Author Archives: Kniffler

More two-letter words for Scrabble

The two-letter word viewer has been updated to include three new two-letter words for 2019. Both the North America (TWL) and International (CSW) lexicons will now include OK and EW. From players, the general reaction to EW was “ok”, and to OK was “ew”. The International lexicon update also includes ZE, the gender-neutral third person singular subjective pronoun. I wonder if the categorisation system needs (or will need) a category of words that are unfamiliar not because they are old but because they are young.

Ruminations on language evolution, the editorial decision-making of lexicon compilation, lawn-defence, etc., are left as an exercise for the reader.

The One Hundred and Twenty-Four Shortest Words in Scrabble

An unhealthy degree of familiarity with the permissible two-letter words is one of the early warning signs of a Scrabble addict. International tournament Scrabble permits 124 two letter words, but only around half of them are everyday words, with the rest an odd mix of variant spellings, foreign-derived obscurities, and written forms of things you didn’t know were words: like the letter R, spelled AR, obviously, or the expression of scepticism produced when first seeing it played, spelled HM (or HMM). For those people who imagine the game is about playing words from one’s own working vocabulary, it can be quite annoying when an opponent drops GU and points smugly at the appropriate page in the definitionless lexicon rather than talking convincingly about their keen interest in Shetland Island folk music.

So, for anyone fed up of being on either end of that kind of conversation, here is a handy semi-interactive visual guide to the two letter words in Scrabble.

Despite usually playing the role of smug GU-player, I have some sympathy for the other point of view. Here’s five 2-letter words doing a bad job of justifying their place in the lexicon:

CH

The Collins dictionary (i.e. International Scrabble) description even says “obsolete form of I”. I chalk this one up to lobbying from players who desperately wanted to be able to play C in a two-letter word.

DI

Collins claims this is a plural form of DEUS. I mean, DEUS isn’t really English either, except as a Plantagenet-era interjection. Is this the foreign word in multiple phrases thing? Though I tip my hat to the scholars trying to make “di ex machina” happen, I am unconvinced by it’s Scrabbleworthiness.

OD

A hypothetical force proposed by Baron Karl von Reichenbach as pervading all nature and accounting for various physical and psychological phenomena. Here’s a brief history. The hypothesis was not very successful. In W. Gregory’s translation of von Reichenbach’s reseaches, we are told “the author has given to the new imponderable the name of Od, a name not possessing any meaning, but admitting of being compounded, according to the genius of the German language.” It didn’t catch on at the time, it’s not going to now, and failed coinages are always a little tragic. Best to lay it to rest.

That kind of universal-fluid-life-force theory was big in the mid-19th century. Bulwer-Lytton’s VRIL is a similar concept, maintaining a similarly dubious place in the lexicon, but its usefulness as a way to dump a V is some compensation.

These subterranean philosophers assert that, by one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call “atmospheric magnetism,” they can influence the variations of temperature—in plain words, the weather; that by other operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied scientifically through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics.

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, demonstrating his mastery of both science and prose, in Vril, The Coming Race.

OE

Unusually, it’s the North American lexicon which is dodgy here. The Hasbro dictionary search defines OE as “a whirlwind off the Faeroe Islands”, which definition seems to have been copied verbatim, from dictionary to dictionary, without anyone wondering whether it was still useful.

oe, n. A whirlwind off the Faeroe Islands.
The American Practical Navigator, US Govt. NIMA (19822002)

oe (ō), n. A whirlwind off the Faeroe Islands.
Navigation Dictionary, US Hydrographic Office (1956)

Oe. A violent whirlwind off the Ferroe Islands.
Naval Encyclopaedia, Philadelphia (1881)

OE. An island [from the Ang-Sax.] Oes are violent whirlwinds off the Ferroe Islands, said at times to raise the water in syphons.
The Sailor’s Word-Book, London (1867)

150-year-old copypasta.

Collins defines OE as “grandchild”, a variant of Scots dialect “OY”, and various dictionaries list that meaning, and/or oe, “a small island”. It would be nice if either meaning had citations more recent than the time Walter Scott finished translating his collection of Danish ballads, but at least there’s some evidence that OE was actually used in those senses.

KY

A dialect word for cows, apparently used in Scots and northern dialects. Fair enough, maybe, except the OED’s usage quotations have the word spelled KYE in every instance since 1522. Might be time to retire the shorter variant? Same argument goes for NY and FY, come to think of it. Allowing spelling variants that haven’t been used since the invention of spelling just makes you looks silly.

