian era, you are referring to the period of its eponymous monarch, Queen Victoria. The Modi government is headed by its eponymous prime minister, Narendra Modi; Obamacare is a health insurance scheme named for its eponymous President, Barack Obama; Thatcherism is an economic philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism named for its strident advocate, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

  Eponyms are not merely useful for referring to politics. A Tudor building refers to a style made popular during the rule of its eponymous British dynasty, and a Georgian square to the eponymous King George III. ‘Those Edwardian young men in spats’ suggests the youth in question lived in the time of Britain’s first post-Victorian monarch King Edward VII. Bowler hats, then worn by those men in spats, were invented by the eponymous William Bowler. Queen Anne furniture alludes to the eponymous British monarch of the beginning of the eighteenth century.

  Common household products also refer, often unknowingly, to their eponymous creators. ‘I’ll Hoover it up’ comes from the inventor of the vacuum-cleaner that bore his name; ‘I need to fill up some diesel’ takes its name from the eponymous German, Rudolf Diesel, who invented that fuel; ‘let’s take the kids on the Ferris wheel’ credits the eponymous engineer who first came up with that enormous contraption to whirl seated people around for pleasure. If you want to hop into the jacuzzi, you are tipping your hat (or doffing your clothes) to an eponymous pair of Italian brothers. If you slip on some leotards, there’s an eponymous French fashion designer, Jacques Leotard, you’re memorializing. And if you eat a sandwich, you are paying tribute to the inveterate gambler, the eponymous Earl of Sandwich, who had the snack invented for him so he didn’t have to interrupt his card games for a meal. When I visited Sudan in the late 1970s, it was common to hear people saying, ‘I’ll pick you up in my Tata,’ without being conscious of the eponymous Indian vehicle manufacturer.

  Thanks to Viking Penguin, I am now the eponymous author of the present volume, which derives its unusual title, as the preface explains, from my own name. I have had a similar compliment paid to me on the Internet, where a group of social media users have chosen to call themselves ‘Tharoorians’, describing themselves as inspired by my ideas and beliefs, which they see themselves resolutely defending against the ‘trolls’ (another word discussed later in this book) who oppose and attack me politically and personally.

  Far more distinguished figures in our history have eponymously inspired much larger numbers of followers. The country is full of self-declared Gandhians, for instance, though few can truly be said to live up to the Mahatma’s ideals and his exacting standards of personal rectitude. Another eponymous term is associated with his closest legatee. For a few decades after Independence, it was entirely reasonable to say, as a senior public figure once remarked about the entire Indian ruling class, ‘we are all Nehruvians’. Today, in the face of relentless criticism from the new ruling establishment around the BJP, the Nehruvians seem to be a dwindling breed.

  One ‘boycotts’ people throughout the English-speaking world without knowing a thing about the eponymous Captain Boycott whose unpopularity led to the term. I may as well stop here for fear of being boycotted myself . . .

  15.

  Farrago

  noun

  HODGEPODGE, A CONFUSED MIX, A JUMBLE

  USAGE

  The channel’s accusations against me were a farrago of lies, misrepresentations and half-truths broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist.

  Farrago, a word that I was excessively fond of using in rebutting my debating opponents at St. Stephen’s College in the early 1970s, was invented around the 1630s and came from a Latin root for ‘medley, mixed fodder, mix of grains for animal feed’. It stands for a jumble, a confused mixture, and is particularly handy when refuting arguments in a debate, lending itself to frequent use in the British Parliament, for instance, in phrases like ‘a farrago of excuses and obfuscation’, ‘a farrago of deceit and lies’, ‘a farrago of conspiracy theories and unproven assertion’ or ‘a rambling farrago of half-digested knowledge’. The commentator Peter Bergen once dismissed a claim by the journalist Seymour Hersh as ‘a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense’. One stern linguist disapproved of the word’s use, saying farrago ‘has become one of those all-purpose dismissive words that ought to appear in public only when attached to a health warning’.

  My denunciation of defamatory accusations by an Indian television channel (that I had separately characterized as the digital equivalent of a toilet roll) briefly resurrected the word’s usage in India, leading to the creation of a spate of social media handles using the word. Some of my serial abusers on Twitter even lamely took to calling me ‘Mr Farrago’. But I claim no particular proprietorship of the word. When political critics dredged up a decade-old Oxford debate of Mehdi Hasan’s in which he uses the word, and accused me of stealing it from him, we both laughed; Hasan replied that neither he nor I had invented the term. A diligent reader promptly came up with a citation from a 1993 article I wrote in the Washington Post, and another from my 1997 book India from Midnight to the Millennium, which employed the word. It is true, though, that it isn’t very widely used. To cite the disapproving linguist again: ‘To judge from the company it keeps, it is much favoured by judges and journalists but by hardly anybody else.’

