
The dwarfs of our vocabulary - Petiver
https://blog.oup.com/2017/06/131663/
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tasty_freeze
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.

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mkbnnh
That's what Pinboard is for.

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seszett
[https://pinboard.in](https://pinboard.in) "Social Bookmarking for Introverts"

What does it have to do specifically for introverts though?

It just looks like a unified bookmarking service, which doesn't solve GP's
problem and doesn't seem to have much to do with being an introvert or not.

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badloginagain
Shouldn't it be dwarves?

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pebers
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.

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CrystalLangUser
The “correct usage” is what’s commonly used by people, not what’s technically
correct.

If people use dwarves, then it’s correct to use it regardless of origins.

It’s the same thing with the whole octopus plural thing. Both octopi and
octopuses are completely correct despite octopedes technically being the right
answer.

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CrystalLangUser
Downvote if you want. Being smart in programming or business stuff doesn't
mean you understand linguistics. Organic language does not adhere to logical
rules.

Many people (who don't actually study language or the evolution thereof) jump
to a Prescriptivist viewpoint at first. Dictionaries follow actual English
usage, not the other way around (Descriptivist).

I can't fault you; in order to teach English a prescriptivist mindset
naturally has to be applied. So we teach Standard English's rules.

However, go compare various English style guides and tell me if they are the
same.

Dwarves & Octopi are correct, because that's what people use. If octopedes was
used instead, it would be correct and it wouldn't have a red squiggly line.

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gumby
I wouldn't downvote your comment but I can see why some would. The discussion
is not about prescriptivism vs descriptivism but rather the origin of a
specific wend in the language and whether it is ideopathic or not.

Even those who most joyfully embrace the flexibility of language need to be
largely linguistically conservative else the meaning of a sentence is lost
(consider Lafferty's story where the language changed every day -- Nine
Hundred Grandmothers IIRC).

And in that list your condemnation of "correct" is itself conservatively
prescriptivist as I have always read it (in this context) as a a shorthand
extension of "typically customary" or "etymologically consistent"

