'Alas, Kiran': Shashi Tharoor Finds Error In 'Amazing' Example Of Rhopalic Sentence Shared By Biocon Chief

Interestingly, Shashi Tharoor had shared the same sentence in 2018, and called it ‘Quite a feat’.

Shashi Tharoor responded to Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw's tweet ( Image Source :Twitter )

New Delhi: An “amazing” rhopalic sentence shared by senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Twitter in 2018 made a comeback on his timeline Saturday, this time posted by another well known personality who, ironically, tagged the MP in her tweet.

Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw took to Twitter Saturday to share an image with a chunk of text that read: “I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunication's incomprehensibleness.”

The text message also said whosoever created the sentence “must be a vocabulary GENIUS”.

Posting the image, Mazumdar-Shaw wrote: “Something for ⁦@ShashiTharoor‘s amusement!”.

Quote-tweeting the post later in the day, the Thiruvananthapuram MP, however, sought to point out an error in the text, effectively meaning it was not entirely an example of a rhopalic sentence in which each word contains one letter or syllable more than the preceding word.

“Alas, Kiran, ‘incomprehensibleness’ is not a word. It's ‘incomprehensibility’, and that's only 19 letters…” Tharoor wrote.

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 given sentence, apparently from Dmitri Borgmann’s book ‘Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities’, has the first word one letter long, the second two letters long, the third three letters, the seventh seven, the eleventh 11 and the last, ‘incomprehensibleness’, which is the twentieth word, 20 letters long. 

The Congress leader had shared the same post on January 7, 2018, saying it was “Quite a feat!”. Interestingly, he had not disputed the claim at the time.

Received on whats app. Quite a feat! pic.twitter.com/JfAQrwwt8V

— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) January 7, 2018

Like last time, this time too Tharoor’s tweet, as also Mazumdar-Shaw’s, are being shared widely, with Twitter users posting comments about the Congress leader’s proficiency in the English language.