<p>Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, known for his penchant for rarely used, difficult-to-pronounce English words, on Friday threw in another head scratcher – floccinaucinihilipilification.</p>.<p>The noun, which had Twitterati once again running for their dictionaries, came up as Tharoor engaged in friendly banter with TRS working president K T Rama Rao over Covid-19 medicine names.</p>.<p>Oxford dictionary describes floccinaucinihilipilification as “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless”.</p>.<p>It started with Rama Rao, or KTR as he is popularly called, wondering why medicine names are so tough to pronounce.</p>.<p>"On a lighter note, any idea who comes up with these unpronounceable names for meds? - Posaconazole - Cresemba - Tocilzumab - Remdesivir - Liposomal Amphoterecin - Flavipiravir - Molnupiravir - Baricitinib. And the list goes on…," he said on Thursday night.</p>.<p>He tagged the tweet and added in another post, tongue firmly in cheek, “I suspect @ShashiTharoor Ji Pakka has a role to play in this .”</p>.<p>Tharoor responded to the Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader, popularly known as KTR, in the same spirit.</p>.<p>"Not guilty! How can you indulge in such floccinaucinihilipilification, @KTRTRS?" "Left to me I'd happily call them "CoroNil", "CoroZero", & even "GoCoroNaGo!" But these pharmacists are more procrustean....," the MP from Thiruvananthapuram tweeted.</p>.<p>The author-politician had slipped in another not-used-so-often word. But there was scarcely any attention on ‘procrustean’, an adjective defined by Oxford as “(especially of a framework or system) enforcing uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality”.</p>.<p>The focus was on the many-syllabled floccinaucinihilipilification -- 29 letters and three more than the English alphabet.</p>.<p>According to the Cambridge dictionary, “The honour of being the longest non-technical word goes to floccinaucinihilipilification.”</p>.<p>It also said it’s an 18th-century coinage that combines four Latin prefixes meaning "nothing".</p>.<p>Several people responded to Tharoor's post, with many joking about how difficult it was to pronounce the word and many others sharing memes on it.</p>.<p>Tharoor has been a man of many words earlier too. In the past, he has stumped people with rarely used English words such as "farrago" and "troglodyte". While farrago means a confused mixture, a troglodyte means a person regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned. </p>
<p>Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, known for his penchant for rarely used, difficult-to-pronounce English words, on Friday threw in another head scratcher – floccinaucinihilipilification.</p>.<p>The noun, which had Twitterati once again running for their dictionaries, came up as Tharoor engaged in friendly banter with TRS working president K T Rama Rao over Covid-19 medicine names.</p>.<p>Oxford dictionary describes floccinaucinihilipilification as “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless”.</p>.<p>It started with Rama Rao, or KTR as he is popularly called, wondering why medicine names are so tough to pronounce.</p>.<p>"On a lighter note, any idea who comes up with these unpronounceable names for meds? - Posaconazole - Cresemba - Tocilzumab - Remdesivir - Liposomal Amphoterecin - Flavipiravir - Molnupiravir - Baricitinib. And the list goes on…," he said on Thursday night.</p>.<p>He tagged the tweet and added in another post, tongue firmly in cheek, “I suspect @ShashiTharoor Ji Pakka has a role to play in this .”</p>.<p>Tharoor responded to the Telangana Rashtra Samiti leader, popularly known as KTR, in the same spirit.</p>.<p>"Not guilty! How can you indulge in such floccinaucinihilipilification, @KTRTRS?" "Left to me I'd happily call them "CoroNil", "CoroZero", & even "GoCoroNaGo!" But these pharmacists are more procrustean....," the MP from Thiruvananthapuram tweeted.</p>.<p>The author-politician had slipped in another not-used-so-often word. But there was scarcely any attention on ‘procrustean’, an adjective defined by Oxford as “(especially of a framework or system) enforcing uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality”.</p>.<p>The focus was on the many-syllabled floccinaucinihilipilification -- 29 letters and three more than the English alphabet.</p>.<p>According to the Cambridge dictionary, “The honour of being the longest non-technical word goes to floccinaucinihilipilification.”</p>.<p>It also said it’s an 18th-century coinage that combines four Latin prefixes meaning "nothing".</p>.<p>Several people responded to Tharoor's post, with many joking about how difficult it was to pronounce the word and many others sharing memes on it.</p>.<p>Tharoor has been a man of many words earlier too. In the past, he has stumped people with rarely used English words such as "farrago" and "troglodyte". While farrago means a confused mixture, a troglodyte means a person regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned. </p>