Not having read fanfiction before, one thing I find fascinating about MoR is the Americanisation. Mostly it’s just fun to spot trivia but the way Eliezer deals with class is pretty curious and I thought I’d get some thoughts down:
Rowling is very careful in the series to draw her heroes from a cross section of the “honest” classes: Ron obviously is very stereotypically working class, Hermoine’s upper middle (though not management) and the Dursleys are little englanders.
So kicking Harry up to Hermoine’s class (and giving him a multi-barelled surname to boot! Though I’m not sure if that’s a stereotype in the US?) and replacing Ron with the aristocratic Draco narrows the class perspective quite a bit. I wonder if this contributes to the more personal air to the fic’s conflicts, particularly as Quirrelmort lacks Voldemort’s evil aristocrat act, and Draco’s now more of a racist than a snob. I’m thinking of reading some more american fanfics, to see how they handle things, it’s an interesting insight into how the american’s think about class (I’m looking forward to the American adaption of Skins for similar reasons, though in that case the relationship is reversed).
...giving him a multi-barelled surname to boot! Though I’m not sure if that’s a stereotype in the US?
I’m not sure what stereotype you’re referring to, but the length of Harry’s surname reads to me as almost a parody of the inclination to signal egalitarianism. I take it as evidence that his adopted parents (particularly the father) are Very Liberal, but that’s all.
Class, Americanization
I hadn’t actually noticed that particular issue before, but now that it’s been pointed out, it seems to me more like a LessWrong-related bias than an American one. We like to focus on big, progressive, constructive issues, and upper-class people are in a better position to do so meaningfully; stories with disenfranchised characters are more likely to deal with apartment cows like ‘how can I keep my abusive stepfather from attacking me’ and ‘how can I afford to replace my broken wand’, which we don’t generally like to think about.
My big problem is the amazing breadth of American idiom that somehow falls out of the mouth of a child brought up by Oxford academics. Those kids really just don’t talk like that. Not even slightly. It jars every single time and gives the impression of an author who can’t be bothered.
If the characters in a story are supposed to be speaking Mandarin, no one, not even bilingual Chinese Americans, will complain that the American author wrote the dialogue in American English rather than the words the characters are literally speaking. Unfortunately, it appears that British English is too close to American English for dialogue between British characters to receive the same concession.
As an American, I don’t particularly mind the Americanisms. If EY tried to write in British English, it would come out stilted and sound wrong to both nationalities. If he got a Britpicker, it would take longer for new chapters to come out. I don’t like either of those options. On the other hand, translations are being done into Chinese, Korean, and German. Is there anyone here willing to translate it into British?
If it helps you suspend disbelief, the early chapters gave me the impression that Harry was brought up by books, with his parents playing a supervising role at best.
Kids like that are already brought up by books. And Hermione talks like that in the story too. No, it’s a common careless HP fanfic author failure mode, not anything clever or intentional.
This seems like something that would take some amount of work to fix in case the author did care. Problem with speech pattern differences is that you have no idea they’re there if you’re not familiar with the target speech pattern, so it’s not like regular fact checking where you can generally tell when you’re dealing with something tricky. I’m not terribly familiar with spoken English and had no idea about incongruent Americanese in the lines, though I can’t think of anyone sounding very British either now that you mention it. The most straightforward fix would seem to be to run the dialogue through a native British English speaking editor, and that’s a bit heavyweight for a fanfic.
In fanfiction, the problem is solved (if the writer cares) collaboratively—American writers trying to do British English well is such a common problem that the proof-reading and copy-editing has a name: Britpicking. I assume that most of that is done by native speakers.
The problems can be subtle. I was shocked to find that modern British English doesn’t include “gotten”. How do they make it through the day without such a useful word?
And I’m not going to mention the book because the author’s a friend, but she writes excellent British English. When she had a couple of short passages of American dialogue, the result was agonizing. She didn’t make the typical error of exaggerating differences, but there was something very wrong with the rhythm.
That’s an interesting question. British people—some of them (and not all Americans, apparently) do use ‘gotten’, but seeing them use it in print will destroy some readers’ suspension of disbelief. Truth or plausibility?
It seems to me that it would add versimilitude to have some British characters use more Americanisms than others, but that might be too subtle.
The problems can be subtle. I was shocked to find that modern British English doesn’t include “gotten”. How do they make it through the day without such a useful word?
