Shashi Tharoor Made Everyone Grab Their Dictionaries, Once Again

Shashi Tharoor is known for a lot of things. But this year, the senior Congress leader gave the Twitterverse some serious English lessons.

And if Tharoor’s words have been bothering you, he has a response-- “I choose my words because they are the best ones for the idea I want to convey, not the most obscure or rodomontade ones!”

To all the well-meaning folks who send me parodies of my supposed speaking/writing style: The purpose of speaking or writing is to communicate w/ precision. I choose my words because they are the best ones for the idea i want to convey, not the most obscure or rodomontade ones!

— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) December 13, 2017

Read that strange R word? That’s the latest one from the minister, aka Twitter’s English professor.

Naturally, everyone went to look up the word. And, Google trends is a proof to that.



So, what does rodomontade mean? Oxford dictionary says it is to “talk boastfully”.

Tharoor’s colleague Omar Abdullah asked the Twitterati to follow Tharoor for English lessons.

“Learning English? Follow my friend Shashi Tharoor for words you never knew existed & will struggle to ever use in a sentence but by golly they sound impressive,” he tweeted.

Learning English? Follow my friend @ShashiTharoor for words you never knew existed & will struggle to ever use in a sentence but by golly they sound impressive. #rodomontade

— Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) December 14, 2017

Someone tried using the word to build a sentence. And this is what it turned out to be:

I can rodomontadely say that day by day I read your rodomontaded tweets in English, I will be rodomontaded of my improved English. A rodomontade Jai Hind sir.

— Kanatunga (@Kanatunga) December 13, 2017

Some folks on Twitter tried to outdo Tharoor.

For what is life if not a perennial quest for the mot juste?

— Raja Sen (@RajaSen) December 14, 2017

And some desperately wanted him as their professor to crack entrance exams.

If twitter was around when I prepared for MBA entrance , I would have done nothing else but to follow this man on twitter . I would have cracked the vocabulary section of the CAT !

— Kapil Bhagat (@BhagatKapil) December 14, 2017

You are a God send for people preparing for GRE and CAT.

— Jagdish Kumar (@kumar_jag) December 14, 2017

Earlier this year, Tharoor stumped the world by using the F word—Farrago. For days, people were trying to figure who first came up with it, how it is used, etc etc.

“Exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations & outright lies being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist,” Tharoor had tweeted slamming a TV channel and a journalist who had accused him of hiding information about the death of his wife, Sunanda Pushkar.