The German (and Anglo Saxon) dwarf is perceived as short. But the Norse dvergr is perceived as human sized. In the Norse sagas, the only dvergr who is described as short is "Alfrikr" who is the German dwarf Albrecht who appears in a saga about a German family in Germany. Similarly, the French fay are human size, except Oberon who is likewise the German dwarf Albrecht, is described as short. In the French context, the Oberon is a fay man and his shortness was explained by him being cursed at birth by an other fay.
The point is. The German dwarf is short. But in other cultures, especially during the Viking Era Norse cultures, the dwarf appears normal human height.
If you agree to switch the names of these races for something else, eventually these new names will also be considered pejorative and we'll discuss a new, new name. It is an endless cycle and you're doing it to make yourself feel better. The Dwarves and Halflings don't care; they're made up.
If you do this, you'll have to ask the Orcs if they would rather be called something else, and then ...
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
I am sure it occurs to everyone sooner or later that the names of these two races seem quite belittling and insulting.
But are they? As others have pointed out, in the context of fantasy, they traditionally have more positive connotations as negative. And frankly, to the extent Dwarves have negative connotations it is typically not about height but other negative qualities such as drunkenness, bad tempers or greed.
Equating them with goblins happens next to never but here in 2020, even traditional 'monsters' such as goblins and kobolds are as or more presented as cute and desirable to play.
Even to the extent height is mentioned, it is usually presented as a positive (being able to slip through small spaces, or out maneuver larger creatures).
Without negative connotations, particularly without any connected to height, what, exactly, is wrong with the names?
Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the names of those species, if one accepts that D&D is a self-contained fantasy game, devoid of any correlation or causation with the real world. And that is what D&D is.
Some people may consider these names offensive. I'm not going to say that they are wrong.
Even if DnD is supposed to be some kind of reflection of our society.
That having been said, I think "Kith" is an excellent option for Halfling. It very much reflects, in my mind, the idea of a tight-knit society working together to accomplish goals. They might see that tight-knit culture as their defining characteristic and as being much further developed among their people than among the larger folk. They might refer to themselves behind closed doors as "the Kindred" and think of anyone who lacks the tight-knit culture as less evolved. The problem I would have with this, though, is that they are a Dex-based race and Dex-Based races tend to be either Rogues or Rangers (which are both classes marked as set off from a sense of belonging to a community). I'd suggest that Halflings could choose between a bonus to Dex or Wis.
Dwarves, in particular with their bonus to strength and endurance, have no connotation of being weak or lesser than. They are one of the main races chosen for fighters.
The medical condition aside, no one really refers to little people as "dwarfs" any more. The word is free to return to its fantasy/mythological origin. It's pointless to fish around for something to be offended about. And hey, if Disney is happy to have "Seven Dwarfs," including a relatively new attraction named such at WDW, I doubt it's a real issue for anyone.
Having said that, Tolkien allegedly regretted using the word for LotR, and mentioned that if he could go back and change things, one update would be to call them Dwarrow, as it fit his linguistic aesthetic better (another change would be to completely excise Tom Bombadil, but that's another story...).
Having said that, Tolkien allegedly regretted using the word for LotR, and mentioned that if he could go back and change things, one update would be to call them Dwarrow, as it fit his linguistic aesthetic better.
Wow.
Old English: dweorg, plural dweorgas
became
Middle English: dwergh or dwerf or dwerw, plural dwarrows
If the term remained in continuous use in English, then it would have become:
Standardized Modern English: dwarf (stem dwery-), plural dwarrows
Plural dwarrows (and by backformation singular dwarrow) is a great name for the specifically British concept of a dwarf.
One of my players calls em DORFS. That works as well.
Halflings..well they're just halflings. Or hobbits. Or small folk. Or the disregarded lot that would have their heads cut off if it stood a bit higher from the ground. My players aren't fond of halflings or gnomes - but there's always one in the party that saves the day!
It's never occurred to me that these would be offensive. As mentioned, mythical dwarves came first, so the offensive thing is to associate that term with real humans. And halflings/hobbits aren't real so...
I'm totally on board with the changes coming in Tasha's, but I don't think this particular change is necessary.
None of my Halflings came from communities with a name for themselves. All non-Halflings outsiders were just "big folk" but the community never used the words with such people. "Big folk" included Gnomes and Goblins and other people with the size of Small who weren't part of the community.
