Undersecretary

[Geoff Bannister]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "zanooda2" <zanooda2 at ...> wrote:

zanooda
> OK, I need to ask one more translation-related question before everybody starts writing about the movie :-). Can anyone explain better than the dictionary what Umbridge's job is :-)? It is called "Senior Undersecretary to the Minister". I looked up "undersecretary", but "senior" confuses me a little. Can there be a "junior undersecretary" then? What exactly is Umbridge's position, especially from the British point of view? I believe Geoff is on vacation, but maybe someone else knows this. 

Geoff:
Well, I am and I'm not. Let me explain. I should be on the 
Isles of Scilly at the moment but we have had to cancel our 
holiday because our friend, with whom we go on holiday every 
year, has been seriously ill with kidney problems. As a result, 
because the Isles are fairly remote in terms of main hospital 
access and any recurrence of his problems would require him 
being moved PDQ to a hospital by helicopter, the doctors 
deemed it unsafe for him to go there. 

Hence, we have come over to "foreign territory" in Cardiff 
so we can still share some holiday time together. But I rarely 
get totally divorced from the groups because there is good 
public computer on the islands and I am currently using our 
friend's system and muttering darkly about Microsoft and PCs, 
and missing my trusty Mac Mini. >:-|

However, to pick up on zanooda's point, I would agree with many 
of you that JKR has probably gone out of her way to create a 
stuffy, pompous and bureaucratic title for Dear Dolores. 
However, the British Civil Service is renowned for having 
similar sorts of positions in its heirarchy (and sometimes 
creating a position for the sake of having one!).

A similar situation sometimes obtains in education. Many 
schools will have a Headteacher and a Deputy Head but some 
schools need two deputies because of their size. In the school 
in which I worked, at one point we had a Headteacher, Senior 
Deputy and Second Deputy, which is analogous to the set up 
which zanooda queried.