The Various Versions of Voldemort’s Real Name, Listed In Order of Levenshtein Edit Distance from “Tom Marvolo Riddle”, with additional commentary

I was going to add an explanatory paragraph here, but then I didn’t.

Language Riddle’s Name Lev.Δ J-W.Δ ‘Voldemort’ Anagram
English Tom Marvolo Riddle 0 0.000 I am Lord Voldemort
Estonian Tom Marvolon Riddle 1 0.018 Mina Lord Voldemort
Turkish Tom Marvoldo Riddle 1 0.064 Adim Lord Voldemort
Slovakian Tom Marvoloso Riddle 2 0.033 A som i Lord Voldemort
Portuguese Tom Servolo Riddle 2 0.074 Eis Lord Voldemort
Russian Tom Narvolo Reddl 3 0.088 Lord Volan-de-mort
Basque* Tom Narivoloz Riddle 3 0.137 Lord Voldemort naiz
Spanish Tom Sorvolo Ryddle 3 0.167 Soy Lord Voldemort
German Tom Vorlost Riddle 5 0.105 Ist Lord Voldemort
Czech Tom Rojvol Raddle 5 0.109 Já Lord Voldemort
Ukranian Tom Yarvolod Redl 5 0.119 Ya Lord Voldemort
Italian Tom Orvoloson Riddle 5 0.156 Son io Lord Voldemort
Latin Tom Musvox Ruddle 5 0.248 Sum Dux Voldemort
Bulgarian Tom Mersvoluko Riddŭl 6 0.116 Tuk sŭm i Lord Voldemor
Hebrew Tom Vandrolo Ridl 6 0.161 Ani Lord Voldmort
Catalan Tod Morvosc Rodlel 7 0.291 Sóc Lord Voldemort
Serbian Tom Mervolodomos Ridl 8 0.158 To smo mi Lord Voldemor
Romanian Tom Ruvel Doodler 9 0.184 Eu Lord Voldemort
Belarusian Tom Val’Dor Redl 9 0.199 Lord Val’Demort
Lithuanian† Tomas Malvoras Ridlis 9 0.206 Aš Valdovas Voldemortas
Swedish Tom Gus Mervolo Dolder 10 0.232 Ego sum Lord Voldemort
Norwegian Tom Dredolo Venster 10 0.249 Voldemort den Store
Hungarian Tom Rowle Denem 10 0.259 Nevem Voldemort
Faroese Tom Evildo Reger 10 0.270 Eg eri Voldemort
French Tom Elvis Jedusor 12 0.306 Je suis Voldemort
Finnish Tom Lomen Valedro 13 0.206 Ma olen Voldemort
Esperanto Tom Vlades Mistero 13 0.267 Mi estas Voldemort
Icelandic‡ Trevor Delgome 14 0.307 Eg er Voldemort
Dutch Marten Asmodom Vilijn 15 0.361 Mijn naam is Voldemort
Slovenian§ Mark Neelstin 15 0.485 Mrlakenstein
Danish Romeo G Detlev Jr 16 0.414 Jeg er Voldemort

* Good try, Basque, but there are too many Is in NARIVOLOZ

† Some sources have LORDAS instead of VALDOVAS. This isn’t an anagram either way (count the Ms, or Is).

‡ If you know what Neville’s toad was named in Iceland, let me know.

§ Well the anagram is as elegant as any, Slovenia, but changing “Voldemort” and “Tom Riddle” is somewhat cheating.

 

Ok, so, why is is that the Romance and Slavic language versions generally just run with an embellished middle name, but the Scandinavian language versions are so tortured? “Riddle” is a Germanic word, so it seems weird that none of them opted to keep it, or a cognate.

My guess is the J-G of the first person pronoun is just really hard to work into a proper name (especially, perhaps, with a V already called for). The Swedish translator cleverly opted to put the reveal into Latin, the Norwegian phrase breaks the form completely, the Danish translator managed to get “Jeg er” in there, but at the cost of making Voldemort’s birth name “Romeo G[åde] Detlev, Jr”.

He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named indeed.