Whatever other people used to call Halflings didn't matter to my Halflings. Either, you were either another Halfling with no designation, you were part of the community with no designation, or you were "big folk" - a phrase laden with xenophobia.
Halflings are not exempt from their own less-than-polite ways when referring to others, but why give any special label to what Halflings consider to be normal? Big folk are weird to call each other something different because they look different. They should get names for being people who do weird things like call each other something different because they look different. It's no wonder my characters' Halfling communities tended to be insular.
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Even Gandalf said in "The Two Towers" when asked what Hobbits are.
"They're halflings."
The race names are fine as is. Dwarves made Mjlonir, Halflings walk to mountains.
That’s what it comes down to. I don’t know of anyone who is or would be actually offended by this (and I’m quite liberal, as are many of my friends). It feels like just fishing for something to complain about. The names come from classic LotR fantasy, which is how most people get into D&D in the first place, and you can’t knock the classics.
The English language does seem to have a distinct disrespect for the terms that people would prefer to refer to themselves as-- and when those people speak the English language, they are forced to use those same terms regardless of what they prefer to call themselves.
They aren't forced to use terms they don't want to, they're using using the English term because they're speaking English. Why would they use their own term when the person they are speaking with might not understand them? If you were speaking Chinese, you'd use the Chinese word for foreigner, not whatever it is you are in English.
And it doesn't matter what you call Dwarves and Halflings. 1 - they don't care. 2 - If you called them something else, then that word would mean short people. So same thing.
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"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
The English language does seem to have a distinct disrespect for the terms that people would prefer to refer to themselves as-- and when those people speak the English language, they are forced to use those same terms regardless of what they prefer to call themselves.
They aren't forced to use terms they don't want to, they're using using the English term because they're speaking English. Why would they use their own term when the person they are speaking with might not understand them? If you were speaking Chinese, you'd use the Chinese word for foreigner, not whatever it is you are in English.
And it doesn't matter what you call Dwarves and Halflings. 1 - they don't care. 2 - If you called them something else, then that word would mean short people. So same thing.
Careful there. Speaking obvious truths can get you banned. The English language has been around for 1300 years in some form. D&D has been around for 40.
But once again, we have a thread that has people trying to impose their real world morality onto a fantasy game based on vigilante killing. And I am pretty sure, most of society frowns upon vigilante killing, so maybe these people should be offended about that primary issue. The species in question in D&D don't exist in any world humans are aware of. There is no one to be offended. This is another thread that should be locked.
The name "hobbit" comes from "hob", a variant of the name "robin". It relates to "Robin Goodfellow" and "hobgoblin", as types of fairy creatures.
Both are sprites, and both are childlike (thus like small human children). A "hob" is generally applied for a helpful nature spirit, while a "goblin" is generally applied for a harmful nature spirit. The oxymoron "hob-goblin" is used in a humorous sense, for a spirit that likes to play practical jokes. The laughter is "helpful" but the pranks can be painful!
In the worldview where Shakespeare is from, the hobgoblin especially refers to Puck, understood as the jester of the royal fairy court.
Meanwhile, the hob refers to house spirits, something like the vibe of a place where humans live. Thus, hob tends to be regional variant of gnomes, brownies, and similar.
According to Shakespeare, the fairies look like small human children. In one of his plays, actual human children are able to convince that they are fairies. So the smallness mainly refers to age. The fairies appear any age from about newborn to about 20. Additionally, the fairies of the culture of Shakespeare can shrink because they are spirits who lack matter, thus can shrink in the exact same way that angels can when they "dance on the head of pin". The angels can shrink smaller because they are more refined. The fairies can shrink to the size of about a thumbnail (a signet on a ring).
Also, as a Tolkien fan, I have to correct this. The word "hobbit," according to Tolkien, first came to him when he was bored grading students' essays, and, finding a blank page in one exam booklet, scribbled down "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," which would go on to become the opening line of The Hobbit itself. At the time, he said, he had no idea what a "hobbit" could be. Any connection between hobbits and fairy creatures was buried deep in Tolkien's subconscious (and as he hated Shakespeare's fairies, it seems unlikely that it existed at all).
