Is Dwarf something to keep, and good alternative names for Dwarves

[Witty Username]

So,
A thing that has been rattling in my brain and won't go away.

RPGs as a whole, and D&D specifically, have been moving to be more inclusive and are taking off the sharp edges of there language usage and mechanics. Races are now Species, Ability scores are not tied to them, some of the game in the OSR crowd have been moving away from gendered terminology.

Should this mean changes to Dwarves in a stronger sense? I don't have more than a couple anecdotes on the subject but I have heard this one causing discomfort for people.

Also, if we would want to go this route, what are some good alternative names for Dwarves:
Duardin is probably out, because Games Workshop calls dibs. Khazad for similar reasons
I have been playing with Duergar in my head as a primary name instead of the Deep version


Any one have any good names for the light side of this topic?
Comments on the larger concern, either to calm my brain rattle or give their two cents?

[Vahnavoi]

There was a longer topic on this not too long ago. The joke is that dwarves have become a highly specific, stereotyped thing in genre fantasy. This leads to sort of a Catch-22: if you play to the type, calling them something else is pointless, as everyone will recognize them as and call them a dwarf. Don't play to the type, and no-one will recognize them.

Fundamentally, though, trying to avoid the word makes no sense in context. This is like some people wanting to drop the word "barbarian". It's not an insult and not in any way exclusive or harmful. You might as well be trying to avoid using "pig", "dog", "chicken" or "ass" as species names because someone somewhere has used them as insults.

[Pauly]

Any word can be used a pejorative. If you take for example 'moron' it originally had a specific medical meaning (an adult with the mental reasoning of an 8-12 year old child). Historically new euphemisms keep on getting invented to describe things when enough people find the old word offensive. The trouble is that if enough people use the new word as a pejorative eventually another new euphemism gets invented and then that new word gets used pejoratively leading to more euphemisms.

Specifically referring to dwarf.
- the irl word has irl meanings that I don't think I can safely discuss here without breaching forum rules.
- it has a clear meaning in fantasy literature which is related to but separate from its irl uses.

Given the clarity of its fantasy literature meaning I don't think there is much point in trying to change the name. In fact it is probably much more tightly defined than other commonly used fantasy names such as 'dragon', 'giant', 'ogre', or elf all of which are much more varied in size, colour and features.

[AMFV]

Any one have any good names for the light side of this topic?

Khazad would probably be the normal one, but it won't work because they'll just get called Dwarves

Comments on the larger concern, either to calm my brain rattle or give their two cents?

Generally Little People are not mentally challenged and are able to advocate for themselves. If I have one of them in my games I would ask them if they find the name troubling... I would certainly not act to shelter them if they hadn't asked me to. The same way I wouldn't want people to remove issues with things that had bothered me in a game without asking me. If somebody was like "let's not have anything that could be related to PTSD in a game because that might bother AMFV" that would be really irritating to me, because I didn't ask for that. It's one of those things that you can ask folks about.

Basically if somebody asks me for something to be treated a certain way, that's different than me presuming that they aren't able to handle it and then acting to shield them from something. That's actually kind of not cool.

[Kardwill]

Any one have any good names for the light side of this topic?

I like the Elder Scroll's "Dwemer", even if they look more like dark elves in those games. That sounds both "dwarvish", and like Dwarf, so it's easy to use.

As to "should you call them dwarves?" It doesn't concern me much because I'm used to it, but if it makes you unconfortable, that's a perfectly good reason to find an alternative.

[KorvinStarmast]

Fundamentally, though, trying to avoid the word makes no sense in context. This is like some people wanting to drop the word "barbarian". It's not an insult and not in any way exclusive or harmful. You might as well be trying to avoid using "pig", "dog", "chicken" or "ass" as species names because someone somewhere has used them as insults.

This is the way.

[MonochromeTiger]

Far as I'm aware the mythological use and implications of the name as well as the words it was derived from predates its use as a term directed at people. It really doesn't make much sense to treat a word as poisonous because people later twisted or misused it, that doesn't solve the issue it just directs it at the word and lets the people misusing it continue to do so; if anything it tells them "yeah we give up, you get to define it now."

It's an issue of language and it has come up several times in the past when something gets used in a derogatory manner. You change the commonly used word and the insult doesn't go away, it just becomes more bitter because there's no longer a competing context for that word. Even worse the things that caused it to get misused as an insult don't go away and if the new word you use catches on the people using the insult may just start using that word for it as well. Terms referring to mental health run into that issue pretty often because the word itself really doesn't matter to the people using it as an insult, the things implied by the word do and so they just move on to something newer that occupies the same space if recognition of the original falls out of favor, or in some cases the original just becomes normalized for the insult and the context gets largely forgotten.

