If there is a Tharoorosaurus, there will be a Kortictionary

Raju Korti

There are high wages attached to being a celebrity and if it is someone like Shashi Tharoor there are other perks as well. Before you jump to conclusions which you think are obvious, let me tell you it is not about the man's reputation with or purported weakness for women. It is more about his penchant for words that he so tellingly sums up in his book "Tharoorosaurus". I am tempted to believe that he derives a sadistic pleasure in making people scurry to the dictionary or a Thesaurus by deploying obscure and complicated words. Devil he may be, but he deserves some due nevertheless.

Much is being made of Tharoor's propensity to charm and sweep women off their feet but that's not being fair to his decrepitude for words that have become harem to his imagination. Tharoorosaurus as we predictably realize is a word play of his name mixed with the word Thesaurus and it ostensibly seeks to find synonyms for words. Published by the Penguin Random House India, it is a veritable inventory of 53 words, one for each letter of the alphabet. Dubbed the Wizard of Words, he shares these examples from his parallel vocabulary  -- unusual words that are more Latin and Greek than Latin and Greek actually are -- from every letter of the alphabets. All of five vowels and 21 consonants. You do not have to be a linguaphile to partake of their novelty, you just have to souse in how he marinates them. Perilously disposed as I am to my perennially penurious condition, I cannot even nurse the chance finding Rs 373 that the book costs but I can indulge fair guess work to know what the book subsumes in its denouement.

Having made the preamble of my harangue so luxurious with not so expansive words, let me come to the precise reason what prompted this impromptu blog. The will of my conscience here has been single-handedly forced by two reasons, both of which have their footing in two branches of Science -- Physics and Mathematics. I will skip expounding the Newton's Third Law of Motion or what is understood as Contrapositive in Logic. The intelligible point I am making here is if there has to be a Tharoorosaurus, there has to be a Kortictionary too. It is all so elementary, my dear Watson! If Tharoorosaurus owes its existence to Tharoor, Kortictionary owes it to Korti. Names do matter and words spelt by either Tharoor or Korti, are words at the end of the day.

Those who know me even peripherally, will bear me out. I have sweated in litres browsing and studying Thesaurus and the Dictionary for ever since I can remember. The words, their substitutes, homologouses, equivalents, usages, figures of speech, idioms, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms and what else have you of from the labyrinthine macrocosm of Wren & Martin. Like Tharoor, I have jealously and steadfastly guarded my paintbrush while celebrating words and treating them like clay. It amuses me no end that the permutation and combination of 26 alphabets spin a complex ecosystem of words that can be moulded, shaped, chiseled, crystallized, kneaded, polished, carved, built, embodied, minted, modeled, framed, forged, fashioned, cast, sketched, whittled, roughewed and fabricated in becoming the edifice of Literature.

People who are lesser endowed with words than I am -- and I don't say this in my self-arrogated wisdom  -- grudgingly tell me all the time that I am too overbearing with them. Their refrain: Do you have to be so extravagant and grandiose with mentally taxing words when simple words could have got your point through. My riposte is as simple as it can get. Why not make the dish more appetizing by garnishing it well! Words don't drill holes in your pockets. Kortictionary will be my tribute to words. Since it incorporates my name, my copyright is guaranteed by default. What Tharoor is to Thesaurus, Korti will be to a Dictionary. Hope you get the essential drift here. The similarity between Tharoor and Korti ends here. I do not possess the other talents which Tharoor is generously accredited with.

I have spent a part sleepless night yesterday fretting over whether it should be Rajucon (as take off on lexicon) or Kortictionary. The second finally made it because carries its trade mark, which is my surname, and sounds more weighty unlike the first that has the misleading "con" to it. Words have to be reined in and cannot be allowed to become their own masters. Once they become subservient to you, sentences have no option but to fall in line. 

Kortictionary does not aim to give Tharoorosaurus a run for its money. It only seeks to complement it and live in harmony with what I earnestly believe is a very limited edition. I have a much larger court to play on even if that means patting my own back. That indulgence makes sense when your head is full and pockets are empty.

Some day I plan to write Vocabulary Chalisa. It will take you an unending game called Word Play.