Biogeography, and Big Year species discovery curves

In 2015, Noah Stryker is birding a global Big Year: i.e. trying to spot as many bird species as possible in the year, without the usual geographical constraints that big year birders often adopt. His blog on the Audubon site makes excellent reading. Aside from the impressive list of bird species being racked up, the logistics involved are mind-boggling. Virtually every week has seen him fly into a new country or part-of-country, a new local birder/guide to ferry him around birding sites, with stunningly little wasted time. For example, having run out of gettable birds in Colombia (no mean feat!), rather than risk a day or two idle, he scrambled a trip to Jamaica (“An old friend of mine, Liz Ames, happens to be finishing a three-month field research season in Jamaica… we’re hoping to make a clean sweep of Jamaica’s endemic birds in the next 48 hours”), a few weeks later, a delayed flight reduced his time in Iceland to an 7-hour overnight layover, but Iceland in summer doesn’t really get dark, so he pulled an all-nighter, and racked up 36 more species.

The fact that he’s birding so consistently and efficiently means the discovery curve is really smooth. Which means we can do things like try to predict his end-of-year total.

Noah Strycker's Species Accumulation Curve 2015

Noah Strycker’s 2015 Species Accumulation Curve, Jan-July

Michael Preston has a series of posts addressing exactly that. In the most recent, at the end of June, he finds that Noah’s accumulation curve is still mostly linear, but chooses to use a fourth order polynomial to fit to the previous global big year attempters, Alan Davies (not that one) and Ruth Miller.

But when the accumulation is done with consistency, the curve will follow the standard discovery curve pattern. Counts of individuals-per-species within a given area follow a power law curve, so the discovery curve is the inverse – usually modelled as a logarithmic or asymptotic curve tailing off to a theoretical maximum. Which is to say, the first day you go out, you’ll see lots of species, and then it becomes more and more a hunt for rarities (and, obviously, this is why Noah’s moving around so much. In order to keep a high number of species per day, he has to move on when the ROI in his current location falls below the expected ROI for the rest of the world in the available time left).

So I think it will be a struggle to maintain a linear accumulation. I predict the gradient will continue to level, and by the end of the year, a logarithmic trend line will fit better than a linear one.

Being a global exercise, it’s not obviously true that that will happen. After all, if the ROI drops, Noah can always move on. One could argue that a negligible number species are so widespread that collecting them early will undermine later collection efforts. But early-counting global species isn’t necessary, only early-counting species that occur in more than one region. The great flyways of the world lead to overlapping bird lists all across the Americas, within Eurasiafrica, and round the Asian Pacific Rim. Species collected in South America will have reduced Noah’s North American collections, and by the time he gets to Australasia in December, his efforts across the rest of the world will have diminished the ‘gettable’ list for Australia and New Zealand, perhaps leaving him only the endemic species. Though granted, there are quite a few in that part of the world.

The other interesting thing about Noah’s accumulation curve is that it already shows some degree of curvature in interesting places. Let’s do some biogeography.

World Ecozones

Ecozones of the world, by Wikipedian ArnoLagrange

Ecozones, as Wikipedia puts it, delineate large areas of the Earth’s surface within which organisms have been evolving in relative isolation over long periods of time. They take fancy Latinate names, but are more or less what you’d expect: South/Central America (Neotropic), Nearctic (North America), Palearctic (Eurasia and North Africa), Afrotropic (Sub-Saharan Africa), Indomalaya (South-East Asia), Australasia, Oceania, Antarctic. Within each zone, there is a shared biogeography, which translates to a lot of species overlap. Not anywhere near total species overlap, of course, but enough that the common and farther-flying species are common across much of the zone. Enough that, on the Big Year scale, it starts affecting the accumulation curve.

Here’s a graph of species seen by Noah per day (so far), coloured by ecozone.

Species counted per day

Graph of species counted by Noah Strycker per day, in Big Year 2015, Jan-Jul, coloured by ecozone.

A trend emerges:
Aside from Antarctica (travel is a bit constrained when you’re on a cruise ship), there’s clear downward trend to the ‘peak’ days (peak days correspond to Noah’s arrival at a new birding site), and a less clear but still noticeable downward trend (R2~=0.2) within each zone as a whole. The spike at the beginning of each new ecozone resets the trend to some extent, i.e. we see a logarithmic pattern within each ecozone. I’m not sure whether the lower initial spikes in North America and Europe are due to early counting of overlapping species or simply that temperate ecosystems are less rich in species to begin with. In particular, the inter-migration between North and South America seems to be producing a macro-ecozone effect.