I like the Elder Scroll's "Dwemer", even if they look more like dark elves in those games. That sounds both "dwarvish", and like Dwarf, so it's easy to use.

As to "should you call them dwarves?" It doesn't concern me much because I'm used to it, but if it makes you unconfortable, that's a perfectly good reason to find an alternative.

Elder scrolls is an interesting case for naming them because only the first half of "Dwemer" actually marks them as Dwarves, the setting uses "Mer" as a catch all for Elves and it's worked into identifiers for pretty much all of them even when they have an "Imperial" name that actually says what fantasy race/species/whatever they're actually supposed to represent. So "Dwemer" was just "Elves who live inside the mountains" but also Dwarves, "Orsimer" are just Elves who worshipped a corrupted deity and were changed when he was but they're also Orcs.

So in essence the Elder Scrolls answer to why their Dwarves and Orcs are different and why they're called something different is "they're just types of Elves" and that's literally worked into their names.

[Xervous]

In all the multi page sagas that end up getting locked, across all the screeching on reddit, I don’t recall any striking examples of people being offended by dwarves. The only good reasons I see for changing the name tie to IP and setting. I say dwarf and it could be any game, I say squat and it’s definitely 40k. If you need your dwarves to be extra distinct and/or you’re highly litigious, then you have a reason to spin up another name.

I just don’t see the value add, there’s only the looming specter of confused players and loss of the immediate mythological and cultural tie ins that games have relied on.

Edit: there’s also the risk of the name change being received as an out of touch ESG-washing attempt.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

I think renaming 'dwarf' does very little for inclusion and causes significant problems to achieve that limited-to-no gain.

Dwarf is a word with a long history used in a ton of fields. It's not just fantasy and folklore, where it stretches back into Old English, Old Norse and High German; it's used in astronomy, biology and computer science as well. Dwarves, under that name, show up in Tolkien and all Tolkien derivatives, of course, but they're also in Pratchett, Marvel Comics, Warhammer and Warcraft and bunches of others. Dwarf Fortress just sold 800,000 copies, and Deep Rock Galactic -- a game about space dwarf miners -- is one of the most widely beloved and played indie games of the last decade.

Dwarf evokes a certain image, including vocal, visual and social characteristics. Renaming that image isn't going to happen overnight. People are just gonna say 'dwarf', not 'khazad' or whatever the thing is, and you can see that in Warhammer. I'm not, like, deep in that scene (or even involved with it at all), but I've literally never heard Duardin prior to this thread. My exposure to Warhammer is through the Total War games, where everything is a dwarf. The cities are dwarfholds, there's a guy called Grombrindal the White Dwarf, there's an antagonist faction with a whole DLC built around it called 'chaos dwarfs'. If GW is doing a dwarf rebrand, they missed including it in one of their most mainstream products.

Renaming something as baked-in to classic fantasy as dwarves without some other reason isn't going to work. If WotC wants to either do a big setting refresh (in this new edition, the resurrected King Karl unites the dwarf clans of Faerun and renames them! Huzzah! Now all dwarves are Knollens!) or create a new setting where dwarves have a different name that's got some support for it, a la The Elder Scrolls, then OK! But just drawing a line and saying 'this word, which has been used in various forms since the 5th century, is bad now' isn't actually going to stop people from using it, because people, not just players, know what it means. Communication is about conveying information, and it's difficult to pack more information about what the characteristics of a character are into a single word than by saying they're a dwarf.

[Amnestic]

As a long-standing crusader against the name "Halfling" I'm on board with retiring Dwarf for a similar reason. Wikipedia informs me that "According to Tolkien, the "real 'historical' plural" of "dwarf" is "dwarrows" or "dwerrows."

Dwarrow or Dwerrow (I prefer dwerrow) feels like a fine alternative to me.

Spoiler: Dungeon Meshi Addendum

Show

In Dungeon Meshi, dwarves, halflings, and 'humans' all fall under the blanket 'human' race, are are called dwarves, half-foots, and tallmen (sometimes 'long-legs').

It makes a little more sense here, since their height is specifically the differentiating physical feature to the other humans.

[Vahnavoi]

Another problem is that many alternative names that would make mythological sense have suffered from D&D-ism and now refer to other weirdly specific creatures. Go ahead, try to call them gnomes, elves, trolls, kobolds or goblins and watch heads explode.

