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The dwarfs of our vocabulary

60 points| Petiver | 8 years ago |blog.oup.com

16 comments

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[+] tasty_freeze|8 years ago|reply
Despite all the crud on the internet, it is distressing to me that there are an uncountable number of interesting, quality sites like the one linked here. My temptation is to bookmark it, but then it will just join hundreds of other quality bookmarks that I don't have time to follow up. Maybe it is better not knowing what I'm missing.
[+] mkbnnh|8 years ago|reply
That's what Pinboard is for.
[+] badloginagain|8 years ago|reply
Shouldn't it be dwarves?
[+] pebers|8 years ago|reply
No. "Dwarves" and "dwarvish" were deliberately introduced by Tolkien as a way of making Middle-Earth language stand apart from English. He mentions it as a deliberate choice in the foreword.

It's a mark of the popularity of his books that people assume that's the correct spelling in English, because that's the most common form of it they've seen, but "dwarfs" is the correct usage outside Middle-Earth.