April 17, 2007

The etymology of "belf".

In exchange for picking the topic of his blog post yesterday, I've allowed that grumpiest of paladins to select mine today in what looks to be a rather interesting series of reader suggested entries.

So, let us speak today on "belfs."

First off, the term "belf" is lazy in addition to racist and offensive. The term dates back to an underground newsrag called "Purity of the Mountain" which circulated around Ironforge for a time back when Gnomeregan refugees were piling in. (I'm using the term "underground" here to mean "independantly published", not literally underground. Every newsrag in Ironforge is, by definition, underground.) Anyway, the periodical in question was funded by some anti-everyone nutjobs who believed Ironforge should remain closed off to all races except dwarves. Now I can't imagine anyone wanting to go to Ironforge to begin with, but that's neither here nor there; point is, the thing ran with the tagline: "Being a weekly Newsletter with the Aim of driving all Pasties, Shorties and Nelfs from Ironforge."

The thing ran a few issues until it was revealed the whole thing was run by a gnomish entrepreneur
who merely saw a way to cash in on dwarven ignorance. In any case, the slanderous rag faded away but one part of it remained: a crudely drawn and completely racist cartoon called "Nelfs and Belfs" which pictured night elves and blood elves in an obscene and demeaning manner, frequently involving animals and bodily emissions. "Nelfs and Belfs" found an audience because, politically correct mumbo-jumbo aside, dwarves really like making fun of elves. It eventually made its way to Stormwind and is now distributed as a monthly comic book all over Azeroth. I believe it's even translated into Orcish nowadays and passed around Orgrimmar, proving that racial insensitivity knows no allegiance.

That said, blood elves are just night elves who don't cower in fear of magic. Which makes them marginally cooler tha night elves, I suppose, but if you're going to rock out with some magic you might as well just be a gnome and get it over with. Blood elves are pink instead of purple, so it's not even really a question of how feminine you want to be. Also, they eat their own young.

That's just something I heard somewhere.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I’m glad to inform you that I added your website to search-wow.com! And I'm also very sorry to post that here, but I wasn't able to find a contact form :(


What is Search-WoW.com?
Search-WoW.com is a search engine dedicated to World of Warcraft. Based on Google, it only searches on a specific list of websites selected for the quality of their content. Therefore, Search-WoW.com returns more relevant results than Google most of the time. And of course, it also filters all the crappy websites full of spam for who knows what (You know, the kind of websites that tends to appear in the 5 first results of Google :-)). In two words, it’s a kind of directory that uses the power of Google for the searches. Human selection with the power of Google!

Of course, some very interesting websites are still missing from Search-WoW. Unfortunately, I’m sure that I don’t know all the good websites on WoW! That’s why I would be very thankful if you could check the list of the indexed websites at http://www.search-wow.com/about.html and tell me if you know some sites that should be included.

I hope that you will like Search-WoW.com and I would be very pleased to have your feedback. So let me know what you think. And if you really like it, you can always digg it :-) (or reddit it, or delicious, or whatever you prefer !)

Cheers,

Julien,
Creator of Search-WoW.com

Hexapuma said...

Bah gnomes... I guess if we could see a few forsaken gnomes that would be interesting. Haven't seen many in the Undercity - I imagine the abomination guards have trouble to spot them. That might explain the small splotches of blood here and there along their patrol route.

Sylvina Solaris said...

mmmmmm.... babies.

Anonymous said...

Wha...?? Rascist? Lazy? NAY, sayeth I! I love my BElfs! BElfs will someday rule the world!

BElf is not a rude statement...BElf is a statement of fact! It's a statement of our greatness (better than miniatured people...BWAHAHAHAHAHA*dies*).

OK OK...here I thought I was all great and wonderful starting the use of the word BElf the week of the BC add-on release...heck, I may've truly instigated it. If so, I'm damned proud of myself, and damned proud of my BElfs, and will continue to refer to them as such.

If you don't like it, you are more than welcome to talk to Dar'Khan's giggling head in the basement of my castle >:D

Unknown said...

I call night elves "crip elves".

Dated gang names for $400, please.

how to buy a runescape account said...

Your article is good!