Etymologically we learn that this word could represent a hum or a throat-clearing noise. While elves are high, smelling them is as prosaic as it gets.
“h’m | hm, int.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 May 2015.
Not only is a guffaw a kind of laugh, OED affirms that it is formed echoically from the sound of the laugh it names. Only giants do it in our work.
“guffaw, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 May 2015.
Although three of these grunts are everyday dwarvish and Beornish noises, in Chapter 8 they are of unknown Mirkwood origin.
While in other stories grumbling could be the warning sign of thunder, in The Hobbit it is always the sound of complaint and earns the “low” tag.
Once again we affirm that whether a sound is funny, mundane, or scary depends entirely on what’s making it.
Goblin poetry: can’t help but laugh and shake in your shoes!
“Drip” is not an imitative word, according to the OED. It does not mean any sound except as a slang or naval term for complaining. Yet we all understand Tolkien perfectly well in 02.034:
They moved to a clump of trees, and though it was drier under them, the wind shook the rain off the leaves, and the drip, drip, was most annoying.
The fact that the sound is annoying has earned it the “low” tag.
Update: Our commenter Sarah Hartman has generously provided us with a link to her thesis on such words!
“drip, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 May 2015.
“drip, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 May 2015.
The OED uses frogs and ravens as the only exemplars of beings which make this sound in the first definition of “croak the noun” and “croak, the verb”. Intrigued, I read onward. Obsolete second meaning includes “forbode evil (like the raven)”, without note or explanation about this anthropomorphization, just one example to make the hair rise:
1609 Shakespeare Troilus & Cressida v. ii. 193 Would I could meete that roague Diomed I would croke like a Rauen, I would bode, I would bode.
Goblins’ singing is so laughable as to be called croaking, but crow and bird croaks are eerie – and perhaps the sounds of Roäc are truly ominous!
“croak, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 27 May 2015.
In the first case, the dwarves are making a racket which is amusing to us readers and in the second case the crackling fire is dangerous.
In contrast with the dwarves who are strutting about in Laketown in the previous paragraph, Bilbo
sneezed and coughed, and he could not go out, and even after that his speeches at banquets were limited to ‘Thag you very buch.’
while some coughs are deadly serious, these are funny and “low”.
words that you were saying 