They just use “got”—at least, that’s what I was taught in school.
And I would definitely appreciate it if Eliezer had a Britpicker “fix” HP:MoR. There should be good chances of a sufficiently dedicated fan in Albion.
Preferably someone who lives in Oxford or Cambridge and knows from personal experience what the smart children of academics in those cities talk like. LessWrong would be one of the few sites where there would actually be quite a lot of people fitting that criterion …
There are no small children in Oxford; the place is entirely populated by students, academics who used to be students, and tourists.
The surrounding villages are fairly normal though. By which I mean typical English home-county.
ETA: But Harry is in no means typical. Unless something awful happens to these kids at puberty, there just aren’t enough player characters at 18 for Harry to be the norm.
Can you give a few examples of MoR’s more blatant Americanisms? As a non-native speaker, asides from the spelling issues (“realis/ze”, “toward/s”) and the most iconic terms (“bloody” vs. “doggone”), it’s hard to notice and remember which side of the Atlantic any given phrase comes from.
Hey, I’m originally of British origin. I can indeed confirm that the language Harry uses has made me wince a little. This hasn’t happened in the last few chapters, since we’ve been hearing from harry!Mort rather than Harry, and mind-dumps don’t respect style, but
“I’m in Mary’s Place, Professor, in Diagon Alley. Going to the restroom actually. What’s wrong?”
-contains the word “restroom”, which no speaker of British English would ever use in that context, and the question “What’s wrong?” is a little aggressive. I would suggest something like
“I’m in Mary’s Place, Professor, in Diagon Alley. Ah, I’m actually just going to the bathroom—is there something wrong?”
Aside: As an American, I’ve often been quite surprised to find out that authors were British (if I read the books before I got background on the author.) My reaction is “British? It can’t be!” This has happened with Alan Moore, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, and Charles Stross. I wonder when my brain will figure out that not everyone who’s fun to read is from my home country.
Americans who learn music from British rock bands too. The British learn it from the Americans then sell it back to them better. That’s why it’s always fun to see Alan Moore writing in what’s quite definitely British rather than in American.
(And Neil Gaiman married an American, his children are American and he’s lived in America for many years.)
Fair enough, this is a derivative work and shouldn’t deviate from the established canon except where it needs to. I am tempted to argue for a special exemption in the case of Harry Potter fanfictions written by authors more skilled than Rowling.
There are things that assume American style systems that just don’t exist over here. In the first chapter it talks about “Elementary Schools”, where in the British system it would be Prep schools, probably (they tend to be classed the “best”). And Tenure doesn’t exist in the same way.
It didn’t jar with me too much. I just ignored the fact it was supposed to be British, to be honest.
I’m not sure what stereotype you’re referring to, but the length of Harry’s surname reads to me as almost a parody of the inclination to signal egalitarianism. I take it as evidence that his adopted parents (particularly the father) are Very Liberal, but that’s all.
In countries with an aristocratic tradition, upper class people tend to have multiple middle names and surnames to better show off all the prominent families the person descends from.
I don’t buy your second point here, because while in reality yes, the rich have the ability if not necessarily the inclination to deal with the world’s problems, stories about those problems tend to maximise emotional impact by making their protagonists part of whatever strata of society is most affected by them. In the story of english democracy, the Chartists are much more sympathetic than Disraeli, and Christy Moore is unlikely to write a song praising John Major for his role in the peace process.
If Eliezer were writing an original story with a similar plot to MoR, he’d be well advised to amp up the prejudice against Muggle Borns and make his hero one. I suspect the narrow class focus here is an incidental result of the intersection of his interests and Rowling’s, particularly her fondness for “salt of the earth” working class stereotypes. That is, Rowling made all the smart kids posh and Eliezer picked all the smart kids.
I’m not sure what stereotype you’re referring to, but the length of Harry’s surname reads to me as almost a parody of the inclination to signal egalitarianism. I take it as evidence that his adopted parents (particularly the father) are Very Liberal, but that’s all.
I agree with this, and I think it may also have been inspired by/intended as a parody of either:
*The fanfics where Harry finds out he’s descended from Merlin or the Founders and picks up a pile of extra surnames
*The use of hyphenated titles for characters like Boy-Who-Lived or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in canon and fanfic
Even if it’s not inspired by either of those, the associations made it funnier.
