Saturday, January 14, 2023

Fortune Quote #3826

It may be observed that in this book... the form "dwarves" is used,
although the dictionaries tell us that the plural of "dwarf" is "dwarfs".
It should be "dwarrows" (or "dwerrows"), if singular and plural had each
gone its own way down the years, as have "man" and "men", or "goose"
and "geese". But we no longer speak of a dwarf as often as we do of a man,
or even of a goose, and memories have not been fresh enough among Men to
keep hold of a special plural for a race now abandoned to folk-tales, where
at least a shadow of truth is preserved, or at last to nonsense-stories in
which they have become mere figures of fun. -- J.R.R. Tolkien, The
Lord of the Rings, Appendix F

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