Tharoorosaurus

by Shashi Tharoor

  USAGE

  Sometimes, in recent years, it has seemed that

  the world’s largest democracy has in many ways degenerated into a kakistocracy.

  Derived from the ancient Greek—the speakers of which were pioneers of democratic practice and knew a thing or two about good governance, or the lack thereof—a ‘kakistocracy’ is a government by the worst elements in society. The word comes

  from the Greek kakistos, which is the superlative form of the word

  kakos, meaning ‘bad’; kakistos means as bad as it can possibly get.

  There’s even a suggestion that kakos comes from the ancient proto-Indo-European root ‘kakka’, meaning what you produce when you defecate (a sense in which it is still used in many Indian languages, at least colloquially). Related words in ancient Greek were kakonomia, meaning ‘a bad system of laws and government’, which in turn gave the ancient Greeks the descriptive expression kakonomos, applicable to a place ‘with bad laws, ill-governed’.

  Kakistocracy, a word in use since the seventeenth century and made popular by Thomas Love Peacock in the early nineteenth, was coined as the opposite of aristocracy, which is made up of Greek aristos, or ‘best’, and cratia, ‘rule’. Of course, there was an upper-class snootiness about the rise of democracy behind the use of the term: whereas rule by aristocrats was supposed to involve the dominance of the best elements of society, democracy, it was suggested, often unleashed the worst. In our more egalitarian times, aristocracy no longer carries an association of approbation, though its opposite is, of course, even worse, and given its etymological roots, kakistocracy could never be considered a positive term.

  The US has long been fertile territory for the use of the word kakistocracy. The American poet James Russell Lowell wrote in a letter in 1876: ‘Is ours a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, or a Kakistocracy, rather for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?’ In 1944, Time magazine hoped that the introduction of voting machines would challenge ‘the very vitals of the kakistocracy’ running the corrupt regime of the New Jersey Democratic party boss, Frank Hague.

  American columnists have lately resurrected the word ‘kakistocracy’ to discuss the rule of President Donald J. Trump, whose manner, policies and tweets seem to evoke fear and loathing in equal measure amongst large numbers of the US chatterati. Populism is often condemned as resulting in kakistocracy, since populists are perceived as coming to power by appealing to the worst instincts, prejudices and ignorant biases of their voters. When a former CIA director, John Brennan, described Donald Trump on Twitter as running a ‘kakistocracy‘, it reportedly sparked a 13,700 per cent increase in people looking up the word on the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

  Of course, America is not the only laboratory of kakistocracy, which can be found wherever expertise, education and ethics are abandoned in favour of short-term popularity, crude appeals to the worst instincts of a people and low standards of governance. The English writer John Martineau, in his 1869 publication Letters from Australia, lamenting the poor quality of the civil service Down Under, the self-serving politicians and the coarse political debate, wondered whether Australia would become a kakistocracy.

  It hasn’t, arguably. But in recent years, many of us have been wondering whether our India has. The word kakistocracy has not been used much in India, despite us seeing in high places people who declare they want to replace Mahatma Gandhi’s statues with his assassin Nathuram Godse’s, destroy or exile the entire Muslim community, or send critics to Pakistan, preferably attached to the wrong end of a bomb. Not to mention those in our ruling circles who believe in the virus-curing properties of cow urine, advocate standing in the sun for fifteen minutes to avoid contagion, and believe our Vedic ancestors invented jet engines, interstellar travel and GPS. Maybe it’s time we too dusted off the term.

  23.

  Kerfuffle

  noun

  A DISORDERLY OUTBURST, TUMULT, ROW, RUCKUS OR DISTURBANCE; A DISORDER, FLURRY, OR AGITATION; A FUSS

  USAGE

  In view of the kerfuffle around my tweet wrongly attributing to the US a picture of Nehruji in the USSR,

  I thought it best to tweet some pictures that really

  showed him in the US.

