Onslaught in conversation

From: David Cake <davidc_at_cs.uwa.edu.au>
Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 11:07:53 +0800

>*Back to alienation, why didn't anyone see the obvious parallell
>between Onslaught and Lobo? There might be another reason for the
>discrepancy between his high language skills and lower level of
>shown aptitude: He is simply a master of all the words for killing,
>mutilating, eviscerating etc in all languages he knows.

        My Japanese is like this - its learnt mostly from karate, so I can say 'knee kick to the groin', but not 'what is your name?'. So I can easily imagine Onslaught learning all his language skills from various martial artists that he has met, or only in order to take up military posts, and thus being somewhat restricted in topics of conversation. And I guess other people might interpret that as being fairly stupid. Maybe the real story on Onslaugts language skills is not 'mastery, but pretends to have a lower percentage', but 'he thinks its mastery, because he knows all the words he ever wants to use, but its actually more like 30%, just specialised'. I can easily imagine Onslaught never noticing that he doesn't know the word for 'fun', or the different words for wine and beer, but feeling annoyed because he can't remember the word for 'spleen'.

        Cheers

               David

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