Two pedantic nerds should not be allowed to come together in a small space. In any case, the guy who runs quiz night at The Black Swan and I have a history of locking horns.
On Halloween, we had a terrible row about Greek semantics. He asked, ‘What animal would you turn into if you were suffering from lycanthropy?’ I wrote down ‘wolf’ and assured my team that we were on firm ground as I happened to be an avid reader of period horror stories.
But when it came to the marking, the pub quiz compère said the answer was ‘werewolf’ and that we couldn’t have a point for writing wolf. ‘Look here,’ I argued, ‘if you are suffering from the mythical disease of werewolfism you don’t change into a werewolf. You are a werewolf. A werewolf is a man who changes into a wolf, ergo the answer is wolf. Not werewolf.
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