  Kerfuffle turns out to quite commonly used in Scots, the language of Scotland, and is an intensive form of the Scots word ‘fuffle,’ meaning ‘to disturb’. The modern word comes from the Scottish ‘curfuffle’ by way of earlier similar expressions that were spelt variously as curfuffle, carfuffle, cafuffle, cafoufle, even gefuffle. This suggests that the word was mainly used orally and that it was usually transmitted through conversational usage rather than written language—such expressions in popular speech often were spelled differently when people bothered to write them down, which is why it took till the 1960s for the standard spelling of kerfuffle to be established.

  The word ‘kerfuffle’ is much more commonly used in Britain and the Commonwealth than in the US. It is said that when the younger President Bush used ‘kerfuffle’ in 2006 during an appearance in Ohio, he created a minor kerfuffle himself, because television channels broadcasting his remarks live had to interrupt their shows to explain the word to Middle America. (This is not entirely surprising, after all, since Bush 43, as he was known, and who had, after all, coined the Bushism ‘misunderestimated’, was not exactly famous for using the language correctly.)

  There’s something about the sound of the word kerfuffle that also lends itself to slightly dismissive usage—a kerfuffle is not just a fuss but a fuss that should not be taken too seriously. I used it, for instance, to refer to the huge fuss made about my misattributed photo on Twitter, because this kerfuffle was a distraction from the real debate that we should have been having, which was whether the public turnout for an Indian prime minister in a foreign country was in any way unprecedented. What Brits might call ‘a storm in a teacup’ can be called a kerfuffle. But a major clash, serious disagreement or monumental fiasco should not be termed a mere kerfuffle, since that would diminish it in the telling.

  So save ‘kerfuffle’ for a trivial row, or an unjustified or exaggerated ruckus. There are plenty of those in social media anyway, all serving as weapons of mass distraction, to take the public’s minds off the real problems we should all be dealing with. Maybe my saying that will cause another kerfuffle!

  24.

  Lethologica

  noun

  THE AFFLICTION OF NOT REMEMBERING

  THE RIGHT WORD FOR THE THOUGHT

  YOU ARE TRYING TO EXPRESS

  USAGE

  He was usually never at a loss for words, but right in

  the middle of an important interview, he suffered

  a crippling bout of lethologica.

  Lethologica happens to everyone—yes, even me! How many of us have gone through that awful feeling when you think of something you know well and wish to convey precisely to the person you are speaking to, but the word for it escapes you? Lethologica is not the same as simply mixing up similar-sounding words, as when people say ‘reticence’ when they mean ‘reluctance’, a common error. It’s when the word you want is trembling at the tip of your tongue but your mind is simply unable to dredge it up from all the many times you have heard or used it before. This too is pretty common: according to the American Psychiatry Association, nine out of ten people will suffer some form of lethologica during

  their lifetimes.

  Lethologica is derived from the Ancient Greek word lethe, ‘forgetfulness’, and another Greek term, logikos, which means ‘of or relating to thought or reason’ (some also relate it to logos, or ‘word’). There’s a great story about the first part of the word lethologica. The Lethe, known as the River of Oblivion, was one of the rivers that flowed through the realm of Hades, the hellish underworld to which, in Greek mythology, you were banished in death. In these tales, the dead were forced to drink from the waters of the Lethe river in order to forget their past l
ives on earth.

  The affliction of an inability to remember the proper word was first identified as a disorder by the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in a 1913 study. But it’s really far too common a problem to be elevated to the medical textbooks. It’s also not incurable—though usually you struggle to remember the right word, and the harder you try, the more elusive it gets. (In the worst cases, that can lead to loganamnosis—when the sufferer from lethogica is so obsessed with trying to remember the word that she couldn’t recall to the point where she’s unable to pay attention to the rest of the conversation.)