So what happens if we model the entire year as a series of ecozones, with each one following a simple exponential drop-off:

Species Accumulation by ecozone Model

Model of species accumulation as exponential fall-off from ecozone peak.
Light green = modelled species seen per day
Grey = modelled species accumulation curve based on the per-day figures
Blue = actual species accumulation curve
Green dots = actual curve linear trend line projected to EOY.

The modelled species per day value is floor[$ecozone_peak * log2($days_in_zone + 1)/$days_in_zone]. The ecozone peak values for Antarctica (12), South America (108), North America (49), Europe (57) and Africa (75) are taken from Noah’s list, being the most successful day spent in each ecozone (all in the first week of their respective zone, counting North America as Guatemala 2015-04-20 onwards). The peak figures for Asia and Australasia are purely guesses, which makes this model not especially powerful as a prediction tool.

So that’s not bad, it tracks the curve quite well in North America (May-June), Europe (Jun), and Africa (Jul), albeit a little lower than reality.

But the smooth fall off doesn’t look anything like Noah’s sighting pattern. As I’ve mentioned, Noah is moving around a lot. And each individual locale he flies into also comes with its own species accumulation curve. Although he takes heroic pains to traverse ecosystems and altitudes to capture as diverse a set as possible, there is inevitable overlap at each new centre he visits, and possibly he is choosing which ecosystems to visit in descending order of richness too. After all, you might find there’s a trip to Jamaica to be squeezed in! So there’s another level to this – within each ecozone are a number of sites, and each site has its own peak-and-falloff, and each peak is lower than the last.

What happens if we model each ecozone as a series of locales, taking a representative nine days at each, and put a drop-off on the accumulations.

Species Accumulation Model by ecozone and Locale

Model of species accumulation as exponential fall-off from ecozone peak and individual locale peaks.
Light green = modelled species seen per day
Grey = modelled species accumulation curve based on the per-day figures
Blue = actual species accumulation curve
Green dots = actual curve linear trend line projected to EOY.

The modelled species per day value is now floor[$ecozone_peak * log2($days_in_zone + 1)^1.6/$days_in_zone * 0.8^(($days_in_locale - 1) mod 9)], so introducing a geometric drop off (and unjustifiably futzing with the ecozone term to compensate).

The alignment is now surprisingly successful, even given how many arbitrary constants there are in that function! The proof of the pudding will come when Noah enters Asia and then Australasia, and I can plug in the final two ecozone peak figures and see how well the model tracks.

Interestingly, even with all the curve matching, the current prediction for the end of year figure, using what I hope are reasonable predictions for the peaks in the remaining tropical ecozones Asia (70) and Australasia (80), comes out to almost exactly the same as the linear trend line shows: about 6,500. But then, so far I have only accounted for the two observable inverse-power-law patterns, and not the hypothetical global one. If that is a factor, then 70 and 80 are probably over-estimates, and we’re probably looking at an end of year figure nearer 6,100.

There is a further line of reasoning to support that, which is: Noah, or someone at Audubon has almost certainly done this exercise already, and they chose to aim for 5000 species, not 6000. That suggests to me that 6000 was not considered a foregone conclusion, and so perhaps they are expecting it to be low 6,000s rather than up in the 6,500s. Who knows.

It occurs to me though, that Noah may have one more trick up his sleeve, at the end of the year. He’s travelling, Phineas Fogg style, eastwards around the globe. Were it me, come the end of December, with New Zealand finally birded out, I would be awfully tempted to cash in the hours banked crossing time zones: catch a Dec 30th flight to Hawaii, and win a bonus day to chase down 48 Hawaiian endemics and the last few Pacific pelagics. Which would quite nicely tick off the eighth ecozone, and thus the world.

The Swan and her crew (1876)

One of the books often cited as a source for Arthur Ransome’s Norfolk-based stories (Coot Club and The Big Six), is the 1876 work by G. Christopher Davies, “The Swan And Her Crew, or the adventures of three young naturalists and sportsmen on the broads and rivers of Norfolk“. The subtitle should have been a give-away, but I was unprepared for the extent of the slaughter enacted by the crew of the Swan on the local wildlife. In the first chapter alone, a pair of crossbills are shot out of a rare-to-Norfolk flock, caterpillars are harvested by the handful to be raised for pinning, and the Swan undertakes her maiden voyage, during which a grebe’s nest is entirely mown down, and a coot’s nest is cast adrift (a sequence inverted in the first chapter of Coot Club).