Another example of the same phenomenom:

Non-D&D player: "Gandalf is a Wizard."

D&D player: "Ackshually, Gandalf doesn't memorize spells or learn them from books and is an ancient spirit, so he's really more like a Solar. Oh and he also rides a horse and fights with a sword and heals people, so really he's more like a Paladin."

Non-D&D player: "WTF are you talking about?"

Or, to paraphrase a Marvel movie:

Dude one (probably Falcon), talking about Dr. Strange: "Wait, Earth has wizards now?"

Dude two (probably Bucky), being a pedantic nerd: "Sorcerers."

Dude one, annoyed: "The only difference is that a wizard has a hat."

[Eldan]

Dvergar is the same word as dwarf, just a few centuries of language evolution.

Honestly, if we're talking D&D, they have watered down races so much (and are doing so even more in Next) that we may as well just call them Mountainfolk and the elves Forestfolk.

Another problem is that many alternative names that would make mythological sense have suffered from D&D-ism and now refer to other weirdly specific creatures. Go ahead, try to call them gnomes, elves, trolls, kobolds or goblins and watch heads explode.

I have long considered to use gnome stats for dwarves in my German-language games. After all, the significant features of dwarves, other than being tiny old men, is their ability with illusion magic, invisibility and magical crafting. Just like gnomes.

Any word can be used a pejorative. If you take for example 'moron' it originally had a specific medical meaning (an adult with the mental reasoning of an 8-12 year old child). Historically new euphemisms keep on getting invented to describe things when enough people find the old word offensive. The trouble is that if enough people use the new word as a pejorative eventually another new euphemism gets invented and then that new word gets used pejoratively leading to more euphemisms.

Also a good point. The most popular insult among kids I deal with is now "victim". Used about in the same way that "gay" used to be, i.e. "Man up and don't be such a victim".

[Vahnavoi]

Honestly, if we're talking D&D, they have watered down races so much (and are doing so even more in Next) that we may as well just call them Mountainfolk and the elves Forestfolk.

That's not watering down. That's just normal way to name things, in multiple different languages across space and time. A lot of common mythological names follow this pattern, it just isn't always obvious to contemporary English speaker.

[Morgaln]

Far as I'm aware the mythological use and implications of the name as well as the words it was derived from predates its use as a term directed at people. It really doesn't make much sense to treat a word as poisonous because people later twisted or misused it, that doesn't solve the issue it just directs it at the word and lets the people misusing it continue to do so; if anything it tells them "yeah we give up, you get to define it now."

It's an issue of language and it has come up several times in the past when something gets used in a derogatory manner. You change the commonly used word and the insult doesn't go away, it just becomes more bitter because there's no longer a competing context for that word. Even worse the things that caused it to get misused as an insult don't go away and if the new word you use catches on the people using the insult may just start using that word for it as well. Terms referring to mental health run into that issue pretty often because the word itself really doesn't matter to the people using it as an insult, the things implied by the word do and so they just move on to something newer that occupies the same space if recognition of the original falls out of favor, or in some cases the original just becomes normalized for the insult and the context gets largely forgotten.



Elder scrolls is an interesting case for naming them because only the first half of "Dwemer" actually marks them as Dwarves, the setting uses "Mer" as a catch all for Elves and it's worked into identifiers for pretty much all of them even when they have an "Imperial" name that actually says what fantasy race/species/whatever they're actually supposed to represent. So "Dwemer" was just "Elves who live inside the mountains" but also Dwarves, "Orsimer" are just Elves who worshipped a corrupted deity and were changed when he was but they're also Orcs.

So in essence the Elder Scrolls answer to why their Dwarves and Orcs are different and why they're called something different is "they're just types of Elves" and that's literally worked into their names.

This somewhat aligns with nordic mythology, where dwarves are the inhabitants of svartalfheim ("home of the black elves").

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

That's not watering down. That's just normal way to name things, in multiple different languages across space and time. A lot of common mythological names follow this pattern, it just isn't always obvious to contemporary English speaker.

I think part of Eldan's point -- and I hope he corrects me if I'm wrong -- is that names like 'hill dwarf' or 'moon elf' or 'Karsite' convey more information about the being in question than just their habitat. Through the 5E and 5.5E development cycle, a lot of that information has either been stripped away or flattened out, and much of what remains is either habitat or height and attitude towards facial hair. So in a generic sense they might as well just group them by the traits that are imposed by where they live.

5E is kind of bad about this in particular because it frequently reaches back to older lore to fill in its gaps, while also picking and choosing which bits it wants to keep.