  With so much to watch on television these days, especially a wide choice of entertainment on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon, many also suffer from lethonomia, the inability to recall the right name. It’s a harmless enough failing—unless, of course, you happen to be a politician, in which case forgetting the name of a party worker or a constituent is tantamount to ensuring the loss of his or her support.

  I suspect most of my readers will have had an experience of lethologica. You’re talking about someone or something, a situation or a problem, and you are just about to use the word to describe it—and then suddenly you hit a blank. But just when you have parted from the friend you were speaking to—that’s when the words pops up, miraculously and frustratingly. Or worse, just when you are falling asleep, the mind goes, ‘Eureka! That’s it! The word for not remembering the right word—it’s lethologica!’

  25.

  Luddite

  noun

  ONE WHO STRONGLY OPPOSES (OR AT LEAST AVOIDS) THE USE OF NEW TECHNOLOGY

  USAGE

  My aunt is a Luddite; she still refuses to have a mobile phone and insists on retaining her old rotary-dial telephone from the 1960s.

  The term comes from the Luddites, a group of angry and radical textile workers in England who, during a region-wide rebellion from 1811 to 1816, destroyed machinery that was causing them to lose their jobs. It is said they were inspired (but apparently not led) by Ned Ludd of Nottingham, who had acquired some notoriety by destroying, in a fit of rage (or insanity, depending on who was telling the story), a knitting frame in 1779. Luddites argued that the new machines were anti-humanity, since they would displace people, while the many years workers spent learning the skills of their craft would be wasted once automated textile equipment took over their roles. The Luddite insurrection did not go unpunished; factory and mill-owners started shooting protesters, armed soldiers were called in and in response to their spree of destruction, the British Parliament passed the Frame-Breaking Act which made the destruction of knitting frames punishable by death.

  The Luddite movement may have died out soon enough, but the name clung to those who opposed many forms of modern technology over the following two centuries. In India, the communist cadres who smashed computers when they were first introduced into LIC offices and public sector banks in the 1980s did so for exactly the same reasons as their forebears in Nottingham in 1811—they feared the new machines would replace them in their jobs and make their mathematical and computational skills irrelevant. They were Indian Luddites. Today the word is also used more irreverently to refer to anyone resistant to technology; housewives who won’t trust microwave ovens, parents who don’t WhatsApp, middle-aged resisters of smartphones and the like can all be described as Luddites.

  But there are still some serious Luddites around, who don’t agree with the way modern technology is transforming our lives. In April 1996, the Second Luddite Congress met in Barnesville, Ohio, and issued a manifesto proclaiming the birth of Neo-Luddism as ‘a leaderless movement of passive resistance to consumerism and the increasingly bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age’. As with all leaderless movements, however, the Neo-Luddites seem to have faded away without a whimper; Google, another technology they no doubt oppose, records no mention of a Third Luddite Congress.

  26.

  Lunacy

  noun

  THE CONDITION OF BEING A LUNATIC;

  MENTAL UNSOUNDNESS

  USAGE

  This was an act of sheer lunacy on his part;

  what he said and did made no sense and can

  only be blamed on a bout of insanity.

  The moon, in most Indian languages, is a romantic object, associated with love and dreams, and often applied to rare and exceptional individuals—‘chaundvi ka chand’, ‘Eid ka chand’ tend to be used in a complimentary sense, and popular names like Chand, Chander/Chandran, and Shashi/Shashikant/Shashank, all derive from that celestial orb.

  But in mediaeval English, lunacy referred to intermittent periods of insanity, believed to be triggered by the moon’s cycle, rather as animals were said to bay madly on full moon nights. This came in turn from the Old French lunatique, meaning insane, which was derived from the late Latin lunaticus, or ‘moonstruck’ (luna is the Latin for ‘moon’). In those days people thought that mental illness, neurological disorders and even epilepsy were related to the waxing and waning of the moon. The Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Roman historian Pliny the Elder suggested that the brain was the ‘moistest’ organ in the body and so most vulnerable to the pernicious influences of the moon, which triggers the tides. In the Middle Ages, many believed that some humans were transformed into werewolves or vampires

  during a full moon.