Soon afterwards, the three young protagonists receive, from their tutor (a vicar), the following lecture on how to be good naturalists, and I dared wonder whether they might behave more carefully for the rest of the book.

Now it won’t take you long to decide that Natural History is a very right and proper thing for you to take up, and therefore you may study it with all your might, and, I doubt not, to the praise and glory of God ; but be very careful about the collecting part of the business. Don’t let your zeal carry you too far. Don’t let collecting be your sole aim and object, or you will become very low types of naturalists. Let it be only secondary and subservient to observation. Let your aim be to preserve rather than to destroy. Remember that God gave life to His creatures that they might enjoy it, as well as fulfil their missions and propagate their species. Therefore if you come across a rare bird, do not kill it unnecessarily ; if you can observe its living motions it will interest you more and do you more good than will the possession of its stuffed body when dead.

Nope. The book goes on to describe a year spent pursuing their interests, in which it becomes clear that “sportsman” and “naturalist” are more alike than a modern reader would expect, and that “naturalist” does not in the slightest mean “conservationist”.

Dozens, maybe hundreds, of eggs are taken from the nests of over twenty different species of birds, although in a few cases the nest is already abandoned through no fault of the protagonists (e.g. someone else shot the parent bird), and the boys rarely take more than half the eggs of each clutch. However, these meliorations are entirely offset by the author’s other disclaimer: “It must not be supposed that I mention all the nests and eggs the boys found in their rambles. Space forbids me to notice more than those which are rare or unusual. For the nest of one rare or uncommon bird they found a dozen of the commoner sorts, for they were very quick observers.”

That habit makes the recorded egg collection look like a parade of rare species: bearded tits, siskins, hen harriers, water rail, wryneck, golden orioles, corn-crakes, bitterns. The scarcity of these birds is often mentioned as a point of interest. Sometimes in the same sentence as the egg collection. On a couple of occasions, the fact that the birds are rare because of egg collectors is mentioned in the same paragraph as the egg collection.

On bitterns, for instance:

Early the next morning they renewed their search, and while they were crashing through the very middle of the reed bed, the bittern rose with a hoarse cry, and flew away with a dull, heavy flight. And there, as good luck would have it, was its nest, a large structure of sticks, reeds and rushes, and in it were four eggs, large, round, and pale brown in colour. It was not in human nature (or at least in boy nature) to resist taking all the eggs.

At one time [the bittern] was common enough in England, but the spread of cultivation, the drainage of the marshes, and the pursuit of the collector have rendered it rare ; … its nest is now but rarely found.

As well as eggs, the boys are keen on hunting, mostly wildfowl, but happy to take anything else that comes their way. On one occasion, a punt gun is demonstrated to devastating effect. (“The mighty gun flashed forth its deadly contents with a tremendous roar, and Frank found himself hurled back upon Jimmy… The birds which were unhurt swept away with a great clamour, but the mud was covered with dead and dying.”). The correct time for shooting ducks is revealed to be, not only in winter on mud-flats, but also in late summer on corn-fields, and in early summer when young ones have just learned to fly and aren’t very good at it yet (“for an hour or so they had good sport beating about the dykes, and flushing them one by one until they had disposed of the whole brood.”), and basically whenever else you like.

There is less empathy for fish killed in sport, but the sheer volumes documented in The Swan are staggering. Here is one of their better days:

Before six o’clock in the evening they had caught over three hundred fishes, big and little, the largest about five pounds in weight. The total weight was about twelve stone. Norfolk bream fishers will know that I am not exaggerating.
“I am thoroughly tired of this,” said Dick at length; “this is not sport, it is butchery, especially as we do not know what to do with them now we have caught them, except to give them to some farmer for manure.”

As with the “nesting”, Davies assures us that the documented days of fishing are only a small proportion of the boys’ activities.

So, obviously this book is going on 140 years old now, and I wasn’t expecting a conservationist agenda, but its entire tone is strikingly different from the Coot Club books of Arthur Ransome, despite the similarity in setting and focus. Ransome obviously drew inspiration from The Swan, but it is the fishing incidents that he gives to the Death and Glories to have (the eel-fishing, and the giant pike), not the murderous transects through the local bird-life. And now I wonder how much the invention of photography, as a non-fatal method of documenting sightings, had on practical ornithology. So all in all I’m rather glad that it is Ransome’s books that are still read, that egg-collecting is no longer common practice, and that wildfowling is managed in a conservation-aware way.

