When Noish-pa said "elfs" instead of the standard English "elves" I assumed it was a non-native speaker's error, a way of suggesting his accent without funny spellings. Then I noticed that Steve used "knifes" as the plural form of "knife" somewhere when it wasn't Noish-pa speaking. But now I see "elfs" all over POTD, and my tentative conclusion is that Steve is deliberately trying to distance the Easterner view of Dragaerans from the Disney-type or even Tolkien-type view of "elves". Maybe this wasn't what he meant to do when he first used "elfs", but it's the effect I see in POTD. This is rather like what Tolkien was doing when he coined "dwarves", as opposed to the standard plural "dwarfs", and his influence has been so strong that now "dwarves" is the usual form (except in technical usage for [some varieties of?] physically small individuals). And I'm not going to worry about "knifes". -- Mark A. Mandel http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/ a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website