there is bravery in being soft

The Fall of Gil Galad // Song of Eärendil // Lay of Nimrodel 

I often hear the argument that having major characters die is more realistic than having them always come through unscathed. Of course it is. But I personally don’t want my fiction to necessarily be “realistic” – I want my fiction to be entertaining. For me, that means watching engaging characters I care about get into and out of dangerous predicaments, working and thinking together in order to defeat the bad guys. While some authors (and readers) like the tension of wondering who will live and who will die, I prefer the tension of seeing how the heroes are going to think or work their ways out of each difficult or impossible situation they find themselves in. If I want realism and the deaths of people I care about, I can turn on the news.

Dress

c. 1772-1775

silk, linen, cotton (thread)

England

For the last message - “drums in the deep / we cannot get out” - used fast elvish characters. Ori uses a “trailing scrawl of elf-letters” to deliver the last line: “they are coming.”

This is quite poignant because of the underlying implication that the elvish alphabet is probably faster and clearer to write than native dwarvish, and Ori obviously had it permanently locked and loaded; and further, that it was suitable in someone’s last desperation, their final trailing scrawl.

But it’s also really funny that Ori was like. Shorthand emoji.

For example, a couple years ago, while learning Spanish, I encountered the word for a store, "la tienda." I thought "huh, that's a lot like tener (tiene) - the word for store in Spanish literally corresponds to 'to have/keep'. How interesting!"

False cognates happen all the time, within one language and when comparing two or more languages.

The word "tienda" is NOT actually related to "tener/tiene."

"Tienda" in Spanish means "tent," and it comes from the same Latin root word as the English word "tent." Every Latin-based language, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, and even Romanian, has a similar word.

"Tener/tiene" does mean "have/keep/hold," but it is unrelated to "tienda." "Tener" comes from an entirely different Latin root word.

However, the word "store" is the same in both instances. It refers to a place where items may be kept OR a place where items may be purchased (though the latter is mainly used in North America).

I'm not a linguist, but it's as simple as looking it up with a reputable source. It is so helpful to know root words instead of just guessing!