Shashi Tharoor responds to Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw on rhopalic sentence, amazes netizens – Times of India

It started with Mazumdar-Shaw sharing an example of a rhopalic sentence on Twitter tagging Tharoor. For those who don’t know, a rhopalic sentence is the one “having successive lines of a stanza increasing in length by the addition of one element (as a syllable or metrical foot),” according to Merriam-Webster dictionary.

In this case, the sentence in the picture read: “I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunication’s incomprehensibleness.” It further read in the picture that it’s an amazing sentence since the first word in the sentence had one alphabet, the second had two, and so on and so forth.

Mazumdar-Shaw had posted the picture with a caption: “Something for @ShashiTharoor’s amusement!”

To this, Tharoor replied to her pointing out a mistake in the sentence! His tweet read: “Alas, Kiran, “incomprehensibleness” is not a word. It’s “incomprehensibility”, and that’s only 19 letters…”

While Tharoor’s impeccable hold on the English language and his ability to point out a grammatical error, which most people wouldn’t have known of, amazed many people, some others disagreed with Tharoor’s statement thus starting a debate on Twitter. Here’s what some netizens wrote:

What are your thoughts on it? Tell us in the comments below.

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