Kottayam: Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram Shashi Tharoor is at it again. After 'floccinaucinihilipilification', his latest adventure in English language is 'schadenfreude'.
In a tweet, supporting Congress leader P Chidambaram, who was arrested by the CBI on Wednesday night, Tharoor hailed the former finance minister saying: "It is a tribute to your strength of character that you are standing up to persecution &character assassination w/ courage & confidence. I believe justice will prevail in the end. Till then we will have to allow some malicious minds their schadenfreude."
According to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, Schadenfreude means pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune. The origin of the word is from German Schaden 'harm' + Freude 'joy'.
Tharoor's remark came as a response to an old tweet (Sept 24, 2018) by Chidambaram wherein he said: 'To a person running scared, every shadow will be a demon'. Tharoor's tweet was retweeted 1400 times and it received around 7200 likes.
Tharoor's adventures in the language has given him a cult status among English-reading Indians.
After the launch of his new book 'The Paradoxical Prime Minister', Tharoor took to Twitter to say that it is "more than just a 400-page exercise in floccinaucinihilipilification" on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The word was once heard in the pre-TV era quizzing circuit. It is among the longest English words, meaning the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. The similar other word then was
'honoricabilitudinitatibus'. It means 'invincible glorious honourableness'.
His tweet that journalist Arnab Goswami's reportage on the death of Tharoor's wife, Sunanda Pushkar, was an 'exasperating farrago of distortions, misrepresentations & outright lies being broadcast by an unprincipled showman masquerading as a journalist' had earned him instant fame.