One day, all of a sudden, your chap says, ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!’ when you show him your rare Hot Wheels collection.
Bro, seriously?
He, who used to respond with a thumbs-up to almost everything, has just dropped a word that looks like an entire paragraph! He's got something to slay.
This edition of Weekend Vines is a little excursion into Shashi Tharoor's world of wonderfully complicated words, political jabs, and what you might call Shakespearean insults.
The Tharoorian way of slamming
See, you can slam anyone in politics, and that's what politics is all about: a give-and-take game. But what happens when you can't even figure out what the other person is saying?
That's what, I guess, happens when Shashi Tharoor gets down to business. He randomly appears, drops a vocabulary bomb, takes a dig at the Modi government and disappears again, leaving behind yet another entry in his school of ‘elite mocking’.
Kill 'em with intelligence. That's his aura!
A 29-letter word for PM Modi
On October 10, 2018, Tharoor pulled out a long word for PM Modi: ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’.
He used it while announcing his new book on the Prime Minister, The Paradoxical Prime Minister. ‘My new book, THE PARADOXICAL PRIME MINISTER, is more than just a 400-page exercise in floccinaucinihilipilification. Pre-order it to find out why!’
Before trying to pre-order the book, I'm sure you have already run to Google to find out what that ‘F-word’ means. The book was a critical examination of Narendra Modi's prime ministership. And Tharoor was having fun announcing it with a word that describes the act of considering something worthless.
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The beard business during a pandemic
"My friend Rathin Roy, the economist, taught me a new word today: pogonotrophy, which means 'the cultivation of a beard'. As in, the PM's pogonotrophy has been a pandemic preoccupation," tweeted Tharoor on July 1, 2021.
It was something nobody saw coming. Perhaps pogonotrophy was happy that someone had finally given it a place in the dictionary of political conversations.
The word means the cultivation or growing of a beard.
If you're thinking, ‘But why?’, here's your explanation.
By July 2021, PM Modi's increasingly long beard had become quite the talking point. From social media discussions to political speculation, everyone seemed to have something to say about it.
And Tharoor decided to join the conversation, armed with a word most of us wouldn't even attempt to pronounce. When you have a Prime Minister whose beard has become a subject of public and political discussion, this word is bound to catch your attention. Yeah, Tharoor just couldn't leave PM Modi's famous beard alone!
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Dear opportunist, here comes Tharoor
A shrewd, unscrupulous person, particularly a politician who puts personal interests above principles. I know, so many faces must have crossed your mind already.
And Tharoor had a word for that kind of politician. Perhaps a face too. He called it ‘snollygoster’. At first, you might not even realise he's taking a dig at someone! In July 2017, Tharoor tweeted his ‘word of the day’, defining snollygoster as a shrewd, unprincipled politician.
The timing was interesting. Nitish Kumar had just walked out of the Mahagathbandhan alliance and returned to the BJP-led NDA. Though Tharoor didn't name him, the tweet was widely interpreted as a jibe at the Bihar leader.
The word made another appearance in January 2024, when Nitish Kumar switched alliances once again. Tharoor dug up his old tweet and added: "Didn't realise it would be the Word of Another Day too!"
Now, you don't have to call someone an opportunist when you have the word snollygoster at your disposal!
The art of being a puppet in politics
Tired of calling someone an ‘andhbhakt’, ‘godi’ or a ‘paid follower’? Well, Tharoor has a word for that too. And, naturally, it's not one you'll use in everyday conversation.
Quockerwodger says hi. The word originally referred to a wooden puppet whose movements were controlled by strings. In politics, it describes a person, particularly a politician, who acts on someone else's instructions rather than exercising independent judgement.
Tharoor introduced this little vocabulary bomb to his followers in April 2022, calling it "a useful addition to our political vocabulary". But he wasn't done with it.
In September 2026, he called quockerwodger the "word of our era", adding, "I think our ruling party has spawned a few of these in the last dozen years…"
And on November 4, he brought it back with another suggestion. For those tired of describing people as ‘andhbhakts’, ‘godi’ or ‘paid followers’, he suggested quockerwodger as an alternative. Well, why settle for calling someone a puppet when you can call them a quockerwodger?
Tharoor, as usual, has made sure the insult comes with a vocabulary lesson!
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Overcome fear with fear
Just when you think you've somehow escaped a 29-letter word, here comes an apology featuring a 36-letter one: Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. And this happened literally the day after the ‘F-word’. It means the fear of long words.
Tharoor, apparently feeling the need to apologise to anyone who might have been intimidated by his vocabulary, tweeted: "I'm sorry if one of my tweets y'day gave rise to an epidemic of hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia! [Don't bother looking it up: it's just a word describing a fear of long words].But #TheParadoxicalPrimeMinister contains no words longer than Paradoxical!" Then there was ‘allodoxaphobia’, which he explained as an irrational fear of opinions. He used it to take a dig at the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh over its use of sedition and UAPA cases against people.
He has also left his opponents scratching their heads with words such as ‘farrago’ and ‘troglodyte’. While ‘farrago’ means a confused mixture, a ‘troglodyte’ is a person regarded as deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.
Yeah, just Tharoor flexing his verbal skills. And you'll need a dictionary just to figure out whether you're being praised or mocked.
