The making of India's Mr Difficult Words

When my publishers at Aleph invited me to put together a book on words and language, I hesitated for a brief moment.

- SHASHI THAROOR

A book on words (following on the heels of the successful Tharoorosaurus) was all very well, but did a serious politician really want to reinforce the image that had grown up of himself as an etymological egghead? As one journalist rather breathlessly asked me, “Your vocabulary has become the subject of memes, comedy shows and now a book! Did you ever think things would take such a turn?”

Well, no, I didn’t. I fell in love with language as a child, and used the words I came across quite unselfconsciously, as a beachcomber might blow into the shells he’s picked up on a stroll along the seaside. But in the process, I found I had inadvertently acquired a rather inflated reputation as a vocabularist. Such reputations tend to build gradually, but mine reached escape velocity with a specific tweet. Incensed by a libellous TV programme about me, I had tweeted that it was ‘a farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist’.