12/11/2002 - 3:46 p.m.

Old English, Middle, a dialect pure.

Get ready, I'm in a rather sort of sarcastic lecturing mood today. If you're not up for it, read only the next paragraph and move on.

I'm going to Chuck E. Cheese's tonight with a bunch of other theatre people. Look at me being social! Well, first off, it's Chuck E. Cheese's, you can't drink yourself silly there, and second of all, I've not been there in ages. I remember when it used to be Showbiz Pizza and had Billy Bob instead of Chucky. I was, in fact, a member of the Billy Bob fan club and as such received a calandar every year until I was about 12. That's probably the last time I was there, but it'll be great to go again. And, yes, I realise, this is lost entirely to my International audience.

Fairy is to dwarfs as blank is to blank. (This is called an analogy children, and will come in quite handy when you take your SAT's, now humour me and give it a try.)

Those of the Tolkien pursuasion wouldn't consider using any other words, because when we use those words, we are speaking of entirely different creatures. A fairy is Tinkerbell. There's nothing more to it than that. Faerie is the category into which all fantastical things belong, and as such those things are called faeries. Tolkien forever despised of the Tinkerbell type of creature, and also of those silly Santa Claus-esque Elves, because they were really just a knockoff of a much better world that Tolkien unlocked for us. Like I say in my profile, it was there all along, and Tolkien simply made it avaliable to us.

Tolkien was a linguist and so understood the importance of names. It is in this manner that when describing short people who delved the earth for jewels he found it easiest to change the plural form of dwarf into dwarves, because it gave the connotation that he was looking for, but seperated them from Snow White's childish dwarfs. In Dr. Tolkiens own words: "It is to mark this that I have ventured to use the form dwarves and so remove them a little, perhaps, from the sillier tales of those latter days."

This basis in language is Tolkien's genius. Everything relates to each other through the language. For instance, we were being told in Oral Comm that English was difficult simply because there are so many words that are the same word, but with different meaning. To stand up, and to take a stand on a subject. Well, if you ask me, that's not so very difficult, the meanings are related- standing up and taking a stand both mean, essntially, to raise something- whether it be a body, or an opinion.

This is the same manner in which I went about my French vocabulary- most of it can all be related back to some Latin or Greek root that can be found in English. In a round about way, that word can be modified to a rather close similie for the French word that doesn't sound peculiar in every day English. The only thing difficult about languages is grammer and conjugation, and that's only difficult for me because I never had to learn it in English the way other people did. It's something I was always able to understand, and so I can't break down French conjugations to have English equivilents. I know what English word goes where, though I may have no idea what it's particular verb tense is.