SCHABB, US/UK/Oz Eng, happiness, morals in HP

[Tabouli]

No: HPFGUIDX 26541

Ebony:
> After visiting the UK this summer, I am intrigued by the idea of 
first schools for magical children... and I think I just might have a 
good idea of where the one in Oxfordshire might be hidden.  ;-)

Where?  Where?  Tell all!

More Ebony:
> I don't think Hermione shows off in the beginning because her ego is 
big.  I think she is a bit insecure and feels as if she needs to 
showcase her knowledge to prove her worth in this new world she's 
found herself in. <

**Exactly**.  At 11, when I started secondary school, I was a total Hermione (minus the bossiness: I was a shy, withdrawn know-it-all), and it wasn't because I was a spoilt arrogant egomaniac, it was because I was a self-conscious, insecure, desperate-to-please child who'd been socially rejected at primary school and thought the only way to prove I mattered in any way was to demonstrate how clever I was.  And yes, it backfired on me, and everyone thought I was a show-off, etc.etc.  Which I was, but not for the reasons they assumed.  And yes, I too was totally crushed when I realised I'd actually alienated my peers, not gained their respect and recognition.  Ohhooo, I identify all too well with Hermione... I'll not only join S.C.H.A.B.B., I'll apply for life membership...



Rowena (in reponse to my musings on US/UK language differences):
> Ah, so that's why everybody keeps talking about 'partners' for the Yule Ball rather than 'dates'.
   Mistakes in slang go the other way too.<

I think the characters do refer to "dates" once or twice in GoF, but yes, "date" is a very American term (in Australia people even get hassled for using it for this reason: there's a bit of an anti-US English movement here).  So are phrases like "kind of", and "all right already" (which I believe is very New York) and "to flunk", etc.

As for mistakes in slang going the other way across the Atlantic, yep, of course they do.  However, I have to insert my own nationalistic grimace here and say that efforts of most of the rest of the Anglophone world at reproducing Australian English are, with few exceptions, painfully inept.  Let me get a few things straight here: the word "cobber" has been dead for several decades (in fact, I suspect the last time it was in everyday use was before WW1: even my grandfather born in 1908 didn't say this), NO-ONE refers to Australian men as "bruces" and no-one outside Monty Python ever has (the difficulty I had in convincing South Africans of this was incredible), our accent is *not* identical to Cockney (there was some gruesome Simpsons episode which evoked howls of protest from our shores), and "Aussies" is NOT spelt "Ozzies" (though Australia can be abbreviated to "Oz").

Grrrr.

Of course, given that most Australian TV comes from the US or UK, Australians are on average pretty savvy about the differences between the dialects, and can do at least recognisable attempts at standard Hollywood American and RP English accents.  I often have to attempt this in my training sessions to demonstrate how Australian English differs from the English people from overseas are likely to have learnt in school or university or from TV.  I also cover a lot of more "macro-level" differences between Australian English and other Englishes, like the Australian penchant for extreme understatement and diminishing qualifiers like "just" and "quite" and "a bit".  Americans, in particular, can find the way Australians communicate quite (!) disconcerting.

Re: happiness of HP characters

You know, a mainland Chinese friend of mine once said that Westerners have a problem with happiness: they somehow think that to be happy means to be naive, stupid and unambitious: if they know someone who is always radiantly happy they quickly decide that they're irritating, shallow and insincere.  The theory presumably being that there are so many terrible things in the world that you'd have to be naive and stupid to be happy, and that if you are completely happy there is nothing left to do or strive for.  An interesting, albeit harsh and sweepingly inclusive comment (he's an anthropologist I used to do cross-cultural training with, and he'd privately often come up with harsh but perceptive comments about various cultures, including his own), and one worth considering in terms of our comments on HP characters.

Amy Z:
> I tend to think Remus is happy, more or less, because he seems to have 
an equilibrium that I equate with happiness

jenny:
> Hermione seems to be a fairly happy person but she puts a lot of 
pressure on herself and that can be overwhelming (...) Dumbledore is now burdend with 
the rise of Voldemort and his own inevitable aging, yet he (like I) 
loves Hogwarts and his position there, making his happiness not quite complete.  

I tend to see happiness as a temporary mood state: even a deeply miserable person can get into a good mood now and then.  Maybe what people mean in comments like the above is what I'd see more as a state of peace with one's self and one's actions.

By this definition, Dumbledore, though put in sad moods by happening such as the Potters' murder, Cedric's death and so on, seems at peace with himself and his actions.  Self-sufficient, even. I can't remember him agonising or cursing himself over having done the wrong thing (even though he has on various occasions).  Sirius, on the other hand, tortures himself about his past actions and seems more needy, which may be why he is more tempestuous and hotheaded.  Remus appears to have reached a state of acceptance about his lycanthropy, and is in a sense at peace, though perhaps a sad and lonely peace.

The students are obviously a bit young to have settled in this sense, but a few comments... Hermione is a proactive idealist, the sort who would fight to the end to achieve something and never be satisfied unless she succeeds; I suspect she will find inner peace hard to achieve (there's always more to learn, more causes to fight for, etc.), but so far she does have great faith in her own abilities.  Harry is a sensitive boy, and I suspect he has suppressed a lot of anger and pain which surfaces in times of stress, and which he is learning how to channel productively.  Ron has a complex about being upstaged all the time: to achieve peace he will need to learn the age-old lesson of seeing himself as of absolute, rather than comparative value.  Unlike Harry, however, Ron's happy family life means he's only insecure about what he does, not who he is; a lifetime of the Dursleys has left Harry unsure of himself in lots of ways (witness his fears stemming from the Sorting Hat).

Mindy:
> > Ron growls by how obsessed Percy is about Mr. Crouch, he says,
> > "They should be announcing their engagement any day now." Oh my 
> > gosh, what kind of engagement are they talking about? Is this 
> > supposed to be sarcasm? A real slash romance?
Rita:
> It was sarcasm.  Slash romance is So Far out of Ron's idea of 
> possibilities that he can say such a thing only as an absurdity

(NB I'm all for these discussions, but isn't homosexuality one of the topics The Moderators have cautioned us away from as too inflammatory?)  I wouldn't be too hard on JKR for reflecting the prevailing society in which the wizards are embedded.  Realistically speaking, there aren't many high schools where heterosexuality *isn't* more or less taken as read (except perhaps by teenagers who *aren't* heterosexual, but even they are probably doing their very best to make sure no-one realises this, thus maintaining the status quo).  It's the ol' write the world "as it is" vs "as it should be" dilemma.  I incline towards the former, even though I personally support most of the causes people have mentioned and find many prevailing social attitudes very depressing.

The question we have to ask is *should* the HP books be a vehicle for moral instruction, filled with Strong Female Role Models, Examples of Same-Sex Relationships, Representation of Minority Cultures, demonstrations that Evil Doesn't Pay and so on?  I'm not totally against this, but for me it would have to be very well done, to the extent that it's plausible, subtle and happens almost subconsciously for the reader.  Nothing undermines moral education more than someone standing on a floodlit pulpit thundering sermons into a loudspeaker: a great way to alienate absolutely everyone except the converted!  Not to worry: from what I've read so far in the HP series, I think Jo's up to the task of judicious moral education.  She's even being too judicious, judging by the growing panic of the fundamentalist far right...

Tabouli.


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