A few years ago, near where I live, there was a rather amusing political flap. Someone, in a speech or interview, used the word "niggard". Apparently one of the people listening, not recognizing the word or knowing its meaning, assumed the speaker had used a
different N-word (a racial epithet which I shall not repeat here
). Anyway, this made the local media and became a big flap before someone provided a definition of what the word meant (a miser).
Well, to my point, I had known what the word meant previous to this "incident", having learned it from Tolkien!
Quote:
'No niggard are you, Éomer,' said Aragorn, 'to give thus to Gondor the fairest thing in your realm.'
ROTK VI, 6
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(I do remember doing a bit of a double-take when I first read the book and read that line, then figuring out the meaning from the context, being too lazy to look it up in a dictionary
)
Does anyone have any words they learned from Tolkien? It seems actually quite a good and fun way to build up one's vocabulary.