  Some people, it seems, have begun using ‘farrago’ to mean a lot of noise and argument signifying nothing, or some happening or event which has proved a fiasco or caused a furore. That is, strictly speaking, wrong usage, though English, with its marvellous elasticity, may well evolve to accommodate this different sense of the word in due course. For now, let’s just remember it whenever we are tempted to turn on our television and change to a channel that claims the nation wants to know what it should never belie
ve.

  16.

  Floccinaucinihilipilification

  noun

  THE ACT OF ESTIMATING SOMETHING OR SOMEONE AS WORTHLESS

  USAGE

  My new book, The Paradoxical Prime Minister, is more than just a 500-page exercise in floccinaucinihilipilification.

  Yes, I tweeted that, and I’ll admit it was meant to grab eyeballs and draw attention to my (then) new book. I supplied the definition, too—and no, I was not making it up. But what I was not prepared for was the rage it became, as for months afterwards, parents would trot out their little four-year-old children to recite the word to me as something they had been taught to say to sound like Shashi Tharoor. Perish the thought: when I resurrected it for that tweet, I hadn’t used it since college.

  My favourite ‘f’ word (which I won’t repeat throughout, since it uses up too much space to do so!) is a jocular coinage, apparently by pupils at Eton College, which combines a number of roughly synonymous Latin terms: floccus (‘a wisp’) + naucum (‘a trifle’) + nihilum (‘nothing’) + pilus (‘a hair’) + fication. Often considered the longest regular word in the English language, being one letter longer than the traditionally cited ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’, it has the merit of not referring to some obscure disease, the sin of ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’, which is technically longer but impossible to use in regular conversation, since it refers to an extremely rare lung disease caused by the inhalation of ultra-fine particles. Whereas the ‘f’ word was even used in parliamentary debates: US Senator Jesse Helms dismissed the demise of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by declaring, ‘I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT’ while in the UK, Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg used the word in the British House of Commons to rail against European Union judges: ‘I am glad to say, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the requirement not to be rude about judges applies only to judges in this country. It does not apply to judges in the EU [European Union], so let me be rude about them. Let me indulge in the floccinaucinihilipilification of EU judges . . .’.

  Lingusitics sources trace ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ back to works published as long ago as 1741, in a letter by William Shenstone, who was credited by Sir Walter Scott in 1826 as the inventor of the word. Others trace it to a 1758 Eton College Latin grammar book, the revised edition of a classic by sixteenth-century grammarian William Lily, which listed a set of words from Latin which all meant something of little value: the first four, memorably, were flocci (trivial, a wisp), nauci (a trifle, having no value), nihili (nothing), and pili (a hair, i.e., something insignificant). The story goes that some Etonians, as a jest, put all the four together to come up with a word that signified total worthlessness. But Scott misspelled it ‘Floccipaucinihilipilification’ (with a p as the seventh letter rather than n) and that version also persists, though the real ‘f’ word is the one that was the longest word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and to which I seem to have given new currency in India by using it in the sentence quoted at the

  head of this entry.

  Is the ‘f’ word only to be used as is? Not really: there’s no reason that you can’t floccinaucinihilipilify something or someone. If something is worthy of floccinaucinihilipilification, it is floccinaucical: trifling. It is in a state of floccinaucity. In more recent times the novelist Robert A. Heinlein called one of his female characters, who was always critical of things, a ‘floccinaucinihilipilificatrix’. It could be a useful word for government spokesmen to dismiss the carping of critics in the Opposition: ‘you can’t take them seriously; they are just floccinaucinihilipilificators’. Fortunately, however, no one has fallen into the habit of uttering the ‘f’ word in our political discourse just yet. Maybe one day, just for the heck of it, I’ll use it in parliament.

  17.

  Goon

  noun

  A BULLY OR THUG, ESPECIALLY ONE WHO ASSAULTS OR INTIMIDATES PEOPLE

  USAGE

  The goons who assaulted students at Jawaharlal Nehru University could not have entered and left without the complicity of the police.

  This is one word where professional English etymologists and I don’t agree. I am convinced that it is a contraction of the Hindi word ‘goonda’, especially given the near-identical meaning.