Good point about narrowing of the range of classes—now that you mention it, the effect is a little claustrophobic for me compared to canon.
I think not having Hagrid has somewhat of the same effect—he comes off as a something of a low-status outsider, even before we find out he’s half giant.
I’ll be curious to see if you find patterns about class in American fanfic, but it’s worth remembering that it’s a non-random sample and probably won’t give you a complete view of how Americans think about class.
Now i’m wondering about that too. The best way to show how rationality wins (if it does, in fact, win) would be to show how it works even for someone of average intelligence—otherwise you can never be sure if you’re looking at the effects of superior intelligence instead.
A very intelligent but irrational person is easy to show, but a rational yet dumb one seems much harder to me. I suppose you could ham-fist it by making them suck at various intellectual challenges—any better ideas?
A very intelligent but irrational person is easy to show, but a rational yet dumb one seems much harder to me. I suppose you could ham-fist it by making them suck at various intellectual challenges—any better ideas?
I thought early Bella from Luminosity did a pretty good job at showing someone rational but with no special cognitive abilities (we’re talking about averages, here, not idiots). She just had noticed her limitations and practiced at overcoming them, but that by itself was very good at making her more effective.
One of the simplest author tricks I can come up with is to give your character a thought speed and stick to it. Harry seems to run through ten lines of text in seconds, sometimes, but if you go with, say, your speed reading aloud you can get a reasonable estimate of how long it takes an average person to ponder something. People can mention how they zone out; they can miss opportunities; they can not come up with a good enough solution in time. They can make conscious decisions about what they will and will not think about.
Stubbornly agreeing with an outside view prediction even when faced with many convincing arguments why this example is special, if most examples are expected to have similarly convincing arguments.
Stubbornly refusing to consider solutions to a problem before examining it more carefully.
Quickly changing opinion when faced with a valid argument, even though it “should” be emotionally unconvincing.
You can catch a glimpse of this in Harry dealing with McGonagall if you remember that adults are significantly prejudiced against children, before his extraordinary intelligence overpowers and dissolves the situation.
Assuming their goal is to remove the prejudice, my guess is they would work within the confines of the prejudice where possible, towards changing the environment into a place where the prejudice is untenable. Something like agitating for a law that requires subservient tasks to be performed by the prejudiced group, then pulling a Fight-Club-esque “we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep.” In a smaller environment such as a woman in an unenlightened workplace, become the indispensable secretary to everyone and then punish the prejudice when it appears (changing the environment so that the prejudice is now directed at an authority figure).
It would be an unfolding plan rather than an impassioned speech and I expect would involve a lot of simple judo-ing of peoples’ surface treatments of the issue.
That’s a great point about Hagrid, and yeah I don’t think reading more will be particularly informative, but it’s interesting given how class-orientated the original’s conflicts are.
I don’t understand what “little englanders” means in this context, since it seems to refer to an attitude rather than an economic class as such. IIRC, Mr. Dursley owned a moderate-sized business. Wikipedia says he “is also the director of a drill-making firm, Grunnings, and seems to be quite successful in his career.”
Er, yes, and it describes an attitude rather than an economic class.* Now as an attitude with a bad reputation, it’s likely acquired connotations of class. But I think I’ve seen British fiction (Foyle’s War) apply it to an Aristocrat or someone approaching that class, and the one example of use on Wikipedia applies it to a “Sir”.
Hmm, I was aiming for that broad swath of the middle classes that considers itself to be average, despite being at least slightly above. But a director is a bit above that, I thought he was a middle manager of some kind. It’s hard to get much in the way of class signifiers off Harry in the book, which I suppose is the point.
Not having read fanfiction before, one thing I find fascinating about MoR is the Americanisation. Mostly it’s just fun to spot trivia but the way Eliezer deals with class is pretty curious and I thought I’d get some thoughts down:
Rowling is very careful in the series to draw her heroes from a cross section of the “honest” classes: Ron obviously is very stereotypically working class, Hermoine’s upper middle (though not management) and the Dursleys are little englanders.
