His penis.
Lyrics:
Mother told me, yes she told me
I’d meet girls like you
She also told me stay away
You’ll never know what you’ll catch
Just the other day I heard
Of a soldier’s falling off
Some Indonesian junk
That’s going 'round
(…)
Father says, “Your mother’s right,
she’s really up on things”
“Before we married, Mommy served
in the WACS in the Philippines”
Ronald Reagan made the same mistake while president. I recall him publicly praising Bruce Springsteen for his message of hope with that song. Springsteen was reportedly mighty perplexed.
Oh.
Note to self: Google lyrics prior to posting…
And here’s something else (not part of a creative work) and you all can have a good laugh at my expense. Until I was in my 30s, I never knew why a freight train would haul 2-3 engines around with all those box and coal cars. They seem awfully heavy to drag. (and in my defense, I’ll say it’s hard to know if more than one diesel engine is functioning as they roll by). I mean, it’s not like it kept me up at night or anything, but I finally asked my husband this (we were stopped waiting for a very long train). When he stopped holding his sides, he informed me that the “extra” engines provided power. Well, go figure…
I agree. It was just too obvious that all she did was look at Latin translations of words and at mythology to name characters, places, and spells. It often disappointed me how easily decipherable they were.
I mean: Sirius (“Dog Star”) Black can turn into a black dog, Sibyll (the Sibyls were prophets of mythology) Trelawney is a divination teacher and sometimes prophet herself, Gregory Goyle (as in “gargoyle”) was also an ugly, monstrous protector, the Malfoys (Latin “maleficus” means “evil-doer”) are an all around bad family, Gilderoy Lockhart (“gilded” as in covered in thin gold foil) hides a rotten inside with a handsome exterior, and Remus (from Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome who were suckled by a wolf as children) Lupin (“Lupus” is Latin for “wolf”) is shock a werewolf. (Which I agree, he was lucky to be named that since years later he gets bitten by a werewolf and becomes one himself. One could say he should have seen it coming.)
The different houses don’t need much thought either: Gryffindor’s symbol is a lion but a “griffin” is a mythological creature half eagle and half lion, Ravenclaw’s eagle symbol is self explanatory with the bird references (“raven”, “claw”), Hufflepuff with its badger I always took to be the sound of that badger foraging (“huff” “puff” sound of breath in the dirt), and Slytherin only makes sense to be a “slithering” snake.
But especially the spells are like a slap in the face to one’s intelligence. They all are merely the Latin translation of what the spell’s effect is: “Lumos” means “light” and causes a light to appear, “Nox” means “darkness” and extinguishes that light, “Crucio” means “to torture” and is a curse that causes extreme pain, “Imperio” means “to command” and is a curse which puts someone under another’s control, “Accio” means “to summon” and is a summoning charm, “Expelliarmus” means “to expel” (expello) “weapon” (arma), and so on and so forth.
I liked the books, but there really wasn’t much mystery to all of this even the first time I read them. I hope that with this extensive response to the Harry Potter thread on this post, this one can be laid to rest, unlike the Audi, Rosemary’s Baby, and “Brown-Eyed Girl” threads.
If anyone is more interested, I recommend looking at “The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter” by David Colbert.
OK, this makes sense.
Oh, this reminded me.
Crabbe and Goyle=Grab and Coil. Very snakelike.
One of them’s sorta from the Aramaic. “Abra kadabra” supposedly derives from the Aramaic a’bara k’davra, “I will create as I speak”. As it turns out, the imfamous killing curse, “avada kadvara”, means, “I will destroy as I speak”.
Maybe it’s a nod to Shiva, who is both destroyer and creator.
I thought Vishnu was creator and Shiva was destroyer. (And Brahma is protector)
Of course, this being Hinduism, maybe we’re both right. Or neither of us. Or both.
I suppose that’s strictly true. But I’ve seen a lot of references in the past to Shiva as both creator and destroyer.