Without or without the comparing the word "halfling" to any IRL racial identity issues, the use of the word "Halfling" being the only official designation in sources such as the PHB and the MM makes for poor world-building.
As the OP argued quite well, the term "halfling" is always refers to creatures much larger halflings themselves, but there is no reason why halflings would ever call themselves that since the halfling language would quite naturally start from the standpoint that halflings are "normal" in size. We see this reflected in how most languages in human cultures tend to center the perspective of the people who developed the language. Unless the people currently called halflings have some kind of inherent inferiority complex, they would certainly refer themselves by a designation that does Not require the existence of another species/race to make sense of their own. This isn't to say that other creatures would commonly use the term, but it's frankly silly that in a compendium after compendium of new "races," from Elves to Dragonborn, from Warforged to Centaurs, that by now there is no broad recognition that a grouping of creatures with unusual luck and agility would still think of themselves as half of any other race.
Modern day society really baffles me. Dwarves and Halflings are called what they are called. There was no insult intended when they were named and there is still no intent meant in the names today. It is utterly beyond me why kids these days are so intent on going out and causing a fuss, claiming insult where there is absolutely none there. Is it just in an attempt to stand out and be seen in the throng of millions of people that use the internet? Has my generation failed so badly at bringing up their kids? I mean my 2 are 19 and 21 and neither of them behave this way or act like the countless others I see on FaceBook or TilTok etc. Have the kids of today never been taught "Sticks and stones"? I mean I could - at a push - understand that people with the medical condition of Dwarfism MIGHT get upset with the inhabitants of a fantasy game incorporating magic and sword swinging hero's and dragons - MIGHT - being called Dwarves. But there are no human medical conditions where the people are referred to as having Halflingism. So why are kids feeling insulted on behalf of a people who don't even exist, over something that is utterly meaningless? Time for the Creator to hit the reset button maybe? A giant asteroid or maybe 40 days and nights of rain? All this sensitivity and PC is being taken way to far. In a few years we are going to see people offended by having to wash, or by breathing.
Modern day society really baffles me. Dwarves and Halflings are called what they are called. There was no insult intended when they were named and there is still no intent meant in the names today. It is utterly beyond me why kids these days are so intent on going out and causing a fuss, claiming insult where there is absolutely none there. Is it just in an attempt to stand out and be seen in the throng of millions of people that use the internet? Has my generation failed so badly at bringing up their kids? I mean my 2 are 19 and 21 and neither of them behave this way or act like the countless others I see on FaceBook or TilTok etc. Have the kids of today never been taught "Sticks and stones"? I mean I could - at a push - understand that people with the medical condition of Dwarfism MIGHT get upset with the inhabitants of a fantasy game incorporating magic and sword swinging hero's and dragons - MIGHT - being called Dwarves. But there are no human medical conditions where the people are referred to as having Halflingism. So why are kids feeling insulted on behalf of a people who don't even exist, over something that is utterly meaningless? Time for the Creator to hit the reset button maybe? A giant asteroid or maybe 40 days and nights of rain? All this sensitivity and PC is being taken way to far. In a few years we are going to see people offended by having to wash, or by breathing.
It isn't a matter of "being offended" on any person's behalf-- after all, there are no such real people. It is a matter of thinking through the fundamentals of how this supposed world would work. And I have never heard of a group of people anywhere on earth who refer to themselves as the "half people." Do you refer to your entire genetic group as "the halfwits" or "the heartless"? Because if you do, then you' can stand in as the living proof that a group of people do refer to their genetic group as an inferior version of what is normal. [REDACTED]
And any group of people in any functional world, outside of perhaps the direct result of long-standing generational oppression, would not actively choose to define themselves as half-people. But that's right there in the name-- half-ling. The first part indicates half, the second indicates little. The whole thing is a bunch of nonsense, regardless of who or what used it. No group of people would refer to themselves not only both in comparison to other people, but in a negative comparison-- to outright state every time they say the name of their people, that they are worth only half of one of those other folk.
[REDACTED] The term "Halfling" in the very least requires that humans already be ubiquitous and already considered "the norm". You do not come up with the term "little half people" to refer to a group of people unless you already have something to compare them disfavorably to.