The X’s Daughter

Update: this post by Emily St. John Mandel didn’t exist when I posted the below, but is a much better analysis of the same subject, and you should read it.

There is an trend in contemporary publishing that seems to have exploded over the last ten years or so, of having novels titled “The X’s Daughter”, where X is a profession or similar descriptor. I hadn’t realised how popular the trend was, until browsing round Amazon for a few minutes found over thirty titles, twenty-six first published since 2000. My theory for the current explosion of titles is that it’s possibly in some part due to the success of “The Bonesetter’s Daughter” by Amy Tan. Here’s a list.

Not quite fitting the pattern, but worth mentioning for it’s profound lack of originality:

The snowclone is spreading into other relationships as well. The Time Traveller’s Wife (then later The Rector’s, the Footballer’s, the Traitor’s), The Gambler’s Nephew (c.f. the Magician’s), The Colonial Gentleman’s Son, etc. It’s almost tempting to find out if there’s some important structural reason why these stories are so evasive about the actual title character, in favour of their more interesting relative. But not tempting enough to make me read thirty novels from the “contemporary fiction” section.

The gender of the dwarves in The Hobbit

The discussion last year about casting a female in a major role in the forthcoming film version of The Hobbit (my money’s on Smaug) reminded me that the book is quite quiet on the subject of the dwarves’ genders. From (rusty) memory, I remembered only Thorin (son of Thrain) as being definitely male. But it turns out that there are gender cues, very scarcely scattered.

So, while re-reading the book recently, I kept a note of all the occasions when a gender is actually revealed, either by gendered pronoun or by family relationships. (Subsequent gender mentions after the initial one are not recorded below.)

[Page numbers are from the Collins Modern Classics edition, and are included not necessarily as a reference aid, but to demonstrate how rarely the minor dwarf characters are afforded singular pronouns.]

The reveals, in order, are:

Balin and Dwalin

When [Bilbo] got back Balin and Dwalin were talking at the table like old
friends (as a matter of fact they were brothers).

Ch. 1. An Unexpected Party, p20

Thorin

Thorin, an enormously important dwarf, in fact no other than the great Thorin Oakenshield himself.

Ch. 1. An Unexpected Party, p22

Dori

“Half a minute!” said Dori, who was at the back next to Bilbo, and a decent fellow. He made the hobbit scramble on his shoulders as best he could with his tied hands, and then off they all went at a run…

Ch. 4. Over Hill and Under Hill, p87

Bombur

“Why, O why did I ever bring a wretched little hobbit on a treasure hunt!” said poor Bombur, who was fat, and staggered along with the sweat dripping down his nose in his heat and terror…

Ch. 4. Over Hill and Under Hill, p88

Fili

“Come here Fili, and see if you can see the boat Mr. Baggins is talking about.”
Fili thought he could; so when he had stared a long while to get an idea of the direction, the others brought him a rope.

Ch. 8. Flies and Spiders, p178

Bofur

There they were at last, twelve of them counting poor old Bombur, who was being propped up on either side by his cousin Bifur, and his brother Bofur…

Ch. 8. Flies and Spiders, p201

Kili

“And who are these?” he asked, pointing to Fili and Kili and Bilbo.
“The sons of my father’s daughter,” answered Thorin, “Fili and Kili of the race of Durin, and Mr. Baggins who has travelled with us out of the West.”

Ch. 10. A Warm Welcome, p238

Oin and Gloin

Oin and Gloin were sent back to their bundles at the top of the tunnel. After a while a twinkling gleam showed them returning, Oin with a small pine-torch alight in his hand, and Gloin with a bundle of others under his arm.

Ch. 13. Not At Home, p285

It may be worth mentioning that in the case of the last four dwarves, these brief references are the only ones. Thorin, Balin, Bombur, and Dori all have slightly more of a “speaking role” in the story, and do get a smattering of “he”s and “his”s elsewhere.

I briefly wondered whether Tolkien’s dwarves, like Pratchett’s, go to war and wear beards and use male pronouns regardless of their biological status, but decided that while finding and reading Tolkien’s History Of The Dwarves In 18 Volumes would be my usual course of action, it would totally undermine the whimsy behind this post. For the same reason, I have made no effort to track down further biographical detail on the thirteen dwarves.