Wow! :smack:
Like…cinders? :smack::smack:
Yeah, took me until I heard the Beatles talk about how they thought it up to realize the spelling difference.
Some of them are grecian in origin like episkey and anapneo which translate as roughly, I repair and I breathe. Others are more esoteric like alohomora. I always thought avada kedavra was a take-off of abracadabra. Rowling’s way of taking a familiar and cliched part of fantasy and turning it upside down.
Nobody: Your wife is correct about “Bones” < “Sawbones”; that’s straight from Roddenberry. And no, I can’t give a proper cite; it’s just something I remember from a TV Guide interview from a hundred years ago or so.
Eleanorigby: In your defense, the “Diagon Alley” thing works better in a British accent. Yanks say “die-YAG-gunnully”; Brits say, approximately, “DIE-a-GONN-elly”. If you had grown up saying DIE-a-GONN-elly instead of die-YAG-gunnully, I am sure you would have gotten Diagon Alley right away.
(Unless you are, in fact, British. In which case, oopsie!)
Panache45: Someone DID mention the FedEx arrow. Roadfood, post # 78, page 2, about halfway down.
This is slightly off OP topic; my apologies. My further apologies for continuing the subthread after Jefahrbach suggested ending it.
For the record, I love the Potter books. But one thing seriously bugged me, still bugs me; related to Eyebrows of Doom’s and Jefahrbach’s gripes: She was frequently, I don’t know how to put this, careless or disrespectful or uninsightful or something, about the nature of magic itself. For example, in battles, she treats wands as though they were ray-guns: people shoot spells at one another, and if their aim – their physical aim – is off, the spells miss! Well, to my mind, any spell worth casting ought to be “smart”, at least; surely the aiming device is not the hand, or even the wand, but the intent in the mind of the spell-caster. How could that miss? This is exacerbated in the movies; but it’s there in the books as well.
Along the same lines, in Halfblood Prince, Harry begins to recite aloud a dangerous curse whose meaning he does not know – and it works! So if the magic lies in the words themselves, then anybody, including a Muggle, could pick up a spellbook and go to town. But a major premise of the series is that only these special people have magical power, and they have to go to special schools for years to learn how to deploy it, and it requires intense mental focus. She isn’t consistent about this; e.g., the teleportation lessons illustrate what seems to me to be a more plausible magic-acquisition process.
But, to return to something a little closer to the OP, a counterbalancing delight, for me, is that some, though not all, of her monstrous or magical menaces are shrewd descriptions of mental and emotional ailments. The most obvious one, of course, is that the Dementors/Azkaban = depression; but there are several others. I made a list once; can’t find it; will return with it if I do.
But, yeah, the Latin is simplistic.
Paul Simon’s “My Little Town”: I always thought it was an American “Penny Lane,” wistfully longing for a more innocent time. I heard this song on the radio a few times in high school in the 70s and promptly forgot it. I happened upon the lyrics again recently and he fuckin’ HATED that place! Oh well.
Not as far as I’m aware - I’ve never heard anybody from Britain pronounce “diagonally” without the stress on the 1st a.
He whistles when he talks … remember now? He tries to get rabbit unstuck when he gets stuck in his hole.
It bothers me that they’re called the “Seven Sisters”, too, but that’s the Europeans’ fault, not the car company’s. The seventh-brightest and eighth-brightest stars in the Pleiades are just about the same brightness, so if your eye or telescope is sharp enough to pick up seven stars, it’ll also be sharp enough to pick up eight. So depending on how good your vision is, they should either be the “Six Sisters” or the “Eight Sisters”.
Well, no, but there’s not an animal called a “roo”, or a “kanga”.
You’ve provided the clarification I was hoping for. 10-Q veddy much!
.
True. (Gopher is a Disney creation, by the way.) And you’re right, all the animals except Rabbit and Owl are toys, and named after ‘real’ toys.