So especially in a world where they have apparently been around longer than humans-- that's just utter nonsense, a major plothole. The only way to explain it would be if at some point the entire race was conquered by humans (or possibly Elves) and spent generations under the oppression of larger folks until they internalized the idea that they are a lesser people. But, even then, one would imagine that once they were freed they would want to stop referring themselves as "little half people".
And a completely made-up term that doesn't have the term "half" or any term meaning "small" that would ever be found used in any other conversation would not come to take on the same meaning. The proof is that the term "Gnome" is also understood to refer to a group of small people, but the word itself does not contain any term that in itself means "small" and certainly not "worthy of only half".
And its not like you can claim the term "half" doesn't exist within the D&D world or something because we have half-elves and half-orcs and such. Although those terms are also a little less-than-ideal-- as was pointed out way back during your nostalgic days and the Dragonlance book Dragons of Autumn Twilight came out and pointed out that Tanis could have called himself "half-human" but that term is so obviously and inherently demeaning and alienizing that no one would use it. And they renamed the Halflings in their world to Kender for the exact same reason. Of course, their Kenders were so one note and flandeized that most people just despise them as a result.
So it has nothing to do with "modern society"-- this has been a thing that D&D has been aware of since the mid 1980s, 33 years ago. So unless you are including the writers of the Dragonlance setting in that "modern society" making me ask [REDACTED] this has nothing to do with "modern society".
Notes: Do not make personal attacks against other users
If you are simply not thoughtful enough to put yourself in other people's shoes-- even fictional people's shoes-- and ask yourself what makes any sort of sense from that perspective.
It's not about being thoughtful, it's simply common sense - why on earth would you need to be thoughtful or considerate of he feelings of something that doesn't exist and never will? The whole thing is a fictitious game, completely made up by a guy who wanted to tell more interesting fantasy stories to his grandchildren. Trying to be polite and not use words that might be considered offensive to a non-existent group of imaginary creatures in a made up game for children is the very essence of political correctness gone awry. That doesn't change no matter how many names you call me or insults that you throw my way.
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The German (and Anglo Saxon) dwarf is perceived as short. But the Norse dvergr is perceived as human sized. In the Norse sagas, the only dvergr who is described as short is "Alfrikr" who is the German dwarf Albrecht who appears in a saga about a German family in Germany. Similarly, the French fay are human size, except Oberon who is likewise the German dwarf Albrecht, is described as short. In the French context, the Oberon is a fay man and his shortness was explained by him being cursed at birth by an other fay.
The point is. The German dwarf is short. But in other cultures, especially during the Viking Era Norse cultures, the dwarf appears normal human height.
he / him
This is pointless.
If you agree to switch the names of these races for something else, eventually these new names will also be considered pejorative and we'll discuss a new, new name. It is an endless cycle and you're doing it to make yourself feel better. The Dwarves and Halflings don't care; they're made up.
If you do this, you'll have to ask the Orcs if they would rather be called something else, and then ...
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the names of those species, if one accepts that D&D is a self-contained fantasy game, devoid of any correlation or causation with the real world. And that is what D&D is.
Confirmed, I saw in a recent interview with Gimili and Bruenor that both were proud of their race and their strong Dwarven name.
Some people may consider these names offensive. I'm not going to say that they are wrong.
Even if DnD is supposed to be some kind of reflection of our society.
That having been said, I think "Kith" is an excellent option for Halfling. It very much reflects, in my mind, the idea of a tight-knit society working together to accomplish goals. They might see that tight-knit culture as their defining characteristic and as being much further developed among their people than among the larger folk. They might refer to themselves behind closed doors as "the Kindred" and think of anyone who lacks the tight-knit culture as less evolved. The problem I would have with this, though, is that they are a Dex-based race and Dex-Based races tend to be either Rogues or Rangers (which are both classes marked as set off from a sense of belonging to a community). I'd suggest that Halflings could choose between a bonus to Dex or Wis.
Dwarves, in particular with their bonus to strength and endurance, have no connotation of being weak or lesser than. They are one of the main races chosen for fighters.
The medical condition aside, no one really refers to little people as "dwarfs" any more. The word is free to return to its fantasy/mythological origin. It's pointless to fish around for something to be offended about. And hey, if Disney is happy to have "Seven Dwarfs," including a relatively new attraction named such at WDW, I doubt it's a real issue for anyone.
