Shashi Tharoor's dictionary of dope words
Shashi Tharoor’s latest book misses a trick in not mining Gen Z and Alpha vocabulary as deeply as it deserves to be
Shashi Tharoor understands the power of words, though being recognised as what he calls “an etymological egghead" came late in his diverse and interesting career as diplomat, politician and author. In his new book, A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays, Tharoor finally embraces this identity fully—a natural conclusion of his role as amateur linguist, which was thrust upon him willy-nilly. Seven years ago, he went on a famous rant on social media after a TV channel aired an unflattering and potentially libellous show about him, calling it an “exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist".
Tharoor could have taken umbrage at the (mostly good-natured) trolling that ensued, but he chose to lean into this late-career turn as a “vocabularist" instead. “There are only two things you can do when a tidal wave of caricature descends upon you like this—either sulk crossly or embrace the caricature and try to turn it to your advantage. I preferred the latter course," he writes in his introduction to the new book. Starting with a weekly column on words in a Dubai newspaper and a book called Tharoorosaurus (Penguin Random House India, 2020), in which he shared 53 examples of unusual English words from every letter of the alphabet, he wrote similar columns, including one for the Hindustan Times, with witty commentary on words like “prepone", “hyperbole", and “rodomontade".
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His fate as a chronicler of words was sealed, and it does seem like this may, after all, become his lasting legacy.
Tharoor has never claimed to be a scholar of language, and his latest work is expectedly light-hearted, unserious and personal; its playfulness heightened by artist Priya Kuriyan’s quirky illustrations. Though there is an attempt to divide it into cohesive sections such as “The Point of Punctuation", “Spelling Bugs", “Literary Tools" and “Literary Acrobatics", the short essays in each section jump from topic to topic with whimsical arbitrariness: the very first section is, rather randomly, on loan words in English and various forms of English spoken today, such as Australian English and Indian English. The section on Linguistic Registers contains writing on topics as diverse and disparate as “phobias", “words about money", “computer terms" and “body parts". Tharoor has evidently packed a chimerical fascination with certain words and word groups, and in each essay he picks a few words and loosely defines them or traces their origin, seemingly as the mood takes him.
On the whole, I prefer his columns, which are witty, political, and linked to recent events. In the piece on “prepone" for instance, he recalls how a tweet aimed at the Kerala government about its decision to hold exams earlier than scheduled, which included the word, was met with jeers and trolling—as if the master wordsmith had committed a linguistic solecism. Defending his choice, Tharoor wrote: “Prepone is an English word... The first usage of the word in the sense in which I used it was from a letter to the New York Times on Dec 5, 1913, from John D. Trenor: ‘For the benefit mainly of the legal profession in this age of hurry and bustle, may I be permitted to coin the word ‘prepone’ as a needed rival of that much-revered and oft-invoked standby, ‘postpone’?"
The book’s best part remains the introduction, which has the requisite whimsy: in one section, Tharoor describes his and his family’s obsession with The New York Times daily word game Wordle, and reveals how his father had invented a game very much like it in the 1960s, played orally during long car rides, made more difficult than Wordle in the absence of screens and keyboards.
Tharoor reminds us that language evolves, and we live at a time when the English language is evolving faster than most of us can keep up. This churn is as glorious as it is unprecedented—rarely, if ever, in the history of the language have words and meanings and redefinitions been added to the recognised canon so fast and so bafflingly. Various generations are pretty much unintelligible to each other. Shakespeare’s plays are being rendered in Gen Z English. Dictionaries can barely keep up—in the past few years, watching “word of the year" entries revealed by major dictionaries has been an exercise in guesswork; does “rizz" mean what I think it means? In 2024 alone, the Cambridge Dictionary added 3,200 new words. It used to take Microsoft Office years to catch up—those red squiggly lines would persistently appear below words that had by then become commonplace, like “prepone" or “internet"—but the turnaround is much faster now.
I would have liked to see the author up his game on this phenomenal churn, and it’s disappointing that it is relegated to a few chapters right at the end that feel like an afterthought. Despite his always-charming voice, linguistic topics that feel dated, such as ‘Wodehousian Words’ and ‘Captain Haddock’s Expletives’, seem to take precedence over the ongoing, almost violent revolution in the language that surely deserves greater scrutiny from the pre-eminent amateur linguist of our times. Tharoor does say, right at the end, that “it’s clear we will need a whole new book soon". Famous last words?
Read this one, then, alongside others like Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue: English And How It Got That Way, published in 1990 and still as fun and entertaining a history of the language as any. Don’t expect them to slay, but in small doses, they are pretty dope, or whatever.
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