[KorvinStarmast]

Dvergar is the same word as dwarf,

Guessing that is related to the German word zwerg or Zwerge.
(I only learned the nominative case...)

[Anonymouswizard]

Honestly I think White Wolf had the right idea back in the 90s: give the race's official name and then a section that lists other terms used. Onyx Path has even gone one better in their CofD books: noting not only alternative names, but also noting specific ones as offensive. It's not the only place I've seen it (UA does it for Adept schools), but it seems like a decent solution. E.g.

Elfs
Also known as: Eldar, Forest folk, Fairies (offensive), bloody child stealing gits (very offensive)

Using elves as I'm a bit stuck on dwarves.

[KorvinStarmast]

Honestly I think White Wolf had the right idea back in the 90s: give the race's official name and then a section that lists other terms used. Onyx Path has even gone one better in their CofD books: noting not only alternative names, but also noting specific ones as offensive. It's not the only place I've seen it (UA does it for Adept schools), but it seems like a decent solution. E.g.

Elfs
Also known as: Eldar, Forest folk, Fairies (offensive), bloody child stealing gits (very offensive)

Using elves as I'm a bit stuck on dwarves.

Why is fairies or faeries offensive? Spenser's The Faerie Queene was a standard of fantastic lit for a long time.

[Anonymouswizard]

Why is fairies or faeries offensive? Spenser's The Faerie Queene was a standard of fantastic lit for a long time.

I don't know, I just remember that according to some folklore it is. Although tbf that folklore is not really the stuff Tolkien was using when he created modern elves (although his still have a bit of a fair folk vibe).

I just needed an offensive term and it was right there.

[AMFV]

I think renaming 'dwarf' does very little for inclusion and causes significant problems to achieve that limited-to-no gain.

Dwarf is a word with a long history used in a ton of fields. It's not just fantasy and folklore, where it stretches back into Old English, Old Norse and High German; it's used in astronomy, biology and computer science as well. Dwarves, under that name, show up in Tolkien and all Tolkien derivatives, of course, but they're also in Pratchett, Marvel Comics, Warhammer and Warcraft and bunches of others. Dwarf Fortress just sold 800,000 copies, and Deep Rock Galactic -- a game about space dwarf miners -- is one of the most widely beloved and played indie games of the last decade.

Dwarf evokes a certain image, including vocal, visual and social characteristics. Renaming that image isn't going to happen overnight. People are just gonna say 'dwarf', not 'khazad' or whatever the thing is, and you can see that in Warhammer. I'm not, like, deep in that scene (or even involved with it at all), but I've literally never heard Duardin prior to this thread. My exposure to Warhammer is through the Total War games, where everything is a dwarf. The cities are dwarfholds, there's a guy called Grombrindal the White Dwarf, there's an antagonist faction with a whole DLC built around it called 'chaos dwarfs'. If GW is doing a dwarf rebrand, they missed including it in one of their most mainstream products.

Renaming something as baked-in to classic fantasy as dwarves without some other reason isn't going to work. If WotC wants to either do a big setting refresh (in this new edition, the resurrected King Karl unites the dwarf clans of Faerun and renames them! Huzzah! Now all dwarves are Knollens!) or create a new setting where dwarves have a different name that's got some support for it, a la The Elder Scrolls, then OK! But just drawing a line and saying 'this word, which has been used in various forms since the 5th century, is bad now' isn't actually going to stop people from using it, because people, not just players, know what it means. Communication is about conveying information, and it's difficult to pack more information about what the characteristics of a character are into a single word than by saying they're a dwarf.

The problem is the same as with Astra Militarum sure you can call them "Knollens" in every book but everybody is still going to call them Dwarves.

[KorvinStarmast]

The problem is the same as with Astra Militarum sure you can call them "Knollens" in every book but everybody is still going to call them Dwarves.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I am trying to discern the offense in that.
Well this was fun

Spoiler: The Philologists show its wide spread appeal

Show

Variants and parallels to other tales
This tale type is widespread in Europe, in America, in Africa[29] and "in some Turkic traditions,"[30] the Middle East, in China, in India and in the Americas.[31] Jörg Bäcker draws a parallel to Turkic tales, as well as other tales with a separate origin but overlapping themes, such as those in Central Asia and Eastern Siberia, among the Mongolians and Tungusian peoples.[32] Due to Portuguese colonization, Sigrid Schmidt posits the presence of the tale in modern times in former Portuguese colonies, and contrasts it with other distinct African tales.[33]

