Flocci-nocci-what?

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!