When Shashi Tharoor made people scratch their heads

Shashi Tharoor is an Indian politician, writer and former international diplomat. He is famous for his exemplary and audacious speech at the Oxford Union where he demanded reparation payments from the UK to India for 200 years of its colonial rule. He’s also an acclaimed writer, having authored 19 bestselling works of fiction and non-fiction and a columnist.

But he’s also notoriously known for heavy words that make people scrambling for a dictionary. I am sure that we all have scratched our heads to understand what he just said, so here are some of those tweets that made us wonder if we know the English language at all.

Farrago: (noun) a confused mixture.

Snollygoster: (noun) a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician.

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia: (noun). the fear of long words.

Rodomontade: (noun) a bragging speech.

Floccinaucinihilipilification: (noun) the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.

Troglodytes: (noun) a hermit, a person who is regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.

Did you know that Shashi Tharoor’s speeches and tweets are known to increase google searches for the words he used? Well, that’s the power of the pen, and the dictionary if we may say so.

You may also like

These 5 new words/slangs were added to Oxford Dictionary recently