Me playing online for free on PC turning out to be an even more solid investment.

Homophones exist in all languages.

Nah, that’s Disney.

It was fine. Not terrible, but I definitely don’t get the hype. A bit dull and dreary, but does a better job of portraying a post-apocalyptic world than many/most others.

I also don’t really get the takes like “it’s brutal, the shit that happens is insane” - everything that happened felt pretty expected and par for the course to me. It’s a decent, straightforward small-scale post-apocalyptic story.

It gets even better than that - Neander also changed his name from German Neumann “new man” to Greek Ne-Ander (also “new man”). So, Neanderthals, the “newly discovered men” were coincidentally from the “new man valley”, named after a guy who changed his name from “new man” to “new man”.

The “thal” in Neanderthal, meaning “valley”, is also the word from which we get the money denomination “thaler”, whence “dollar”!

The -ard/art suffix had already become a pejorative by that time (due to the association of “too much X, and therefore to negative excess”), so a bastard was a “(bad) (child) of the bast”, meaning “saddle”. That is, a child conceived in a makeshift bed, usually on the road, instead of properly in a marriage bed. Source

It probably originally meant “avocado” in Nahuatl, but took on a second euphemistic meaning as “testicle” in that languages as well, so kinda.

The (very brief) etymology in that video is almost certainly incorrect. “Fuck” has been difficult to accurately etymologize, but the most popular arguments are summarized here.

That’s not quite true - it does (probably) come from Persian shah mat, but that meant “the king is stumped, the king is astonished”. When originally borrowed into Arabic it was incorrectly assumed that it instead meant “the king is dead”, and the mistranslation survived from there into the languages that borrowed it from Arabic. Source.

This is [almost certainly not true] (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cock_up).

Balrogs adopt some physical form, which they can change at will

From Tolkien’s essay Ósanwë-kenta, included in Vinyar Tengwar #39:

Melkor alone of the Great became at last bound to a bodily form; but that was because of the use that he made of this in his purpose to become Lord of the Incarnate, and of the great evils that he did in the visible body. Also he had dissipated his native powers in the control of his agents and servants, so that he became in the end, in himself and without their support, a weakened thing, consumed by hate and unable to restore himself from the state into which he had fallen. Even his visible form he could no longer master, so that its hideousness could not any longer be masked, and it showed forth the evil of his mind. So it was also with even some of his greatest servants, as in these later days we see: they became wedded to the forms of their evil deeds, and if these bodies were taken from them or destroyed, they were nullified, until they had rebuilt a semblance of their former habitations, with which they could continue the evil courses in which they had become fixed".

Never in the legendarium do we see a balrog change its form, and this is probably why - they weren’t able to, and like their master, were trapped in their form of power and malice.

We also know that in early drafts of the legendarium, “Melko” specifically kidnapped eagles to experiment on because he was unable to replicate flight. That’s part of why the flying wyrms were so surprising and devastating when he finally unleashed them, but balrogs were created long before, and we can easily conclude that, therefore, they were not created with wings.

(Also, if Gandalf could fly, he wouldn’t have needed Gwaihir to rescue him from the pinnacle of Orthanc. Tolkien’s legendarium isn’t Dragon Ball Z.)

In that same passage we also get “Gandalf flew down the stairs”. Explicit, unambiguous evidence that Gandalfs have wings.

In that same passage we also get that “Gandalf flew down the stairs”. Literal, unambiguous evidence that Gandalfs have wings.

Jumpin’ jigawatts!

The wiki page is pretty notoriously full of inaccuracies, especially for small-scale personal VX setups - not really worth reading imo.

Exactly. Writing the entirety of “shadows like two vast wings” twice would have been awkward for no reason. (Or it should be no reason, but apparently some people are incapable of understanding metaphor.)

Balrogs - and I shouldn’t even have to say this - don’t have wings.

They’re homophonous in a few southeastern US accents and most African-American English (AAE) speakers. It’s usually called the feel/fill merger, one of a few different mergers before /l/.

How so?

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