  Perhaps this association was because a full moon brought light into the night, thereby confusing animals—and some human beings—with brightness when they were accustomed to darkness, and thus throwing their minds into confusion. As Shakespeare says in Othello:

  ‘It is the very error of the moon.

  She comes more near the earth than she was wont.

  And makes men mad.’

  The idea that lunacy involves acts of madness or folly persisted, even though the correlation between sanity and the phases of the moon stopped being taken seriously in modern times. Typically, some American scholars decided to research the subject: two psychologists and an astronomer did a detailed meta-analysis of the moon’s effects on human behaviour, and their 1985 review of thirty-seven studies entitled ‘Much Ado about the Full Moon’, in the major peer-reviewed journal, Psychological Bulletin, concluded that no effect could be proven and further research was unnecessary. The moon might move the tides, and it even influences the mating cycles of corals and glow-worms, but not, despite all the myths, of humans—not even adolescents.

  The term ‘lunacy’ persisted through the last century, though. Lawyers used it to refer to unsoundness of mind that might make a person incapable of managing their affairs or concluding civil transactions. Indeed, the word ‘lunatic’ appeared in British laws—and therefore in Indian ones—well into the twentieth century, and it was only in 2012 that the US House of Representatives passed legislation (approved earlier by the Senate) removing the word ‘lunatic’ from all federal laws in the US. Today, ‘of unsound mind’ or the Latin expression non compos mentis is preferred by the courts to ‘lunatic’.

  Today it is widely accepted that ‘lunatic’ is an obsolete term that is not used any more to refer to persons suffering from mental illness. ‘Lunacy’ survives, but only in metaphorical and often jocular usage; to use it literally as a synonym for ‘insanity’ would, at the very least, be considered impolite. It’s totally normal to enjoy looking at the moon! (Of course, Shashi would say that . . .)

  27.

  Lynch

  verb

  INFLICT SEVERE, AND OFTEN FATAL,

  BODILY PUNISHMENT ON SOMEONE,

  WITHOUT LEGAL SANCTION

  USAGE

  The mob lynched a man accused of slaughtering

  a cow, even while he protested that the meat he

  was carrying was that of a buffalo.

  The word ‘lynch’, like ‘boycott’ and ‘macadam’, comes from the name of a person. In this case, there are two possible claimants for this eponymous distinction.

  The expression derives from the American Lynch law of 1811, c
overing punishment without trial, named after either William Lynch (1742–1820) of Virginia, who in about 1780 led a vigilance committee to keep order in his home town of Pittsylvania during the American Revolution, or Charles Lynch (1736– 96), a pro-revolutionary Virginia magistrate who fined and imprisoned British loyalists in his district without trial at about the same time, and got a law passed by the American government exonerating him for his actions.

  A nineteenth-century dictionary, the Century Dictionary, published in 1895, defines lynching as ‘lawless concert or action among a number of members of the community, to supply the want of criminal justice or to anticipate its delays, or to inflict a penalty demanded by public opinion, though in defiance of the laws’.

  Lynching involves what is often called ‘mob justice’, since it is always conducted by a mob, and always in the name of executing an act of ‘justice’ that the authorities are deemed to be too soft, too cautious (or too hamstrung by due process) to execute themselves.

  Lynching dispenses summary justice, often unjustly, and without the authority of the law, in retribution for a crime or public offence. In America this usually included flogging and ‘tarring-and-feathering’, where the targeted person was doused in liquid tar and feathers were stuck all over his person, so when the tar dried he was reduced to a figure of ridicule and paraded through the town to be hissed at for his sins. At first this kind of action targeted people suspected of crimes in the frontier regions of the Wild West, though soon enough the target list was broadened to include slave owners lynching abolitionists and blacks trying to escape slavery, who were often hanged in public for their efforts (racial lynching).