When Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw tagged Shashi Tharoor in a post about an amazing feat of the English language, she probably wasn’t expecting him to find an error in it. But trust the Congress leader - who is well known for his vast vocabulary and mastery of English - to spot the mistake that most would have missed.
In her post, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw shared an example of a rhopalic sentence – a sentence in which each successive word has one letter more than the word before.
“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunication's incomprehensibleness,” read the sentence shared by Mazumdar-Shaw. The post went on to explain that each word in the sentence contained one letter more than the word before it, and branded the sentence writer a “vocabulary genius.”
The Executive Chairperson of Biocon tagged Tharoor while sharing the post. However, Shashi Tharoor was quick to point out that despite its tall claims, the sentence contained a word which does not exist in the English dictionary.
“Alas, Kiran, "incomprehensibleness" is not a word. It's "incomprehensibility", and that's only 19 letters...” he wrote in response.
Alas, Kiran, "incomprehensibleness" is not a word. It's "incomprehensibility", and that's only 19 letters...@kiranshaw https://t.co/vYQ0zMDCKDRelated stories
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) April 30, 2022
With Shashi , couldn't have expected anything less!! @kiranshaw https://t.co/XJZl5ciIQt— Prabhu Sankar (@smartthinker2) May 1, 2022
With humble apologies to the maestro, here's the cover of Benjamin Coleman's book, "A Humble Discourse of the Incomprehensibleness of God, in Four Sermons, Preached at the Lecture in Boston" (Boston: Draper and Henchman, 1714). https://t.co/5FSmAPACb7 pic.twitter.com/7DS2eoWV5g— Arup K. Chatterjee (@chatterjeearupk) April 30, 2022
Merriam-Webster is an American company that publishes reference books and is known for its dictionaries. It is the oldest dictionary publisher in the United States.
Incomprehensibleness is not a word in British English— Jyoti Kathju (@jyotikathju) April 30, 2022
It’s interesting to note here that Tharoor had shared the same post four years ago. “Received on WhatsApp. Quite a feat!” he had written at the time.
Received on whats app. Quite a feat! pic.twitter.com/JfAQrwwt8V— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) January 7, 2018
Discover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated!
Find the best of Al News in one place, specially curated for you every weekend.
Stay on top of the latest tech trends and biggest startup news.
