Shashi Tharoor's Reply To Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw On Rhopalic Sentence Wins Internet

Shashi Tharoor never fails to create a buzz with his profound knowledge of the English language and exotic vocabulary. He showed his talent yet again on Saturday, while replying to Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw on Twitter.

Ms Mazumdar-Shaw posted a photo tagging the Congress leader, which contained a message: “I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunication's incomprehensibleness.”

The message claimed that the person who wrote the sentence must be a vocabulary genius.

The Biocon chief said in her tweet: “Something for @ShashiTharoor's amusement!”

The Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram replied to her saying: “Alas, Kiran, "incomprehensibleness" is not a word. It's "incomprehensibility", and that's only 19 letters…”

Alas, Kiran, "incomprehensibleness" is not a word. It's "incomprehensibility", and that's only 19 letters...@kiranshaw https://t.co/vYQ0zMDCKD

— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) April 30, 2022

The sentence is an example of a rhopalic sentence, which according to Merriam-Webster has each succeeding unit in a prosodic series larger or longer than the preceding one. This means each word contains one letter, or one syllable, more than the previous word. From the way it reads, the 20th word “incomprehensibleness” is 20 letters long. But Mr Tharoor corrected the mistake, which gave a chance to the social media to celebrate.

“One will require pandiculation after reading this!” said a user.

“This is like two space scientists discussing path trajectory of Mars and we are listening with 10th standard knowledge of physics,” tweeted another user.

“My boy strikes like a Rattle Snake when it comes to English,” a third user commented.

Interestingly, the Congress leader had himself shared the “amazing sentence” on Twitter in January, 2018.

The rophalic sentence is an interesting example from English. There is also a toy programme, which lets users create their own rophalic sentences.