Europe
A primary analysis by Celtic folklorist Alfred Nutt, in the 19th century, established the tale type, in Europe, was distributed "from the Balkan peninsula to Iceland, and from Russia to Catalonia", with the highest number of variants being found in Germany and Italy.[34]

This geographical distribution seemed to be confirmed by scholarly studies of the 20th century. A 1957 article by Italian philologist Gianfranco D'Aronco (it) studied the most diffused Tales of Magic in Italian territory, among which Biancaneve.[35] A scholarly inquiry by Italian Istituto centrale per i beni sonori ed audiovisivi ("Central Institute of Sound and Audiovisual Heritage"), produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, found thirty-seven variants of the tale across Italian sources.[36] A similar assessment was made by scholar Sigrid Schmidt, who claimed that the tale type was "particularly popular" in Southern Europe, "specially" in Italy, Greece and Iberian Peninsula.[33] In addition, Swedish scholar Waldemar Liungman [sv] suggested Italy as center of diffusion of the story, since he considered Italy as the source of tale ("Ursprung"), and it holds the highest number of variants not derived from the Grimm's tale.[37][38]

Another study, by researcher Theo Meder, points to a wide distribution in Western Europe, specially in Ireland, Iceland and Scandinavia.[31]

Germany
The Brothers Grimm's "Snow White" was predated by several other German versions of the tale, with the earliest being Johann Karl August Musäus's "Richilde" (1782), a satirical novella told from the wicked stepmother's point of view. Albert Ludwig Grimm (no relation to the Brothers Grimm) published a play version, Schneewittchen, in 1809.[39] The Grimms collected at least eight other distinct variants of the tale, which they considered one of the most famous German folktales.[40]

Interestingly, there's a Russian variation from Pushkin, about the Seven Knights and the Dead Princess ...

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

The problem is the same as with Astra Militarum sure you can call them "Knollens" in every book but everybody is still going to call them Dwarves.

And if you've drawn a line and said that you're no longer using 'dwarf' for reasons of sensitivity, everyone on the other side of the line not using the updated term is bad, even if they're using it in their pre-Knollen campaign or because their buddies know what a dwarf is but don't read novels or whatever. It's a moral judgement. And while Wizards won't issue a statement saying that, some designer will give an interview or do a tweet saying that 'dwarf' is and always was problematic and they changed it because people who say 'dwarf' are doing harm. And it'll unfold like every other terminology battle in the social media era. I cannot imagine wanting to poke that hornets' nest without absolutely needing to.

[Prime32]

Far as I'm aware the mythological use and implications of the name as well as the words it was derived from predates its use as a term directed at people. It really doesn't make much sense to treat a word as poisonous because people later twisted or misused it, that doesn't solve the issue it just directs it at the word and lets the people misusing it continue to do so; if anything it tells them "yeah we give up, you get to define it now."

It's an issue of language and it has come up several times in the past when something gets used in a derogatory manner. You change the commonly used word and the insult doesn't go away, it just becomes more bitter because there's no longer a competing context for that word. Even worse the things that caused it to get misused as an insult don't go away and if the new word you use catches on the people using the insult may just start using that word for it as well. Terms referring to mental health run into that issue pretty often because the word itself really doesn't matter to the people using it as an insult, the things implied by the word do and so they just move on to something newer that occupies the same space if recognition of the original falls out of favor, or in some cases the original just becomes normalized for the insult and the context gets largely forgotten.

Related case here:

Years ago there was a campaign to get the Irish word for "dwarf" changed from the native word abhac to the English-style duine beag (a direct calque of "little person"). Not because the campaigner had ever been called abhac as a slur, nor had she ever seen it used that way by anyone else. Rather, it was because she'd looked up "dwarf" in an English-to-Irish dictionary one day and saw abhac, then looked up "midget" in the same dictionary and also saw abhac.

Well the campaign was successful (even if the idea that English phrasings are morally superior to Irish ones is... controversial, duine beag is more easily-understood than abhac and rolls well off the tongue). And the result is that now dictionaries list both abhac and duine beag as translations of dwarf... and they also list both abhac and duine beag as translations of midget. Because that's how translation works.

As an aside, when I heard the story I initially thought someone had called her a duinín ("personling"), and thought yeah that does sound like a rude thing to call someone... until I realised she was talking about Pádraig Ua Duinnín, the writer of the dictionary.

[Spriteless]

Many fantasy world's dwarves have a name for themselves that isn't dwarf. Fateforge has Dvaerg, and if you can't pronounce it correctly you had better not try in front of them.

