How to improve your English? Shashi Tharoor has a few ideas

David Davidar and Shashi Tharoor at the launch of 'A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays', at Prime Minister's Museum and Library, Teen Murti Bhawan, Delhi, on August 30, 2024.

Parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor is a self-professed "etymological egghead". As a lifelong lover of words, Tharoor often gets asked what he recommends to someone who wants to improve their English vocabulary. His response: Read more books, albeit with one condition.

At the recent launch of his new book, 'A Wonderland of Words', at Teen Murti Bhavan, Tharoor explained this condition.

To improve your English, he said, read more. The caveat, he added, is that you must read for pleasure. He was speaking from experience, he explained: he once read 365 books in a year in a fit of youthful doggedness, and then promptly swore off such experiments for life.

Indeed, there are many reasons to recommend reading in general, and reading the Thiruvananthapuram MP's new book in particular - albeit with one or two caveats:

First, the speed bumps:

1. At Rs 999 for the hardback, the book - published by Aleph - is expensive as book-prices in the subcontinent go. No, there are no photos (barring the author photo on the book jacket) that require expensive photo paper. Having said that, the 442-page book does have an illustration by Priya Kurian on the cover.

2. Some of the essays can also feel a bit self-indulgent. One example is 'The Anechdoche Anecdote', about a precocious student who, when crushing on her professor, felt compelled to send him messages containing words like "cingulomania", "myotahapea", "alexithymia", "nefelibata", "atelophobia"... it goes on. But like the irate professor in the story, you stop caring before the essay is over.

Now, to what works in the book:

1. Words say something about the world we live in, and our preoccupations. Tharoor explains this in the essay on 'Words About Money': He compares the sheer volume of English-language words linked to money with the number of words the Inuit have for snow, and then proceeds to list quite a few: aid, allowance, alimony, bills, bribes, budget, capital, cash, cheque, coins, commission, compensation, consideration, currencies, debt, deposits, fee, fine, funds, honorarium, income, instalment, IOU, loan, rebate, remuneration, stake, tip, voucher...

2. The research: You can tell that Tharoor's love affair with the English language is not new. He quotes just as easily from William Shakespeare's plays as from social media parlance (Algospeak, Yuppie, Yappie, NIMBY, DINKIE...) and non-fiction books like one on the origins of the word OK, for example.

OK, and not okay, is the right way to write the word, he explains in the book. For, the word came from a very specific time and context: it's an abbreviation of "all correct" deliberately misspelled - as per a popular trend of the time - as "oll korekt" by American newspapermen in the 1830s.

3. How you say something can matter almost as much as what you say. That Tharoor can be witty is known. On a subject he loves - words - he's wittier than he is in most other contexts.

An example is the essay on 'The Significance of Slang'. Speaking about the longevity of some slang words, including "cool", Tharoor writes: "An eccentric person is 'bonkers', a weak one a 'wimp', an unpleasant one a 'jerk', for decades now. But 'groovy' (for 'with-it'; 'fashionable') dates you..." Don't be surprised if this type of construction reminds you of word games like NYT Connections, but also don't expect an essay on word games in this book - there isn't one.

4. Tharoor's essays draw on his personal experiences, and he seems to have lived an interesting life by most standards.

One example is an anecdote he shares from his days in the UN. Back then, he says, officials would present non-papers - a kind of whitepaper with no official standing, so there's no need to retract it if there are serious objections.

Tharoor doesn't say as much, but clearly it's an idea whose time has come. Imagine implementing it properly in contexts as wide-ranging as corporate offices and parent-teacher meetings - to discuss dangerously new ideas, for potential breakthroughs.

Indeed, a lot of the essays feel like they might be anecdotes that he or his friends might tell at parties; they have the quality of an almost intimate, one-on-one conversation.

There's one devoted to 'Diplo-Speak', for example, about how diplomats couch disagreements and disappointments in ambiguous language. That chapter ends with Tharoor recounting a conversation he had with Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf was at the United Nations headquarters to speak at a gathering, and Tharoor was still working at the UN at the time. During his address, Musharraf spoke about the effects of the India-Pakistan war on the subcontinent, saying something to the effect that when elephants like India and Pakistan fight, smaller countries get trampled like the grass. Unable to resist, Tharoor joked with him afterwards that the grass suffers even when elephants make love.

5. The book comprises short essays on words in English, a topic on which Tharoor has undeniable authority. Not as brief as tweets but some of the essays take up just two pages, so short enough to hold anyone's attention. Case in point, his essay on 'The Language of Elections'. It begins with definitions and origins of words like election, electorate, candidate, campaign, manifesto, ballot, count and recount, and ends by illustrating the difference between the similar-sounding suffrage and suffering which come from very different root words. He writes: "'Suffrage' and 'suffering' are like distant cousins—they're no exactly related, but if an unsuitable candidate is elected, suffering is guaranteed." This is not his wittiest chapter ending, but you get the picture.

6. The essays in 'A Wonderland of Words' are organized to look at word clusters, discuss their meaning and origins, illustrates their usage and often find something funny in how it all came to be. (Though you wouldn't guess that from the vanilla title.)

The sheer range of topics and ideas is another reason to recommend this book. From 'Words That Don't Exist in English' to 'Words About Nonsense' and words that no one needs to know, there is a freewheeling exploration of the possibilities and limitations of language.