Having said that, Tolkien allegedly regretted using the word for LotR, and mentioned that if he could go back and change things, one update would be to call them Dwarrow, as it fit his linguistic aesthetic better (another change would be to completely excise Tom Bombadil, but that's another story...).
Wow.
Old English: dweorg, plural dweorgas
became
Middle English: dwergh or dwerf or dwerw, plural dwarrows
If the term remained in continuous use in English, then it would have become:
Standardized Modern English: dwarf (stem dwery-), plural dwarrows
Plural dwarrows (and by backformation singular dwarrow) is a great name for the specifically British concept of a dwarf.
he / him
One of my players calls em DORFS. That works as well.
Halflings..well they're just halflings. Or hobbits. Or small folk. Or the disregarded lot that would have their heads cut off if it stood a bit higher from the ground. My players aren't fond of halflings or gnomes - but there's always one in the party that saves the day!
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It's never occurred to me that these would be offensive. As mentioned, mythical dwarves came first, so the offensive thing is to associate that term with real humans. And halflings/hobbits aren't real so...
I'm totally on board with the changes coming in Tasha's, but I don't think this particular change is necessary.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
None of my Halflings came from communities with a name for themselves. All non-Halflings outsiders were just "big folk" but the community never used the words with such people. "Big folk" included Gnomes and Goblins and other people with the size of Small who weren't part of the community.
Whatever other people used to call Halflings didn't matter to my Halflings. Either, you were either another Halfling with no designation, you were part of the community with no designation, or you were "big folk" - a phrase laden with xenophobia.
Halflings are not exempt from their own less-than-polite ways when referring to others, but why give any special label to what Halflings consider to be normal? Big folk are weird to call each other something different because they look different. They should get names for being people who do weird things like call each other something different because they look different. It's no wonder my characters' Halfling communities tended to be insular.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Even Gandalf said in "The Two Towers" when asked what Hobbits are.
"They're halflings."
The race names are fine as is. Dwarves made Mjlonir, Halflings walk to mountains.
That’s what it comes down to. I don’t know of anyone who is or would be actually offended by this (and I’m quite liberal, as are many of my friends). It feels like just fishing for something to complain about. The names come from classic LotR fantasy, which is how most people get into D&D in the first place, and you can’t knock the classics.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
They aren't forced to use terms they don't want to, they're using using the English term because they're speaking English. Why would they use their own term when the person they are speaking with might not understand them? If you were speaking Chinese, you'd use the Chinese word for foreigner, not whatever it is you are in English.
And it doesn't matter what you call Dwarves and Halflings. 1 - they don't care. 2 - If you called them something else, then that word would mean short people. So same thing.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Careful there. Speaking obvious truths can get you banned. The English language has been around for 1300 years in some form. D&D has been around for 40.
But once again, we have a thread that has people trying to impose their real world morality onto a fantasy game based on vigilante killing. And I am pretty sure, most of society frowns upon vigilante killing, so maybe these people should be offended about that primary issue. The species in question in D&D don't exist in any world humans are aware of. There is no one to be offended. This is another thread that should be locked.
Also, as a Tolkien fan, I have to correct this. The word "hobbit," according to Tolkien, first came to him when he was bored grading students' essays, and, finding a blank page in one exam booklet, scribbled down "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," which would go on to become the opening line of The Hobbit itself. At the time, he said, he had no idea what a "hobbit" could be. Any connection between hobbits and fairy creatures was buried deep in Tolkien's subconscious (and as he hated Shakespeare's fairies, it seems unlikely that it existed at all).
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
Without or without the comparing the word "halfling" to any IRL racial identity issues, the use of the word "Halfling" being the only official designation in sources such as the PHB and the MM makes for poor world-building.
As the OP argued quite well, the term "halfling" is always refers to creatures much larger halflings themselves, but there is no reason why halflings would ever call themselves that since the halfling language would quite naturally start from the standpoint that halflings are "normal" in size. We see this reflected in how most languages in human cultures tend to center the perspective of the people who developed the language. Unless the people currently called halflings have some kind of inherent inferiority complex, they would certainly refer themselves by a designation that does Not require the existence of another species/race to make sense of their own. This isn't to say that other creatures would commonly use the term, but it's frankly silly that in a compendium after compendium of new "races," from Elves to Dragonborn, from Warforged to Centaurs, that by now there is no broad recognition that a grouping of creatures with unusual luck and agility would still think of themselves as half of any other race.
