John J. Miller alerts us at The Corner that John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born eleventy-one years ago today.
Which reminds me of yet another of my oddball notions. I don’t like the word eleventy-first (or even twenty-first), because the root of first has nothing to do with ‘one’ let alone ‘one more’: it is related to foremost. Why don’t we say twenty-oneth or twenty-next?