Today there was lots of shoveling. Lots and lots of shoveling. Tomorrow, the shoveling of the roofs. There is far too much snow on top of our out-post and the garage. I started clearing some of the snow off the garage this evening and it looked like it was actually three feet deep up there. Quite a large drift had formed. I don't want us to be crushed under a falling ceiling, or hit by an avalanche in our own back yard. That would be most embarrassing.
I had to look up "roofs". At first I was confident I had read that was the correct plural. I did an interweb search and found "rooves". Even as I finish typing it now the computer decorates it with the dotted red underlining, just as it has done with "interweb". Thinking about it a bit I decided the notion I'd had in favour of the unvoiced "f" had come from Tolkien and his thoughts on "dwarfs". A better dictionary gave me some background: late Old English and Middle English use hrof (line above the "o", whichever accent that is) as does Old Norse. Dutch also uses "roef" (the modern language using the same as English, "roof" and the reconstructed Pre-Germanic source (assumed through linguists' study of morphology) is listed as *khrofaz.
Every word has a like history. It's true. I back-traced it. Language remains one of the most incredible technologies conceived by the human mind, and one of the most over-looked.
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