This stratum is ascribed to a "Mediterranean" language believed to have dominated large parts of the ancient world before the arrival of the Indo-European peoples.
Perhaps politicians feel they can justify their harsh language, believing that blaming and shaming will encourage or "nudge" people into changing their behaviour.
David Foster Wallace, who briefly attended the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Harvard after writing a first-rate undergraduate philosophy thesis (published in December by Columbia University Press as "Fate, Time, and Language"), believed that fiction offered a way to capture the emotional mood of a philosophical work.
For the sake of argument, I am prepared to accept - and indeed, to use their own language, believe - that Tony Blair, George W Bush and the much-derided neocons all did and do believe what they tell us they believe and that their intentions were, and are, entirely honourable.
What is my responsibility to those who sent me off with a stranger – one who didn't look like me and didn't speak my language – believing that they were investing in our shared future, and that I would someday make things better for them?
Many believe that every theory should incorporate a linguistic component that yields meanings, in much the same way that many philosophers of language believe there to be such a separate component.
"If you come into this country it should be a prerequisite in certain jobs like being a doctor or a nurse that you should speak the language of the land and that language, believe it or not, even here for the majority of people in Wales, is English".
They were from a different place, speak a different language, believe in a different god, dress in different clothes.
In a speech before a crowd estimated at 300,000, Jinnah stated (in English) that Urdu alone should be the national language, believing a single language was needed for a nation to remain united.
But Ripley's legacy is still alive and well today in newspapers, books, museums, TV shows, film, on the web AND in one of the most popular and oft repeated phrases in the English language: Believe It or Not!
