One obvious reason why the word nife is unusable is that everyone will think you can't spell knife - and then they'll realise your sentence doesn't make sense and assume you've gone mad, as well.
But there are yet other reasons to eschew the word nife. For one, do you say it to rhyme with life, or mighty?
Even the dictionary isn't sure.
Then there's the fact that nife is a scientific term but doesn't look like a scientific term - and that it's made up of one Latin and one German word, and yet it looks like a simple English one.
If we're having to cope with complicated words like that, well, I think we should be getting the credit for it.
Sunday Rest: nife. Nife is the Earth's metallic core. It's named on the assumption that this core is made up of Nickel and Iron, which have the chemical symbols Ni and Fe respectively.
Nickel is a sprite in German mythology, whose mischief is thought to be the reason no one could smelt copper from nickel ore. The Latin for iron was ferrum.
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