Perhaps I need to clarify...

[mellienel2 at yahoo.com]

> Alan Rickman is marvelous as Snape, oozing his way around every 
> sarcasm-oiled line.  He was unfairly robbed of screentime in the 
lack 
> of balance that the rather rambly editing issues caused.  Also, his 
> Snape actually oozes a bit more than canon Snape apparently does, 
but 
> it works wonderfully and that's the biggest test, now isn't it?  On 
> an unrelated note, I am puzzled by the change from "stopper death" 
> to "put a stopper in death".  The former sounds like poison or 
> somesuch (as it should); the latter sounds too much like it might 
> mean some kind of immortality, which, as we all know, is *not* what 
> that line refers to.
> 

Actually, I see that the exact opposite way. A stopper is a noun, to 
stopper is a verb of that noun (to put a stopper in something), 
so 'to stopper death' is to put a little rubber cap in a bottle that 
holds death. And put a stopper in death seems basically the same 
thing. It might just sound too much like "to stop death" instead 
of "to stopper death" when said out loud as opposed to being read, so 
they changed it. Also, remember his lines: "brew fame, bottle glory, 
put a stopper in death" - they're all about the physical bottling of 
a potion, just in different ways of saying it. 

m.