Was the title of this article guilty of using expressions that are too esoteric? As in, was the title comprised of words that are barely employed in common parlance? Okay, the simplest way to ask it – did the title have words that we rarely use in day-to-day language?
If yes, you need to take a look at the following tweet:
Mr Tewari, your bacchanalian logorrhea is but the aboral ablactation of discernment from the pabulum of syllogism. This sanguisugent politicking must end. You have become the accoucheur who conceives and also delivers hot-air. Ebriection is nigh, sir.
https://t.co/FXUw7sGlzZ— Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) November 20, 2017
Okay, shake your head, close your eyes, and take a deep breath.
Now let’s try to decipher the above tweet.
But before that, let’s try to understand why this tweet came into existence. And to understand that, let’s revisit the title of this article itself. The title basically refers to the above tweet and essentially says that the tweet is wide mixture of words that can make your brain go numb.
But it uses words that are unusual and not used in our daily conversations. Chances are that you didn’t know meanings of many of them, except perhaps of “farrago”, which was popularized by Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, when he used that in a tweet attacking journalist Arnab Goswami for repeatedly raising the issue of his (Tharoor’s) wife’s death.
The above tweet by columnist and scientist Anand Ranganathan also has connections to Congress and death. Not death of any person though, but death of free speech.
The tweet deliberately uses inscrutable and arcane words as it mimics a statement by Congress leader and former Minister of Information & Broadcasting (I&B) Manish Tewari. Take a look at that statement by Tewari, which was also a tweet:
Before you go into paroxysms of ecstasy that you caught me lying on Twitter Let me tell you I was MIB not CHAIRERSON CBFC.The latter is a statutory body & I unlike current dispensation gerrymandering with jury decisions did not interfere with the functioning of Statutory bodies https://t.co/hIv5n9k43f
— Manish Tewari (@ManishTewari) November 20, 2017
Okay, Tewari is basically accusing the Modi government (current dispensation) of interfering and manipulating (gerrymandering) decisions by statutory bodies related to movies (hinting at Padmavati and IFFI controversies), while washing his hands off instances of censorship during his tenure, especially when a particular movie was refused censor certificate and denied participation in an IFFI like event.
Tewari was responding to a tweet, which is part of a series by Anand that has, by now, captured 166 (and counting) instances when Congress clamped down on free speech and freedom of expression. The tweet series began after Farrago Tharoor tried to project Congress as some free speech friendly party and it featured Gerrymandering Tewari in the latest tweet, eliciting a response from him.
Since Tewari could hardly have argued for Congress as being a free speech friendly party, that too on a day when Congress Chief Minister Amarinder Singh justified protests against Padmavati movie, he chose a farrago of abstruse terms to evade the original argument.
This is the reason Anand chose to reply to Tewari with even more abstruse and obsolete terms – to show that using high sounding words doesn’t exactly mean that one has won the argument. And perhaps we can all agree, that if high sounding words can win arguments, Anand has beaten Tewari by an innings and 166 runs.
Now let us come to the tweet that is giving headaches to people and try to learn new words.
- Bacchanalian – drunken
- Logorrhea – tendency to talk a lot
- Aboral – far from the mouth
- Ablactation – the process of a child no longer needing mother’s milk
- Pabulum – bland and boring
- Syllogism – deductive reasoning; using logic to conclude something
- Sanguisugent – blood sucking
- Accoucheur – a male midwife
- Ebriection – mental breakdown from too much drinking
- Nigh – near
So, in simpler terms, Anand Ranganathan basically told this to Manish Tewari in far convoluted way –
“Mr. Tewari, you are drunk tweeting. What you concluded from my tweet is not at all logical. Please stop this blood sucking politicking. You have become a male midwife who conceives and delivers hot-air (such tweets). Mental breakdown is near sir (if you continue tweeting like this).”
Phew!
By the way, we got in touch with Anand and asked if he regrets using such a simple term “hot-air” when he could have used equally brain-frying words. He answered in affirmative.
“Decalescent zephyr” is what he said he should have used for “hot-air”, but thought to keep some parts easy.
Thank god for small mercies.
