In a gold Rolls, making it with the dumb chauffeur

[venta]

Please help me. I am suffering from extreme dwarf-related confusion.

This morning, I heard someone say "Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work I go".

I mused that, in my world, the words which follow that are "With a shovel and a spade, and a hand grenade". And I was pretty sure that they weren't in the Disney original.

A quick straw poll drew suggestions of "With a shovel and a pick, and a walking stick" or "With a knife and fork, and a belly full of pork". Neither of those struck me as being all that likely as the original words.

So, me and google got together. And I am baffled.

The only reliable-looking sets of words I can find online don't seem to contain these lines at all. They, and the clips I've found on youtube, feataure the dwarves singing "Hi ho, hi ho, it's home from work we go" and then whistling the next couple of lines. They "dig, dig, dig with a shovel and a pick", but they never list the items they are carrying.

My first assumption was that this was just a different version of the song, which shows up later in the film. But I can't find any lyrics for, or clips of, the "off to work, with a..." version.

Is my google-fu very poor today? Has anyone seen Snow White recently? Do the dwarves, in fact, never actually sing about going off to work?

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Dwarfs = pituitary dwarfism = real people
Dwarves = derived from "dwerrows", Tolkien-brain-ish (?Sindarin?Numenorian) for "people who delve deep in the ground"

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I wasn't disputing the_alchemist was correct, merely that I'd been aware of the issue when I was originally writing my post.

Y'see, I go dwarf = person, dwarf = Tolkien beastie. Now, which way round does the plural work again? English is weird, so dwarf almost certainly pluralises to dwarves, and Tolkien was being cussed by just sticking an s on the end.

I think your "dwarves = derived from dwerrows" might be a good way of remembering.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I'm given to understand that it was originally a mistake on Tolkien's part, and when called on it he decided that it was to differentiate them as a species.

This may be apocryphal, though.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Yes that's why I said it, because it's a good way of remembering.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah. Sorry. Text-based communication is hard. I misread your original comment as assuming that I needed the difference explaining. But yes, good nmemonic, thank you.