So kicking Harry up to Hermoine’s class (and giving him a multi-barelled surname to boot! Though I’m not sure if that’s a stereotype in the US?) and replacing Ron with the aristocratic Draco narrows the class perspective quite a bit. I wonder if this contributes to the more personal air to the fic’s conflicts, particularly as Quirrelmort lacks Voldemort’s evil aristocrat act, and Draco’s now more of a racist than a snob. I’m thinking of reading some more american fanfics, to see how they handle things, it’s an interesting insight into how the american’s think about class (I’m looking forward to the American adaption of Skins for similar reasons, though in that case the relationship is reversed).
I’m not sure what stereotype you’re referring to, but the length of Harry’s surname reads to me as almost a parody of the inclination to signal egalitarianism. I take it as evidence that his adopted parents (particularly the father) are Very Liberal, but that’s all.
I hadn’t actually noticed that particular issue before, but now that it’s been pointed out, it seems to me more like a LessWrong-related bias than an American one. We like to focus on big, progressive, constructive issues, and upper-class people are in a better position to do so meaningfully; stories with disenfranchised characters are more likely to deal with apartment cows like ‘how can I keep my abusive stepfather from attacking me’ and ‘how can I afford to replace my broken wand’, which we don’t generally like to think about.
My big problem is the amazing breadth of American idiom that somehow falls out of the mouth of a child brought up by Oxford academics. Those kids really just don’t talk like that. Not even slightly. It jars every single time and gives the impression of an author who can’t be bothered.
If the characters in a story are supposed to be speaking Mandarin, no one, not even bilingual Chinese Americans, will complain that the American author wrote the dialogue in American English rather than the words the characters are literally speaking. Unfortunately, it appears that British English is too close to American English for dialogue between British characters to receive the same concession.
As an American, I don’t particularly mind the Americanisms. If EY tried to write in British English, it would come out stilted and sound wrong to both nationalities. If he got a Britpicker, it would take longer for new chapters to come out. I don’t like either of those options. On the other hand, translations are being done into Chinese, Korean, and German. Is there anyone here willing to translate it into British?
If it helps you suspend disbelief, the early chapters gave me the impression that Harry was brought up by books, with his parents playing a supervising role at best.
Kids like that are already brought up by books. And Hermione talks like that in the story too. No, it’s a common careless HP fanfic author failure mode, not anything clever or intentional.
I don’t really see it as careless; it’s just a work obviously written by an American.
Well, I guess I do see it as careless, in the sense that “I don’t care”.
This seems like something that would take some amount of work to fix in case the author did care. Problem with speech pattern differences is that you have no idea they’re there if you’re not familiar with the target speech pattern, so it’s not like regular fact checking where you can generally tell when you’re dealing with something tricky. I’m not terribly familiar with spoken English and had no idea about incongruent Americanese in the lines, though I can’t think of anyone sounding very British either now that you mention it. The most straightforward fix would seem to be to run the dialogue through a native British English speaking editor, and that’s a bit heavyweight for a fanfic.
In fanfiction, the problem is solved (if the writer cares) collaboratively—American writers trying to do British English well is such a common problem that the proof-reading and copy-editing has a name: Britpicking. I assume that most of that is done by native speakers.
The problems can be subtle. I was shocked to find that modern British English doesn’t include “gotten”. How do they make it through the day without such a useful word?
And I’m not going to mention the book because the author’s a friend, but she writes excellent British English. When she had a couple of short passages of American dialogue, the result was agonizing. She didn’t make the typical error of exaggerating differences, but there was something very wrong with the rhythm.
It bloody does include “gotten”! It’s just regarded as an “Americanism”, hence evil to the purity and beauty of the sacred English tongue [*].
British writers writing ’Merkin can be painful. I’m Australian and even I can tell.
[*] may not be 100% pure nor 100% sacred. Beauty may vary. Grammar may have settled in shipping.
I did two polls because of annoying constraints. The second one has comments, the first one may eventually get comments.
The results back up what you’ve said.
Thanks. At this point, since I did get this confirmed by someone British, I’m going to do a livejournal survey. There may be local variation.
In fiction, it would pretty much never be wrong to remove “gotten”, but it does come out of their mouths.
That’s an interesting question. British people—some of them (and not all Americans, apparently) do use ‘gotten’, but seeing them use it in print will destroy some readers’ suspension of disbelief. Truth or plausibility?
It seems to me that it would add versimilitude to have some British characters use more Americanisms than others, but that might be too subtle.
They just use “got”—at least, that’s what I was taught in school.
