ghost food, godric's hollow, death in book 5, hart and spelling

[Simon Branford]

No: HPFGUIDX 1440

"But then, wouldn't the ghosts at his Deathday Party be eating and drinking,
instead of just trying to?"

Just because they eat the food does mean they can actually taste it. They
pass through the rotten food in CoS to try and get some taste of it. The
idea being that 'dead' food has some sort of ghost existence.

"Godric's Hollow (where is that again?) is gonna be very important"

Does this mean that Harry also owns a broken down old house and some land in
Wales? No one has mentioned what happened to the house after Harry was taken
from it.

"A really big death in 5 - Lupin?  (please no!) Ron?  Dumbledore?  Sirius?"

We can all go back to speculating on who is going to die in the next book.
We got it so totally wrong for book 4 that there is little chance of us
doing any better this time round! Shall I for completeness say now that it
will be George Weasley (he was my predication for book 4)?

"Simon was getting into defining deer, and mentioned that the definition of
'hart' was significant.  Assuming he meant in reference to HP ... I dunno
Simon - what's the answer?"

Ah! A slight mistake was made in the assumption. This has nothing to do with
HP.
I am studying at Hertford College and the college crest is a Hart on a red
background.

"Talking of my dictionary, it refers to itself as "Encyclopedic".  I'm
assuming that Simon's spellchecker had corrected it to "Encyclopaedic". Most
references on English usage say that the former of these spellings is taking
precedence. I wonder if this is due to the American influence or a natural
tendency to modernisation of British English?"

I have my spell checker set up to correct before sending and I would
normally only correct bits that I have written. This must have got past
while I was not concentrating. I personally would normally use encyclopaedic
and other British spellings. The main inconsistency I have is in the use of
ize/ise. I use both, sometimes in the same sentence, and am never sure which
is which.

Simon

PS: The Olympics starts soon. Now to sort out a sleeping pattern that means
I can watch all the action. This may even give me some quality computer time
to get to some serious work on the FAQ's.