Interlocutor: A 4-letter word!

It takes some doing for an Indian minister to trip over a five-syllable, 12-letter word! Laurel and Hardy never did it even in their most comic reel-life moments. Neither did the three Stooges or Buster Keaton. Nor did the most erudite of the Marx brothers, Groucho. However, Shashi Tharoor has tripped again and that too on Saudi soil and over the word interlocutor which, the dictionary tells us, literally means someone who speaks in between. Interlocutor is not the same as intermediary that means someone who mediates in a dispute between two sides. If Tharoor still managed to trip over the 12-letter word, it was because the omniscient media pointed out that the minister of state (MoS) for external affairs should not have suggested the Saudis play an interlocutor’s role in an Indo-Pak context, given India’s policy that mediators had no role to play vis-a-vis bilateral issues. And so what if on the flight back from Riyadh, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh mentioned that he had suggested that the Saudi monarch use his good offices to persuade Pakistan to desist from the path of aiding, abetting and inspiring terrorism in India. A royal word of advice is apparently not the same as mediating.

However, by then, the Indian electronic media had gone to town on Tharoor’s use of the word interlocutor. One TV news channel even called the MoS a serial offender when it came to saying things that not only became the focal point of televised chat shows but also invited a stream of conscious criticism from Indian political parties opposing the Congress-led coalition government. However , there is a positive side to all this. Television-watching school kids can improve their vocabulary by learning the difference between five-syllable words like interlocutor and six-syllable ones like intermediary to an extent where even TV need no longer be referred to as the idiot box! As Groucho Marx once quipped, “I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on, I go into another room and read a good book.”