And I would definitely appreciate it if Eliezer had a Britpicker “fix” HP:MoR. There should be good chances of a sufficiently dedicated fan in Albion.
Preferably someone who lives in Oxford or Cambridge and knows from personal experience what the smart children of academics in those cities talk like. LessWrong would be one of the few sites where there would actually be quite a lot of people fitting that criterion …
There are no small children in Oxford; the place is entirely populated by students, academics who used to be students, and tourists.
The surrounding villages are fairly normal though. By which I mean typical English home-county.
ETA: But Harry is in no means typical. Unless something awful happens to these kids at puberty, there just aren’t enough player characters at 18 for Harry to be the norm.
However, I think they’d be good enough examples that Harry PVE could be expected not to talk in American slang.
Can you give a few examples of MoR’s more blatant Americanisms? As a non-native speaker, asides from the spelling issues (“realis/ze”, “toward/s”) and the most iconic terms (“bloody” vs. “doggone”), it’s hard to notice and remember which side of the Atlantic any given phrase comes from.
raises hand
Hey, I’m originally of British origin. I can indeed confirm that the language Harry uses has made me wince a little. This hasn’t happened in the last few chapters, since we’ve been hearing from harry!Mort rather than Harry, and mind-dumps don’t respect style, but
“I’m in Mary’s Place, Professor, in Diagon Alley. Going to the restroom actually. What’s wrong?”
-contains the word “restroom”, which no speaker of British English would ever use in that context, and the question “What’s wrong?” is a little aggressive. I would suggest something like
“I’m in Mary’s Place, Professor, in Diagon Alley. Ah, I’m actually just going to the bathroom—is there something wrong?”
Aside: As an American, I’ve often been quite surprised to find out that authors were British (if I read the books before I got background on the author.) My reaction is “British? It can’t be!” This has happened with Alan Moore, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, and Charles Stross. I wonder when my brain will figure out that not everyone who’s fun to read is from my home country.
Americans who learn music from British rock bands too. The British learn it from the Americans then sell it back to them better. That’s why it’s always fun to see Alan Moore writing in what’s quite definitely British rather than in American.
(And Neil Gaiman married an American, his children are American and he’s lived in America for many years.)
Fair enough, this is a derivative work and shouldn’t deviate from the established canon except where it needs to. I am tempted to argue for a special exemption in the case of Harry Potter fanfictions written by authors more skilled than Rowling.
There are things that assume American style systems that just don’t exist over here. In the first chapter it talks about “Elementary Schools”, where in the British system it would be Prep schools, probably (they tend to be classed the “best”). And Tenure doesn’t exist in the same way.
It didn’t jar with me too much. I just ignored the fact it was supposed to be British, to be honest.
Prep schools—as a Scot I have no idea what they are and they sound awfully posh. Are they the same thing as primary schools?
Awfully posh independent primary school is a good description. Although the sometimes go up to 13 years old as well.
In countries with an aristocratic tradition, upper class people tend to have multiple middle names and surnames to better show off all the prominent families the person descends from.
This tends not to be done in Britain. (Hyphenation does appear at all social strata to some degree.)
I don’t buy your second point here, because while in reality yes, the rich have the ability if not necessarily the inclination to deal with the world’s problems, stories about those problems tend to maximise emotional impact by making their protagonists part of whatever strata of society is most affected by them. In the story of english democracy, the Chartists are much more sympathetic than Disraeli, and Christy Moore is unlikely to write a song praising John Major for his role in the peace process.
If Eliezer were writing an original story with a similar plot to MoR, he’d be well advised to amp up the prejudice against Muggle Borns and make his hero one. I suspect the narrow class focus here is an incidental result of the intersection of his interests and Rowling’s, particularly her fondness for “salt of the earth” working class stereotypes. That is, Rowling made all the smart kids posh and Eliezer picked all the smart kids.
I agree with this, and I think it may also have been inspired by/intended as a parody of either:
*The fanfics where Harry finds out he’s descended from Merlin or the Founders and picks up a pile of extra surnames
*The use of hyphenated titles for characters like Boy-Who-Lived or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in canon and fanfic
Even if it’s not inspired by either of those, the associations made it funnier.
[edited for format issues]
Good point about narrowing of the range of classes—now that you mention it, the effect is a little claustrophobic for me compared to canon.
I think not having Hagrid has somewhat of the same effect—he comes off as a something of a low-status outsider, even before we find out he’s half giant.