All that aside, the startling conclusion of this post is that Ori, Nori and Bifur do not have a defined gender (within the artificially small scope of The Hobbit as a standalone work of fiction). Not, perhaps, enough ungendered dwarves that it Raises Interesting Questions About Our Assumptions Hmmm, but enough that Peter Jackson can, without abusing the text, give Dori a pair of axe-wielding sisters…

Edit, after the fact: Introducing new characters is cheating, Jackson.

The Last Deadloss Visions

Christopher Priest’s essay on the history of the promised third of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthologies was published in fanzine form, in book form, and online, and was then removed from the web (at the request of both Priest and Ellison), all before I had ever used the internet. It remains not obviously available, which I, being used to the power of the Streisand effect these days, find remarkable.

But the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine caught it…

This is the full text of THE LAST DEADLOSS VISIONS, an essay I wrote in
1987 and published at my own expense in a fanzine called Deadloss. It was an attempt to bring journalistic techniques to a subject that from the point of view of anyone outside the sf world might seem an odd one for enquiry: the non-publication of a book.
Of course, the book was Harlan Ellison’s anthology ‘The Last Dangerous Visions’, a title surrounded from the beginning by so much hype, exaggeration and persistent invisibility that it has been a subject of
interest to a generation (literally) of sf writers and fans.

– Christopher Priest, from the Internet Archive’s archive of the Lysator archive of Last Deadloss Visions

This is all ancient history now: the essay was taken offline back in about 1997-98, judging from the link chronology on the Harlan Ellison links page. And the whole TLDV business has been quiet for ages. Priest still mentions it, as in his 2005 Worldcon speech. Ellison has been much quieter in recent years. Maybe the essay had an effect; probably just the passage of time has worn down his enthusiasm and restrained his hyperbole. Wikipedia points me at this 2007 article, in which Ellison refers (unprompted) to TLDV as a project which he would like to finish, but with rather less passion than in his heyday.

That same Links page is another testament to internet history.

Just after Midnight, 08/29/95:
Here is the problem with looking for Harlan Ellison Links. He was, as you know, involved with a little thing called Babylon 5 (and aside from mentioning the Bab 5 Support Page this is the ONLY link you’ll see here to it!), and since he is a Respected Author and what-not, every dork with a Babylon 5 Toaster Oven homepage has to mention his name. In fact, if you run a Lycos Search on “harlan ellison” (and why would you run any other kind of search?), right now, you’ll get 117 hits (actual mileage may vary). If you run a Lycos Search on “harlan ellison babylon” you’ll get 43. Get the picture?

Editor’s Note: these numbers are now (10/20/95) 242 and 70, respectively. Time waits for no man.

Anyway, save your eyeballs and mouse button and just read on. Trust me, everything worth looking at (except maybe some notes on how Ellison personally styles the hair of every cast member on Babylon 5) is here. If you’re a glutton for punishment, click on those Lycos searches above.

Remember when Lycos was to the Internet as, er, Google is to the Internet? Remember when it was possible to search for a name (let alone a famous name) and get only 242 hits? And that a third of them being irrelevant was annoying levels of dilution? And when you could be sure that you had seen everything worth looking at? I don’t.

Harlan Ellison is now 75. I don’t think he will ever finish The Last Dangerous Visions. Christopher Priest was right, more than twenty years ago, when he declared that the project had got too large to handle. But maybe something can be salvaged, posthumously, when Ellison’s pride is no longer resting on it so heavily. I would like to see that.

Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Fate Worse Than Death

In June 1970, an article by R. D. Mullen appeared in the fanzine Riverside Quarterly, detailing all occurrances of a heroine escaping the lustful clutches of a villain in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs written between 1911 and 1915. From just those five years (21 novels), Mullen finds and lists seventy-four such instances.

The stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs contain many lessons of great value for the attentive reader, but none more valuable than the warning that an unprotected girl is always in danger of being raped by an Arab, Negro, great ape, Green Martian, or monster of some other kind, or by a wicked white man, or sometimes even by a good white man. Unwilling to rest content with a mere warning, Burroughs also provides many useful pointers on how an endangered young lady may defend her honour — or, if her own resources fail, on the kinds of rescue that may be expected from an ever-watchful Providence.

— R. D. Mullen, Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Fate Worse Than Death