These scientific skeptical essays are a representative sample of the author’s ouvre as a linguist and thinker. It comprises some leading-edge articles, some of them of a timeless character and game-changing, as Probal Dasgupta says in his foreword, sedulously wrought academic exercises on linguistic structure, on the language of literature which field bristles with seriously skewed perceptions, on translation as a phenomenon, on art and literature whose internal expanses are in the author's view seriously skewed as well. This becomes clear, in this limited expressive canvas of the possibilities of the author’s being, in articles like The Language of Literature: An Articulation of its Distance from Everyday Speech, Poetic License: A Linguist’s Eye-view, Language and Literature: Clearing the Ground. For example, as is argued persuasively in Art cannot Own What Reason Disowns: Caste in Kannada Literature, all art needs to make life and the world sentients live in beautiful and magically alive, and not dignify and legitimise as a matter of course ‘sewers in spate’ that human ethoses may empirically be. Art needs to operate within the boundaries defined by ethical salubriousness and civilisational salutariness. The locution ‘poetic license’ is an egregious misnomer (Poetic License: A Linguist’s Eye-view). All papers here on linguistic structure are originally researched ones. The notion of language, as has been known for some time now, has been chronically misperceived. Some of the papers try to repair this. The article, Language and Culture: Some Misgivings, for example, and the one on the Chomskyan perspective on the epistemics of natural language.weiterlesen