Shashi Tharoor Puts Out Ensorceling Classic

A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays (2024)
by Shashi Tharoor

Most Indian readers are familiar with Shashi Tharoor, the diplomat, writer and politician.

For those not familiar with the man, Shashi Tharoor is the rare Indian politician who can articulate his thoughts in English without sounding like a baboon.

The dashing Member of Parliament is the darling of India’s Gen Z and millennials. My first encounter, albeit literary, with Tharoor was in 1989 when I read his brilliant The Great Indian Novel.

Given my interest in the English language, I snapped up Tharoor’s latest book — A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays (2024).

My short verdict on the book: Gold on Every Page.

The book draws upon Tharoor’s World of Words column for the Khaleej Times. Tharoor writes that “most of the pieces [in the book] have been expanded and augmented since their original publication.”

Like with any book from a celebrity, you’re quickly assailed by doubts.

Did Tharoor really pen the book? How could he find the time with his parliamentary responsibilities, endless engagements and frequent travels plus his constituency duties as a Lok Sabha MP to put out a 404-page book?

As if in response to the question in my mind, Tharoor writes in the Acknowledgments section of the book that Professor Sheeba Thattil “did the bulk of the research for my columns…. This book is, in many ways, as much to her credit as to mine.”

Tharoor’s writing style is not unusual. It reminds me of Churchill’s later works. The British leader hired a team of researchers to write the initial draft and then Churchill, working late into the night, would revise it into his masterful prose. Tharoor’s acknowledgment to Prof. Thattil suggests he may have done something similar with this book.

In A Wonderland of Words, Tharoor has cleverly avoided writing a traditional word power book, of which there are dozens.

Instead, Tharoor has partitioned the book into 101 short chapters — based on interesting themes like Indianisms, homonyms, forbidden words, pleonasms, wartime words, disputed word origins, appropriate inappropriate words, etc.

Within each of these chapters, Tharoor deftly weaves in interesting words. One of the more interesting chapters is Disputed Word Origins (Chapter 24), which debunks myths about the origins of common words like sandwich, marmalade and bug.

Word lovers will love Literary Insults, a chapter with delightful examples of writers dishing out and responding to insults.

I picked up scores of interesting words from Tharoor’s book: mundivagant (wandering all over the world), accismus (pretended refusal of something one keenly desires), epicaricacy (delight in the misfortune of others), chatterbug (civilians who spread rumors during wartime), swallow the anchor (retire from life at sea), poppycock (nonsense), logomisia (aversion for specific words) and many more.

The book also exposed me to a bunch of literary devices like anagrams, aptagrams, bactronyms, and homonyms. There's a full chapter devoted to "words about nonsense" and another to "most hated words."

To Tharoor’s credit, the book also includes chapters on punctuation that go into commas, colons, apostrophes, hyphens and more. Don’t skip them. They’re not only useful but also fun to read.

The book lacks an index but contains an extensive bibliography (18-pages) and elaborate notes (19-pages) at the end.

A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays is a classic for lovers of the English language.

Tharoor's book now occupies pride of place in my modest library.