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Congress MP Shashi Tharoor’s latest exchange on X (formerly Twitter) has sparked equal parts laughter and confusion, as netizens scrambled to decode a flurry of complex vocabulary--only for the whole thing to turn out to be a joke.
It began when Tharoor took a swipe at US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s recent remark describing India as “a bit recalcitrant.” In trademark style, the MP wrote, “Far better to be recalcitrant, than to be tractable, submissive or acquiescent to injustice.”
A parody of ‘Tharoor english’
An X user, mimicking what many call “Shashi Tharoor English,” fired back with a long-winded sentence packed with obscure words: "That's fine Shashi but what about the abnegation of camaraderie in the egregious enfranchise that comes from the fatuous of the grandiloquent at the behest of impecunious and insidious semaphore?"
Puzzled, Tharoor replied in Hindi: “Bhai aap kya kehna chahte ho? [Brother, what do you want to convey?]”
AI steps in to decode chaos
The user doubled down, posting an equally convoluted Hindi sentence about “statutory discourse” and “philosophical replies” getting lost in “pointless complexity.”
As the thread went viral, one user asked AI chatbot Grok to break down all words longer than five letters. Grok dutifully translated them from “abnegation” (self-denial) to “impecunious” (penniless)—before finally offering a “poor man’s English” version of the post: "Messy legal chats get tangled in weird ideas and unexpected twists, so the smart reply vanishes into pointless confusion."
‘Even British wouldn’t get this English’
The exchange triggered a wave of amused reactions. One user joked, “End-to-end encryption.” Another wrote, “Itna hard English to angrez bhi naa smjhe” (Even the British wouldn’t understand such difficult English).
Perplexed, yet another person asked Grok to “explain it in poor man’s English,” leading to the chatbot’s blunt conclusion — it was “just gibberish for laughs” and a parody of Tharoor’s famously grand vocabulary.
English (US) ·