Modern day society really baffles me. Dwarves and Halflings are called what they are called. There was no insult intended when they were named and there is still no intent meant in the names today. It is utterly beyond me why kids these days are so intent on going out and causing a fuss, claiming insult where there is absolutely none there. Is it just in an attempt to stand out and be seen in the throng of millions of people that use the internet? Has my generation failed so badly at bringing up their kids? I mean my 2 are 19 and 21 and neither of them behave this way or act like the countless others I see on FaceBook or TilTok etc. Have the kids of today never been taught "Sticks and stones"? I mean I could - at a push - understand that people with the medical condition of Dwarfism MIGHT get upset with the inhabitants of a fantasy game incorporating magic and sword swinging hero's and dragons - MIGHT - being called Dwarves. But there are no human medical conditions where the people are referred to as having Halflingism. So why are kids feeling insulted on behalf of a people who don't even exist, over something that is utterly meaningless? Time for the Creator to hit the reset button maybe? A giant asteroid or maybe 40 days and nights of rain? All this sensitivity and PC is being taken way to far. In a few years we are going to see people offended by having to wash, or by breathing.
Of course, we also have the other end of the spectrum, where people get offended by the mere hypothetical that someone might find something offensive.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
It isn't a matter of "being offended" on any person's behalf-- after all, there are no such real people. It is a matter of thinking through the fundamentals of how this supposed world would work. And I have never heard of a group of people anywhere on earth who refer to themselves as the "half people." Do you refer to your entire genetic group as "the halfwits" or "the heartless"? Because if you do, then you' can stand in as the living proof that a group of people do refer to their genetic group as an inferior version of what is normal. [REDACTED]
And any group of people in any functional world, outside of perhaps the direct result of long-standing generational oppression, would not actively choose to define themselves as half-people. But that's right there in the name-- half-ling. The first part indicates half, the second indicates little. The whole thing is a bunch of nonsense, regardless of who or what used it. No group of people would refer to themselves not only both in comparison to other people, but in a negative comparison-- to outright state every time they say the name of their people, that they are worth only half of one of those other folk.
[REDACTED] The term "Halfling" in the very least requires that humans already be ubiquitous and already considered "the norm". You do not come up with the term "little half people" to refer to a group of people unless you already have something to compare them disfavorably to.
So especially in a world where they have apparently been around longer than humans-- that's just utter nonsense, a major plothole. The only way to explain it would be if at some point the entire race was conquered by humans (or possibly Elves) and spent generations under the oppression of larger folks until they internalized the idea that they are a lesser people. But, even then, one would imagine that once they were freed they would want to stop referring themselves as "little half people".
And a completely made-up term that doesn't have the term "half" or any term meaning "small" that would ever be found used in any other conversation would not come to take on the same meaning. The proof is that the term "Gnome" is also understood to refer to a group of small people, but the word itself does not contain any term that in itself means "small" and certainly not "worthy of only half".
And its not like you can claim the term "half" doesn't exist within the D&D world or something because we have half-elves and half-orcs and such. Although those terms are also a little less-than-ideal-- as was pointed out way back during your nostalgic days and the Dragonlance book Dragons of Autumn Twilight came out and pointed out that Tanis could have called himself "half-human" but that term is so obviously and inherently demeaning and alienizing that no one would use it. And they renamed the Halflings in their world to Kender for the exact same reason. Of course, their Kenders were so one note and flandeized that most people just despise them as a result.
So it has nothing to do with "modern society"-- this has been a thing that D&D has been aware of since the mid 1980s, 33 years ago. So unless you are including the writers of the Dragonlance setting in that "modern society" making me ask [REDACTED] this has nothing to do with "modern society".
It's not about being thoughtful, it's simply common sense - why on earth would you need to be thoughtful or considerate of he feelings of something that doesn't exist and never will? The whole thing is a fictitious game, completely made up by a guy who wanted to tell more interesting fantasy stories to his grandchildren. Trying to be polite and not use words that might be considered offensive to a non-existent group of imaginary creatures in a made up game for children is the very essence of political correctness gone awry. That doesn't change no matter how many names you call me or insults that you throw my way.