Much subtle wisdom in today’s Piled Higher and Deeper.
-
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
Site Meter
Copyright © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.
Privacy - Terms - Reader Services - Subscribe Today - Advertise - About Us
November 30th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
I knew it.
Tenure not only makes you grey, it turns you into a male.
Or maybe a dwarf. I remember reading somewhere that dwarven women have beards. I don’t recall any actual non-male dwarf characters from Tolkien, which is my primary source, so…
November 30th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
I believe the dwarf women with beards comes from the Terry Pratchett books.
I’m not sure he’s a reliable authority on the mythology, but he is consistent.
November 30th, 2006 at 7:17 pm
Terry Prachett clearaly is not a reliable authority.
He has only one turtle, but we all know that it’s turtles all the way down.
November 30th, 2006 at 9:57 pm
Not all male dwarves have beards. Consider Dopey.
Yes. I have a beard.
November 30th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
Well, that was the strangest series of comments I’ve ever seen in a Cosmic Variance post.
And that’s saying something!
November 30th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
You are all wrong.
(a) There is a mention of a female dwarf in Tolkien. You have to look real hard for it though (hint : it’sin the appendix).
(b) Dwarven females in Tolkien have beards, so TP stole the idea from JRR.
Dwarves
(c) Clearly, Stephen Uitti has read a lot of Tolkien, since dwarf’s original plural form is dwarfs not dwarves. (Un)fortunately too many people have read Tolkien and mispelled it so often that the latter form actually has begun to overtake the former.
Yes, I read Tolkien. Lots of it too.
December 1st, 2006 at 1:50 am
I can’t believe I am responding to this weird thread (I am a huge Tolkien geek too, and devour each TP book as it comes out, so couldn’t resist). I think the etymology of dwarves precedes Tolkien, and his “invention” of the spelling must be an urban myth. He actually wanted to call them dwarrows, which I think is a fantastic word.
December 1st, 2006 at 1:55 am
Thank you, Julianne – you hit the nail on the head. If this keeps up we’ll have to write a post on physics dwarves, by popular demand of course.
December 1st, 2006 at 3:02 am
But clearly Rob has also read a lot of Tolkien, as evidenced by his eloquent use of the word “dwarven,” which if not original to Tolkien is certainly prominent therein. (“Elven”, too, as opposed to the more standard “elfin”.)
Of course in the LOTR movies, the tidbit about bearded dwarven women was played for laughs (a moment of silence here to mourn Gimli’s demotion to comic relief).
To get back on the original topic, I did quite enjoy this comic with its multilayered humor. However, in my experience the full professors on the picture board aren’t uniformly graybearded, because the pictures tend to be decades old! It’s always fun to see those ’70s-era haircuts framing much younger faces.
December 1st, 2006 at 6:19 am
If you doubt sexism in academia is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES+DWARFS??
December 1st, 2006 at 10:05 am
Indeed, the 30-year-old photographs of professors can be quite amusing.
Heck, even the 5-year-old photographs are noticable. Go through my department’s faculty webpages, and I think you only find one 30-year-old photograph. But many of the department (probably even me, but we’re always bind about ourselves) look older than they do in the photos.
The other thing is : you can tell the graduate student photos were taken right when they got there, and before they’d been graduate students for long, becuase so many of them are smiling. (Oops, that was too cynical.) I suppose if you took the pictures right after a succesful defense, you’d get even bigger smiles, but much older-looking people. (Even if grad school is chronologically only 5 or 6 years, you age more than that… and besides, even without grad school, age 21-26 is a time where how old you look cna change quite a bit.)
-Rob
December 1st, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Hiranya,
Well, the “dwarfs” vs “dwarves” vs “dwarrows” discussion is actually written by JRRT himself (right here in App F of the copy of LOTR sitting right here in my office). The problem is, that he discussed that in context of his own mythology as real!
What was true, however, was that in the earlier days, many publishers changed all his deliberate use of weird spellings to the usual widely accepted form at those times which include dwarfs -> dwarves and elven -> elfin.
My bitter experience with dwarf/ves began when I had a long and heated argument with a high school English teacher about the correct spelling for the word. I was so sure I was right it was dwarves! She won when she pulled out a copy of the Oxford Pocket Dictionary. I hated her since then, forever and ever!
December 1st, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Eugene, I am pretty sure your English teacher is wrong. It could be true that by the time of Tolkien dwarfs may have been a more common spelling, but the etymology of dwarves in print is given in the OED as preceding that of dwarfs, and before Tolkien. The pocket dictionary does not give etymologies in any detailed sense, and the online full OED is very expensive to subscribe to – I will verify this the next time I happen on the actual OED. But I see the Tolkien story is prevalent on the internet… The story gets more convoluted because Tolkien actually worked for the OED for a while. I believe he felt that dwarrows was a more approrpiate rendering of the Middle English plural of dwarf, but as far as I know he did not work on the “D” words.
December 1st, 2006 at 7:57 pm
Sean -
There is much wisdom in everything that Jorge Cham presents in his cartoons…
December 1st, 2006 at 8:25 pm
[...] The Department Board [...]
December 1st, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Hiranya, the story is quite prevalent, but it’s also inside many later editions of LOTR (in the form of a publisher’s preface) and also in Tolkien’s authorized biography by Humphrey Carpenter which I read years back. Tolkien was a philologist after all. I tried to look it up in the online edition of the OED, but I have too little training to make any sense out of it. Anyway, sadly, I heard that my old English teacher has long passed on, but one day I know I will be vindicated!
December 7th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
I love the inclusion of the lone grad student from the entering class of 1987 (who will undoubtedly gun down his committee after he fails his thesis defense).
January 12th, 2007 at 2:46 am
HAH, what a great comic. I like the “REAL professors” haha, i’m sure my chemistry prof is on there. In fat he looks exactly like one of those guys..
-jon