Back on 7 April, Philip B. Corbett’s “After Deadline” column in the NYT (which “examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times”) noted a new stylebook entry on dwarf, which begins:
dwarf(s) (n.) Use this as the usual term for people with a genetic condition resulting in unusually short stature. Midget, once used to describe dwarfs of otherwise normal proportions …
Two commenters objected strongly to dwarfs as a plural of dwarf. These objections surely arise in part from an adherence to One Right Way: variant usages are not allowed, so if the writers themselves use dwarves, dwarfs must be wrong. But something further is going on here: a belief in the superiority of irregular forms over regular forms, especially where the writer believes the irregulars are older. (At least some usage critics seem to think that regularization is the work of the ignorant, the less educated, the lazy, and so on.)
But sometimes, as in this case, critics are wrong about the history and about current usage.
