Lupine / Muggle Parents / BIG Castle

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston) <catlady@wicca.net>]

No: HPFGUIDX 52752

Honoria Granger wrote:

<< "Lupine" is simply the Latinate collateral adjective for "wolf" 
(from the Latin 'lupus'). Like "vulpine" for foxes, "cervine" for 
deer, "caprine" for goats, "phocine" for seals... (Honoria is showing 
off like her cousin Hermione ;), now for some "normal" ones)... 
"canine" for dogs, "feline" for cats, "equine" for horsies...like 
that. >>

'Bovine' for cattle, 'ovine' for sheep, and I always wonder WHY isn't 
'humine' for hominids?

<< And so "Lupin" is extremely appropriate for a werewolf's surname 
-- though how he got the name BEFORE he was the werewolf...hmmm. >>

People have wondered how his parents knew to name him "Remus", and 
Pippin hypothesized a Naming Spell which automatically puts an 
appropriate name on the child, but I don't see how even a Naming 
Spell could control what family name he had inherited ... the same 
applies to Sirius Black being a Black Dog animagus ("an-ee-may-juss" 
to me) ... I want to know how it is that the wizarding folk never 
notice that so many of their people have meaningful names and get 
suspicious of them. Such as how could no fellow student have 
suspected that Remus Lupin was a werewolf just from his name?

Christine Acker wrote:

<< If you found out one day that witches do exist, your daughter is 
one of them, and you have to pay to send her somewhere you've never 
heard of and be taken care of by people you never knew existed 
before, wouldn't you be scared, instead of pleased? >>

I want to nitpick the "have to pay" phrase. We have not been able to 
find from canon whether Hogwarts charges tuition. I think that not 
only tuition but also room & board are paid for by the Hogwarts 
endowment. It has been suggested that free tuition is one reason 
why parents are pleased. A less mercenary reason would be that the 
parents are relieved that there IS some reason (other than lunacy) 
for the strange things that have kept happening around their children 
(like Harry's teacher's wig turning blue).

Steve bboy_mn wrote:

<< Can you imagine what a nightmare is is to try and heat a place 
like this. Think about how much heat you have to pour into the Great 
Hall to fill it ceiling to floor with warm air (remember warm air 
rises), then consider that the ceiling (or area where wall meets 
ceiling) has a big hole in it for the owls to fly in, so heat is 
constantly leaking out. Since they appear to heat with firewood, I'm 
surprised there is any forest left at all in that area. >>

Surely they heat with magic. Magic to get more heat from the fires 
than nature provides. Magic to keep the heat down where the people 
who need to be heated are. And magic to spread the heat through the 
heated area well enough that people don't burn up from sitting beside 
the fire.

<< Now let's look at Hogwarts. The main building of which I assume 
there are several wings, is 7 floors. Assume an extremely modest 
average floor to floor thickness of 14 ft (probably closer to 16 to 
18 ft) that makes 7 castle floors equal to a 10 story residential 
building, and for the moment, I am ignoring any additional height 
added by the roof. >>

I suspect there aren't floors across the whole space of one building 
unit (e.g. tower or keep), but rather they put a room wherever they 
wanted it to be (being magic, maybe not even on top of some other 
room(s)) and made it as tall as they wanted to be, so every step from 
one room to another on the "same" "floor" would be a step or several 
steps up or down. Anyway, I doubt that most rooms have the high 
ceilings seen in preserved Muggle castles ... I just don't have the 
feeling of dorm rooms or Common Rooms or classrooms being that tall.

Do you remember the painting of Sailing To Hogwarts from the WB 
merchandise before the first movie? With the castle (looking like 
Neuschwan-I can't spell it) on top of a cliff, and the entrance for 
those boats at the bottom of the cliff? I think there is some accuracy 
in that picture, and much of Hogwarts Castle is actually INSIDE the 
cliff. If you imagine "inside the cliff" as being floors or stories, 
the "ground level" is the boat landing (designed to be usable at 
either high or low tide, right?), and they go up several floors* to 
the waiting area for first-years and another floor to the level with 
the Great Hall... I think the oppoosite side of the Castle from the 
boat landing, the land slopes down so the Castle emerges from it as a 
building with a grand entrance on the land side and the Great Hall is 
on the same floor as the land entrance. The kitchens, the Hufflepuff 
Common Room, and the first-year waiting area are on the next floor 
down, the Potions dungeon and Slytherin common room are still further 
down ... but Slytherins COULD, despite their Common Room being deep 
underground, have dorm rooms with outside windows, just by digging 
the dorm rooms to edge of the cliff...

* This is like what Jazmyn said about magic geometry: that staircase 
(or ramp, I don't remember) from boat landing to waiting area is one 
flight long so the first-years don't realise that it goes up several 
floors. A person who wants to go to one of those other floors must 
use a different staircase.