Ginny and Colin and student numbers

[Jim Ferer]

No: HPFGUIDX 9637

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Steve Vander Ark" <vderark at b...> 
wrote:
Steve:"The books says that they jumped a foot into the air. Now we all 
know and assume that they didn't REALLY jump a foot off the ground. In 
fact, no one really even leaves the ground at all when they do that 
jump in surprise thing. But JKR writes it that way be cause Harry 
feels it like that. There are quite a few other examples of this in 
the books.
 
Now that seems to me to support the theory that many of the "big 
numbers" mentioned--the two hundred Slytherin supporters, the 
hundreds of Christmas turkeys, the seating for 1200 people at the 
Yule Ball-- are all just coming from Harry's subjective point of 
view." 

That's really straining for a reason to discount evidence of larger 
numbers. You can choose your own evidence that way. A casual 
observation that Hagrid "jumped a foot" (where I come from you hear 
the expression "jumped a mile"; I never held anyone's powers of 
observation cheap because they used it) is far different than the 
straight declaration that there were a hundred tables set for twelve 
at the Yule Ball.  I don't think it's difficult to distinguish when 
JKR is assuming the mantle of the omniscient narrator compared with 
Harry's personal POV.

The high, low, and middle number proponents all have something to 
argue with. I'm a middle, 450-500. It doesn't appear that JKR paid a 
lot of attention to that kind of continuity when she sat down to write 
the stories. [There are precedents. Conan Doyle was notoriously 
careless about those sorts of things, sparking about a hundred years 
of debate. My _Annotated Sherlock Holmes_ is about three and a half 
inches thick.]


In each of these cases Harry would have reason to see a larger 
> number than there were and JKR writes it that way.
> 
> Steve Vander Ark
> The Harry Potter Lexicon
> which doesn't have a Colin Creevey page...yet
> http://www.i2k.com/~svderark/lexicon