  But most Western authorities date it to an American usage in 1921, in US humorist Frederick J. Allen’s piece ‘The Goon and His Style’ (Harper’s Monthly Magazine, December 1921), which defines it as ‘a person with a heavy touch’, one who lacks ‘a playful mind’. Maybe in that sense it might have descended from the sixteenth-century gony, or ‘simpleton’, which was applied by sailors to the albatross and similar big, clumsy birds, because a ‘gooney bird’ was one whose awkward way of taking off and landing made it look stupid. The word became used more widely in the US when ‘goons’ became characters in the ‘Thimble Theater’ comic strip (starring Popeye) by cartoonist E.C. Segar (1894–1938). The most famous was Alice the Goon, a slow-witted and muscular character initially depicted as a subhuman brute (but a gentle-natured one for all that).

  It may well have been due to Segar’s influence that the word ‘goon’ came to refer not just to a clumsy or awkward thick-headed person but also to a thick-muscled one, somebody of impressive physique who was hired as a ‘tough guy’. In 1938, a book on American slang described a goon as a ‘person of imposing physique and inferior moral and mental qualities’ who usually acted as a hired ‘enforcer’ for a labour union, which famously led a rather rough-and-ready existence. The following year, an article in Collier’s magazine reinforced this definition when it described members of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) as a ‘goon squad’, principally for their role in beating up dissenting workers who refused to support the union’s decisions. Eventually the term ‘goon squad’ was used to refer to any similar group of enforcers, especially in organized crime—though some on the wrong side of the law, having been on the receiving end of some punitive justice in prison, also used it to describe the police. After all, in those harsher times (when offenders were not read their rights when they were arrested), the long arm of the law often ended in a clenched fist.

  However, the more commonly used sense of a bully or thug surely comes from the ‘goondas’ we know so well, perhaps because British POWs in German prisoner-of-war camps during the Second World War used the word ‘goon’ to describe their guards as unintelligent thugs. That Indian meaning of a ruffian or violent thug has long supplanted the earlier American sense of a silly, foolish, or eccentric person. Today, what most English-speakers imagine when they speak of a goon is a slow-witted, unshaven, lumbering lout hired to intimidate people. Even in the US, the word ‘goon’ is now widely applied to hefty thugs who accompany a mobster: ‘Al Capone never appeared in public without his goon squad around him.’ The British comedian Spike Milligan’s The Goon Show (co-starring Peter Sellers) gave further currency to the word in the UK.

  In India, of course, ‘goon’ requires no subtitles: the word, and the violent thugs themselves, are sadly ubiquitous in our country. Like its Hindi parent, goonda, a goon is not a desirable thing to be, and yet goons are widespread: bigger nasties need them, so they are available to serve bad causes for a price, often a price they extract themselves with a fist or a knife. Goons can be—and are—students, politicians, even ‘leaders’ in our debased political life. And they can be—and are—used to disrupt protests, beat up opponents, and intimidate decent people exercising their constitutional right to object to acts of government. They must be identified, arrested, tried and punished, if India is not to descend into a Goon(da) Raj.

  18.

  Hyperbole

  noun

  A FIGURE OF SPEECH, IN WHICH EXTREME EXAGGERATION IS USED FOR EFFECT

  USAGE

  The prime minister’s promise to put Rs 15 lakh in every Indian’s bank account wasn’t understood by everyone as hyperbole, so there was a lo
t of disappointment when it never happened.

  Hyperbole, or an ‘obvious exaggeration in rhetoric’, derives from the Latin and Greek words hyperbole, literally meaning a ‘throwing beyond’, from hyper, meaning ‘beyond’, and bole, meaning ‘a throwing or casting’, thus figuratively an exaggeration or extravagance. The use of the term in its rhetorical sense goes as far back as Aristotle, where it is also known as auxesis.

  Many of the best-known examples of hyperbole have become such clichés—like ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse’—that it is always wise to avoid using them, because they have been drained of all meaning by overuse. However, hyperbole has its uses in poetry and oratory, especially of the political variety, as well as in personal conversation. The person using hyperbole does not intend to be taken literally, but rather to convey the intensity of his convictions or feelings about something—‘if I’m wrong, I’ll eat my hat’ is a typical piece of hyperbole, often uttered by people who don’t even possess a hat. The listener is also meant to understand that the statement merely conveys a feeling rather than embodying a promise.

  Hyperbole is often used in casual speech as an intensifier, such as saying, ‘My poor boy! His schoolbag weighs a tonne.’ Hyperbole serves to make the point that the son of the speaker has an extremely heavy bag, although it obviously does not literally weigh a ton. Hyperbole can be used to convey or express humour, contempt, political views and all sorts of emotions from excitement to distress, all intending to make an effect. The American humorist Will Rogers, for instance, once combined the first three of these purposes when he said of a particular politician that, if brains were gunpowder, he wouldn’t have enough to blow the wax out of his ears.