Stardew Valley has dwarves who call themselves Smolnew, or maybe only the wizard calls them that. They're about as close to typical fantasy dwarves as the dwarves are in Elfquest though.

I think it's a nice way to have a diagetic reason to stop using the name, if someone is uncomfortable.

[Berenger]

I don't have more than a couple anecdotes on the subject but I have heard this one causing discomfort for people.

Basically everything causes discomfort "for people".

The terms dwarf, elf, fairy, ogre, orc and many more either have or had widespread use as slurs for various groups.

The experience of living in slavery, in prison, in a theocratic autocracy, in a slum, under subjugation by foreign soldiery, martial law or any other circumstances restricting basic human rights can be highly traumatic. The same is true for the experience of torture, hunger, sickness, poverty, drug abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, exposure to the elements, wild animal attacks, being the victim of even "mild" crime such as burglary or being in combat.

The mere concepts of magic and fictuous gods being real within a setting are offensive in the extreme to many.

So is the concept of chopping creatures up with blades or burning them alive with fireballs as a go-to solution for problems of all kind.

All these things and many more cause discomfort "for people". The discomfort of these people is real and valid. You can not entirely avoid content that is potentially discomforting to at least some people, not in a meaningful work of art and not in RPG that needs some kind of conflict or drama to function.

What you can and probably should try to do is to avoid terms and topics that are likely to cause a) great discomfort for a few people, b) some degree of discomfort to many people, and most importantly c) any amount of discomfort to your core target audience - unless you are publishing, that's only the people present at your gaming table. If those are not long-time friends with well-known preferences, I recommend a Session 0 to ask about sensitive topics instead of trying to avoid every potentially discomforting element in advance.

[Errorname]

Another problem is that many alternative names that would make mythological sense have suffered from D&D-ism and now refer to other weirdly specific creatures. Go ahead, try to call them gnomes, elves, trolls, kobolds or goblins and watch heads explode

Yeah, D&D enforcing a really strict taxonomy to extremely fluid folkloric concepts with a lot of overlap can be a little frustrating. It's certainly very tempting from a worldbuilding perspective to go in and start lumping taxa together. I certainly think if you were working from scratch you'd want to prioritize creating a handful of taxa that are distinct and versatile over hundreds that are very similar to each other with only minor distinctions, but there's enough history and fan attachment to D&D's current set-up that it'd be pretty difficult to start merging things.

[MonochromeTiger]

Yeah, D&D enforcing a really strict taxonomy to extremely fluid folkloric concepts with a lot of overlap can be a little frustrating. It's certainly very tempting from a worldbuilding perspective to go in and start lumping taxa together. I certainly think if you were working from scratch you'd want to prioritize creating a handful of taxa that are distinct and versatile over hundreds that are very similar to each other with only minor distinctions, but there's enough history and fan attachment to D&D's current set-up that it'd be pretty difficult to start merging things.

Dragons are a pretty good example of this I think. Can't go more than a week without seeing someone post that overused "a Drake has X limbs and Y wing structure, a Dragon has Y limbs and X wing structure, know the difference" somewhere on the internet when the difference they're trying to teach is very much a D&Dism that caught on like lizard-Kobolds and people just didn't bother to acknowledge how weird and varied something could be and still be "a Dragon" before the specific labels got popularized.

[KorvinStarmast]

The mere concepts of magic and fictuous gods being real within a setting are offensive in the extreme to many.

To include my wife, which informs why she still does not, after all these years, care to play D&D.

[Unoriginal]

Guessing that is related to the German word zwerg or Zwerge.

I have to say that if The Giant had published an OotS book called Utterly Zwerged, it would likely have been moved to the erotic literature section of any bookstore it reached, on the name alone.

[Maryring]

I actually remember a letter written to a local news station about this very subject, about someone who wanted to remove dwarf from the modern vocabulary and go entirely over to the term "little persons", because of all the negative stereotypes surrounding the word. So I ended up having this very discussion, and funnily enough, one of the responses I heard that stuck with me was that yes, "Dwarf" does have certain stereotypes associated with it. But to them, being a "Dwarf" meant being industrious and hardworking and generally badass, so they actually did NOT want the wording to change, because they had such a strong, positive association with it.

So to answer your question OP, I think that the best thing you can do is to be flexible at your own table. There are people who find the term negatively charged. There are also people who find it positively charged. So the best way to be inclusive is to be mindful of the needs at your table. That should do plenty to make your gaming sphere approachable and safe.