"Sounds kind of prescriptivist."

"Hmm?"

"I don't know that much about Earth linguistics but what I do know is that there's prescriptivists, who are, like, there's a right way to say this thing and a wrong way - I learned this in the context of the Academie Française since I study French in school, they like, fine people in France who use loanwords, I think? - and there's descriptivists, who are like, I found some people who talk this way, isn't that neat!"

"Huh, that seems like an odd distinction to draw -- I would hope that if I went other places and saw their art I would be fascinated by their techniques and what they chose to depict and what materials they used and so on, but also I would probably notice whether the art was aesthetically appealing, and when I made art I'd try to make it so."

"I am not aware of aesthetic competitions for languages and turns of phrase the way there are for purebred cats but maybe I just haven't heard of them."

"Language is the form of art we employ the most. It has to be pretty."

"There's... like a couple words people don't like because they don't have good, uh, mouthfeel? But they still ever get used and I think that's mostly about associations with the meanings."

"I think aesthetics are more important to Elves than humans, though of course it's hard to distinguish this from Elves having more resources and longer lives."

"I super believe that, the city's gorgeous."

"Thank you."

"I assume the Elves are paying through the nose to the Dwarves to keep it up to spec."

"Almost everything here was a collaboration."

"But the maintenance?"

"Elves find it - exhausting and depressing, how fast things deteriorate here. In Valinor they don't, not ever."

"...how do they not? Deterioration isn't one thing, it's... lots of things including some things whose natural categories include, like, breathing."

"Right, but there's a bunch of gods with opinions on which of those should exist and which shouldn't, right, and the result is that you can leave a sandwich out for a decade, and never need to fix a house."

"I guess. So do you pay the Dwarves to keep things up so you don't have to think about things falling apart too much?"

"Yes. And we're working on magical solutions, there ought to be some -- it's not like the Silmarils, it's a collaborative project, lots of people involved, if we can do them at all we can mass-produce them -"

"How do you mass-produce magic items?"

"Very slowly. They're produced in the first place through osanwë -- Dwarves have a different approach, though -- and the instructions are usually very long and if you make a mistake you have to start the whole thing over unless it's designed such that you only have to start one block over, but designing that way makes it take even longer."

"This sounds like a distinct meaning of 'mass production' from what I am used to, where, like, they have a mold for hundreds of crayons and dump a vat of wax into it all at once and then pop the crayons out and have a machine to roll them in labels announcing that they are Spring Apple Green or something."

"We can't do that with magic but we can publish the instructions and set lots of people to making them and then they'll be widely available eventually."

"Yeah that's not mass production that's... open-sourcing."

"Okay. If we can do it at all we can open-source it."

"Cool. It's not dangerous to do the magic?"