Those who have been through the mental,
physical and emotional wringer that is the Indian educational system, chiefly
of the variety that slotted teenage children into two groups: (prospective)
engineers & doctors, and further classified the former class of adolescents
into GRE-takers and CAT-crackers, will be no strangers to the art of expanding
one’s English vocabulary by committing to memory words that drip with preponderance,
sound staggeringly pretentious when used, and that lends one the presumptuousness
needed for floccinaucinihilipilification of the system that produced them.
Like any corporate group, your vocabulary
also has two pathways for its growth strategy: organic and inorganic. Some choose to go about it in the organic way:
boring, old-fashioned. Gleaned from reading books of various genres and periods
across one’s lifetime. Some choose inorganic, achieved by spending a weekend
with Barron’s. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I belong to the former
group and whether or not I turned up my nose at the latter. Of course, there
are nihilists who don’t believe that words are our ultimate source of magic, and
drip disdain,” Say, you really think knowing gasconade from gasbag is going to save you when
the cyborgs come for us?” To them, at the risk of repeating myself, I have just
one thing to say, “You, madam, are a first-rate floccinaucinihilipilificator!” Bam!
QED et al.
Secretly, I had to agree with
them, though, that some words have only curiosity value and cannot be expected
to pop up in any conversation, particularly if the interlocutors have to
maintain straight faces. And particularly if you don’t want to the give the
other party a chance to smirk (as a beloved period character said once), “My, my,
have you swallowed a dictionary?”
Until recently.
For those of us who are in drab
corporate jobs or stuck in high-octane dealing rooms where the only scope of
learning or rediscovering words are either if they are given to a newly-minted
charting pattern or creative expletives hurled at the unexpected turns being
taken by inflation or the inversion of yield curves (I can I can neither
confirm nor deny whether I belong to the latter group), deliverance arrives
from a completely astonishing quarter. In the form of policymakers of the
central bank, no less, deigning to use words that you had no hope of glimpsing
outside of your long-forgotten and much-maligned study material.
To my old friends, the vocab- floggers,
I can finally say that ‘curiosity’ words have finally found a useful economic
function: the much-vaunted ‘surprise element’ in the policymaker’s toolkit.
I rest my case.
Heck, not yet. Just one parting shot.
If you can keep your vocab when all about you,
Are losing theirs
and blaming it on you,
If you can tell the difference between capacious and commodious
And yet not equivocate
too
Then you can be a central banker, my girl!
