Tossing a dwarf - the real story!

[Kalimac]

I didn't really mind "Let's hunt some Orc" - Aragorn may be Isildur's heir, but he's been in the wild for a good space, and let's face it, he's not going to talk like a king all the time.<P>Dwarf tossing - now that I think about it a little more (scary thought in itself) it does seem possible that the line was done straight, in a misguided attempt to lighten the situation a bit, with no sly jokes about British or American tossing intended. My only reason for thinking that might be so is that neither Jackson nor Rhys-Davies are terribly young (Good lord, I remember watching my "I, Claudius" DVD and being astonished to see that Rhys-Davies was actually Macro! So he's been around a while). If the British meaning of "toss" is one of those fairly recent slang things they really might not have been aware of it. I'm basing this guess on a nice but getting-up-there comp sci professor I once had, who decided one day to show us how to write a Scheme program to add up a string of numbers. He read off the board "OK, we start the program off with `Define procedure get-sum.'" He spent the rest of the hour wondering why nobody could stop laughing. <P>Of course, "toss" may be one of those expressions that's been around for decades, which would knock that theory on the head. Does anyone know?