Nassim employs playfulness, whimsy, and a punishment involving tomatoes to right that linguistic wrong, with the help of the audience and a different actor each night – Chris Thorpe at the performance I saw – who is seeing the script for the first time.
The first is the simple ethical matter of righting the wrongs of colonial linguistic supremacy.
The name Hamito-Semitic (or Semito-Hamitic), although occasionally still used, is largely considered obsolete; many scholars reject it because it is linguistically wrong there is no linguistic entity "Hamitic" to be contrasted, as a whole, to "Semitic".
One important reason for such discrepancies is the relatively large number of individual and methodological errors in linguistic datasets 19; this is reflected by numerous cases of wrong translations, wrong homology assessments (incorrect identification of cognate words), and undetected cases of lateral transfer (borrowing) 17, 18.
Fun with words (remember Zembla?): a comma in the wrong place; the origins of the fanboy; Twitter as a linguistic corpus; a truly remarkable pun on a famous line in Tacitus.
And in death-penalty cases wrong convictions might be impossible to put right.Police interrogations also follow linguistic guidelines about direct and indirect speech that seem odd and unreliable.
Such linguistic precision in the face of gore rubbed me wrong in other stories -- it felt chilly and mannered, a stylistic tic -- but in this one it fits.
The result is a historical catalogue of verbal gaffes, from spoonerisms and Freudian slips to "eggcorns"—wrong words, such as "pre-emptory," that sometimes make it into the linguistic mainstream.
The result is a historical catalogue of verbal gaffes, from spoonerisms and Freudian slips to "eggcorns" — wrong words, such as "pre-emptory," that sometimes make it into the linguistic mainstream.
