Thanks for elaborating. Is British English generally freer with plural verbs on collective nouns, would you say? I was taught that it is, but by American grammarians.
fezziwig
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Somewhat off-kilter way to get the Time Turner into the story? Does it need more explanation than that?
You have asked a difficult grammar question. I prefer “lives”. This is definitely not correct (the two nouns and the verb should agree in number), but at some point you have to stop letting mere grammar push you around.
Collective nouns like “everyone” can be treated as either singular or plural, depending on whether you want to treat the collection as single entity, or deal with each part of the group separately. In your case, each person in “everyone” has their own life, they’re not all living the same life, so we should treat “everyone” as plural and use “lives”...
...but, the verb must agree with the noun! So now we have ”...everyone have lived with scarcity all their lives”. This sort of thing is common British English, but to my American ear it sounds very strange. In American usage collective nouns almost always take singular verbs, with a few word-specific exceptions like “police”.
It does not. It doesn’t quite not say it, either:
1) At 15, Voldemort creates his first Horcrux from Abagail Myrtle.
2) After he “grasp[s] the stupidity of ordinary people”, Voldemort decides to invent a better ritual.
3) He spends “years” refining it in his imagination.
4) Quirrel finds one of the Horcruxes which Voldemort had hidden in the “hopeless idiocy of [his] youth”
So, is “when he grasped the stupidity of ordinary people” + “years” < “youth”? It seems unlikely. But I do not think that it is quite ruled out.
There’s one thing for which it’s genuinely impossible for V to have a counter: the realization that killing Harry is not in his interests. Speaking in Parseltongue, bound by the Vow, Harry is uniquely prepared to make that case—assuming it’s true.
I think that must be the role of the stirring and heating requirements: to control which aspects of the thing’s creation, and how much of them, are infused into the potion. There may well be a way to call forth solar fusion from common iron. But of course we know that no one has ever done it.
Here’s the passage from chapter 1:
Verärgert schnaubte Professor McGonagall durch die Nase. »O Ja, alle Welt feiert, sehr schön«, sagte sie ungeduldig. »Man sollte meinen, sie könnten ein bisschen vorsichtiger sein, aber nein - selbst die Muggel haben bemerkt, dass etwas los ist. Sie haben es in ihren Nachrichten gebracht.« Mit einem Kopfrucken deutete sie auf das dunkle Wohnzimmerfenster der Dursleys. »Ich habe es gehört. Ganze Schwärme von Eulen … Sternschnuppen … Nun, ganz dumm sind sie auch wieder nicht. Sie mussten einfach irgendetwas bemerken. Sternschnuppen unten in Kent—ich wette, das war Dädalus Diggel. Der war noch nie besonders vernünftig.«
My rough, not-a-native-German-speaker translation:
Professor McGonagall snorted angrily through her nose. “Oh yes, the whole world is celebrating, very nice” she said impatiently. “One might think they could be more careful, but no—even the Muggles have noticed that something is going on. It was in their newspapers.” With a jerk of her head, she indicated Dursley’s dark living room window. “I heard about it. Swarms of owls, meteorites...they aren’t all idiots. They must have noticed. Shooting stars over Kent—I bet that was Daedalus Diggle. He never was very sensible.”
I take from that that McGonagall doesn’t expect the Muggles to know what it means that there are suddenly a bunch of owls everywhere, but that wizards everywhere nevertheless have a duty to make sure that Muggles don’t see those sorts of things.
Don’t have it in front of me, but my sense was the timeline was more nuanced. First he made some Horcruxes. Then he invented the True Horcrux, and made some of those. Then he invented the True Horcrux Hiding Place, and made about a zillion of them. Quirrel found Horcrux v2 in Hiding Place v1.
I kinda agree, but...the Time Turners really didn’t have protective shells. If you see what I mean.
I’m not sure I agree. Everyone Is An Idiot Except Quirrel And Maybe Harry is a major theme of the whole series, not stronger than anti-deathism but certainly more consistent. Dumbledore bought the first level of Riddle’s two-level bluff; in context that’s pretty dumb, but not unusually so by MOR NPC standards.
Dumbledore behaves very strangely in this chapter.
He likens Riddle’s spirit to a dumb animal, which does not know that it was sent away. That’s a sad, sympathetic image.
He laughs at the skewed symmetry between Good Riddle and Evil Riddle, saying that this is what Riddle could have been if he’d been raised by parents who loved him. If you feel any sympathy for Riddle at all then that’s not funny, it’s tragic: Riddle’s crimes and suffering, his whole live, arose from sheer bad luck on his part. To think it a joke, or to expect Riddle to share it, is something I don’t understand at all.
EDIT: Also, he’s not taking the prophecy very seriously anymore, did you notice? “Oh well, I trapped you in time so Harry will defeat some other dark lord”. One wonders what Dumbledore’s “unusual power of Divination” is.
But I don’t think that necessarily means he’s a fake, inadvertently conjured up by Riddle (one wonders why real!Dumbledore would throw away the Wand and Line, for example, but why would fake!Dumbledore do so?). I don’t know what it means.
His original plan was to set Harry up to retrieve the Stone for a selfless reason, then steal it from him. But Harry figured out the truth, and so that became impossible. I suspect that he had other plans, but that he abandoned them when he realized that Harry understood Dumbledore better than he did.
Having said that, yes, I think he should have spent a few more minutes looking for potential solutions.
Why do you not see “people skills” as, say, being a specialist in dealing with people?
This is my objection too. This is an interesting idea but when I try to use it, I find that it’s harder to distinguish “generic” from “specific” than I expected.
So, Voldemort is explained, and in a way I find persuasive. I wasn’t sure it was possible.
My understanding is that new posts don’t show their vote totals right away, to help prevent snowball effects.
I think that claims of the form “This is what you should eat” are held to a lower standard than “This is who you should kill.” Does that seem unreasonable to you?
Interesting guesses in the responses here. It never occurred to me that this organization might be anything other than “the next iteration of the Death Eaters”.
So I guess the quality unit would be the Wild?
Anecdote: I have several of these and love them. If you live in the Frozen North, I recommend them highly.
I agree with this interpretation. But given that, I’m not sure why Harry thinks he didn’t kill Voldemort.