I’ll be curious to see if you find patterns about class in American fanfic, but it’s worth remembering that it’s a non-random sample and probably won’t give you a complete view of how Americans think about class.
Now I’m wondering what fiction about a rationalist who’s not extraordinarily intelligent and who’s up against significant prejudice would look like.
Now i’m wondering about that too. The best way to show how rationality wins (if it does, in fact, win) would be to show how it works even for someone of average intelligence—otherwise you can never be sure if you’re looking at the effects of superior intelligence instead.
A very intelligent but irrational person is easy to show, but a rational yet dumb one seems much harder to me. I suppose you could ham-fist it by making them suck at various intellectual challenges—any better ideas?
I thought early Bella from Luminosity did a pretty good job at showing someone rational but with no special cognitive abilities (we’re talking about averages, here, not idiots). She just had noticed her limitations and practiced at overcoming them, but that by itself was very good at making her more effective.
One of the simplest author tricks I can come up with is to give your character a thought speed and stick to it. Harry seems to run through ten lines of text in seconds, sometimes, but if you go with, say, your speed reading aloud you can get a reasonable estimate of how long it takes an average person to ponder something. People can mention how they zone out; they can miss opportunities; they can not come up with a good enough solution in time. They can make conscious decisions about what they will and will not think about.
Stubbornly refusing to believe in magic.
Stubbornly agreeing with an outside view prediction even when faced with many convincing arguments why this example is special, if most examples are expected to have similarly convincing arguments.
Stubbornly refusing to consider solutions to a problem before examining it more carefully.
Quickly changing opinion when faced with a valid argument, even though it “should” be emotionally unconvincing.
You can catch a glimpse of this in Harry dealing with McGonagall if you remember that adults are significantly prejudiced against children, before his extraordinary intelligence overpowers and dissolves the situation.
Assuming their goal is to remove the prejudice, my guess is they would work within the confines of the prejudice where possible, towards changing the environment into a place where the prejudice is untenable. Something like agitating for a law that requires subservient tasks to be performed by the prejudiced group, then pulling a Fight-Club-esque “we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep.” In a smaller environment such as a woman in an unenlightened workplace, become the indispensable secretary to everyone and then punish the prejudice when it appears (changing the environment so that the prejudice is now directed at an authority figure).
It would be an unfolding plan rather than an impassioned speech and I expect would involve a lot of simple judo-ing of peoples’ surface treatments of the issue.
wonder how his parents managed that
Magic!
Presumably, the same way porcupines have sex.
Porcupines have the same dimensions in the important parts. Giants and humans might not.
TheOtherDave was alluding to a joke that goes like this:
Q: How do porcupines have sex?
A: Very carefully.
My answer makes sense even if I knew the joke. Which I do. Was it ever addressed in canon? How tall are the Giants?
Something like twenty feet tall, if I remember right.
I thought it was more like fifty feet, but I checked my copy of OotP and you’re right.
Ah, I had a totally wrong mental image. In many movies giants are like: bigger.
[I happen to be about 2 meters (6 and a half feet for the non-metric users), so maybe I need more size to perceive someone as a giant.]
He’s human on his dad’s side and giant on his mum’s, rather than vice versa. I imagine that made things easier.
That’s a great point about Hagrid, and yeah I don’t think reading more will be particularly informative, but it’s interesting given how class-orientated the original’s conflicts are.
I don’t understand what “little englanders” means in this context, since it seems to refer to an attitude rather than an economic class as such. IIRC, Mr. Dursley owned a moderate-sized business. Wikipedia says he “is also the director of a drill-making firm, Grunnings, and seems to be quite successful in his career.”
The obvious place describes it reasonably well.
Er, yes, and it describes an attitude rather than an economic class.* Now as an attitude with a bad reputation, it’s likely acquired connotations of class. But I think I’ve seen British fiction (Foyle’s War) apply it to an Aristocrat or someone approaching that class, and the one example of use on Wikipedia applies it to a “Sir”.
*Must...resist...giving...examples!
Hmm, I was aiming for that broad swath of the middle classes that considers itself to be average, despite being at least slightly above. But a director is a bit above that, I thought he was a middle manager of some kind. It’s hard to get much in the way of class signifiers off Harry in the book, which I suppose is the point.
It is.