Giveaway Names

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C3162
From: catlady_de_los_angeles
Subject: Re: Giveaway Names
Reply To: [Yahoo! #3149] Giveaway Names
Date: 7/1/00 3:42 pm  (ET)

> It bothers me that you can often tell what a person is by their
name. (snip) You could guess that "Sirius Black" would end up as a big
black dog.

It seems to be part of the nature of the wizard world that people's names
have meanings (one of the ways in which whimsy and puns are natural laws
in the wizard world).

I very much wonder how that works. If the name affects the
person's destiny, why would parents *ever* name their child Remus
Lupin???? (Perhaps the reason they didn't change the family name is
that Lupin is also a flower. Like Monty Python's highwayman who steals
the lupins.)

However, having the name influence the destiny would explain why wizard
family resemblances seem to persist more in the patriline (with the
surname) than in the matriline.

Or, if the destiny pre-exists, which causes all kinds of philosophical
problems about free will (except to centaurs, who don't believe in free
will, but if everything is pre-ordained, so was Firenze helping Harry
pre-ordained), how do parents know what name will match it?

Or do people go through orgies of name-changing, to suit their activities,
at age 10 before going to wizard school, and again at age 18 after having
graduated, and maybe every ten years throughout life?

Altho' I thought that Sirius Black would end up as an astrological object,
I never thought of a dog!