Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Back on 7 April, Philip B. Corbett’s “After Deadline” column in the NYT (which “examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times”) noted a new stylebook entry on dwarf, which begins:

dwarf(s) (n.) Use this as the usual term for people with a genetic condition resulting in unusually short stature. Midget, once used to describe dwarfs of otherwise normal proportions …

Two commenters objected strongly to dwarfs as a plural of dwarf. These objections surely arise in part from an adherence to One Right Way: variant usages are not allowed, so if the writers themselves use dwarves, dwarfs must be wrong. But something further is going on here: a belief in the superiority of irregular forms over regular forms, especially where the writer believes the irregulars are older. (At least some usage critics seem to think that regularization is the work of the ignorant, the less educated, the lazy, and so on.)

But sometimes, as in this case, critics are wrong about the history and about current usage.

[Note: I had the attributions to commenters wrong in my earlier version.]  

Here’s the first commenter, Rob Arndt, in comment 11:

Why “dwarfs” as the plural noun? “Dwarves” used to be usual; “knives” still is… I’d prefer to go back to “rooves” and “wharves” as well.

Where to begin? Well, note that OED2 (1989) says flatly that the plural is dwarfs, with cites of this form from 1664 (and only one cite for dwarves, from 1819). More recent dictionaries seem mostly to say things like: pl. dwarfs, also dwarves.

So where does dwarves come from? From J.R.R. Tolkien, who introduced it as an innovation in The Hobbit (1937), as a parallel to the plural elves (which genuinely is an old form). Tolkien’s authority and example seem to have led many people to believe that it’s the only correct form.

Meanwhile, roofs is the standard plural, and has been around since at least 1611; rooves does occur, but as a dialect form and as an occasional analogical formation. And wharves and wharfs are now variant plurals. Each word has its own history and sociolinguistic profile. There is both regularization and irregularization (sometimes by analogy, sometimes in playfulness), and some regularizations become standard.

Now, the second commenter, Claudia, in comment #22, going for bald assertion and withering scorn:

“Dwarfs”? Seriously? Since when does the NYT dictate incorrect spelling? The verb “to dwarf” is conjugated as “it dwarfs”, but the noun, plural of dwarf, is definitely dwarves.

Confusing verbs and nouns again, are we? Shame! 😉

Notice that Claudia is so sure that her opinion is the only correct one that it doesn’t occur to her to check to see whether the Times stylesheet might not be on to something.

(There are, of course, a number of different senses of dwarf, and many people who have both plurals differentiate senses, at least in part, by the choice of plural: dwarves for the beings of legend, but dwarfs for the people in the stylesheet entry and for dwarf stars.)

This entry was posted on May 19, 2009 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Inflection, Language change, Morphology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.