The dwarfs of our vocabulary
blog.oup.com
blog.oup.com
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.
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.
ADDED from the link:
Tolkien himself admitted that “dwarves” was a misspelling. In a letter to Stanley Unwin, the publisher of The Hobbit, he wrote:
"No reviewer (that I have seen), although all have carefully used the correct dwarfs themselves, has commented on the fact (which I only became conscious of through reviews) that I use throughout the ‘incorrect’ plural dwarves. I am afraid it is just a piece of private bad grammar, rather shocking in a philologist; but I shall have to go on with it."
In English the only correct plural of dwarf is dwarfs, and the adjective
is dwarfish. In this story dwarves and dwarvish are used, but only when
speaking of the ancient people to whom Thorin Oakenshield and his
companions belonged.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dwarves&year_s...
Dwarvish is a more unusual world and it doesn't surprise me that's almost exclusively tied to Tolkien and derivatives.
etymonline points out that the form with a better-in-some-sense claim to be "correct" is dwarrows, not "dwarfs". But that term was uncommon enough that it completely died out. ( http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dwarf )
As I mentioned sidethread, "dwarves" is a natural extension of what happens with other common English words ending in f, making it difficult to argue that it is somehow incorrect.
This form appears in LOTR in "Dwarrowdelf", given as the translation of the Dwarvish name "Khazad-dûm" of Moria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moria_(Middle-earth)
> It's a mark of the popularity of his books that people assume that's the correct spelling in English
It's more likely a mark of the fact that people are familiar with other common English nouns ending in f, such as wolf(wolves) / leaf(leaves) / hoof(hooves) / elf(elves) / staff(staves). (Granted, some of those are less common than others.)
I see no reason to believe that "dwarf" was the odd noun that resisted that process. Making Middle-Earth language "stand apart from English" by applying a perfectly normal rule of English would be an odd thing to try.
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.
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.
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"