The Anaphora to Zeugma of the Queen's English

Shashi Tharoor's book is a logophile's candy shop, full of fun, surprises and insights

- Satish Padmanabhan

IF you have a bittersweet longing for something absent in your life, or you have experienced something once, loved and lost, and may never experience it again and are left with feelings of love, happiness, sadness, hope, emptiness and desire—and if you speak Portuguese—you would say you are feeling saudade. It is the ‘pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy’. Alas, there is no equivalent for it in English. As there is none for the Russian word toska, which in Vladimir Nabokov’s description is: “At its deepest and most painful, is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning.”

There are gems like these in Shashi Tharoor’s latest ‘verbal callisthenics’, the only kind of exercise he says he can do, A Wonderland of Words. The book has 101 short essays on words, written for the Dubai-based newspaper