[HPforGrownups] OOP: Re: What's in a name . . . (was: ...Luna/Lupin)

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 65421

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, hermiawoods wrote:

> --- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "kwilson1003" <delineate at h...> 
> wrote:
> > There's also 'Mark Evans' being bullied by Dudley.  Is the surname 
> > just a coincidence?
> 
> 
> Are there any coincidences in these books?

We haven't seen any confirmed coincidences yet, and plenty of things that
have appeared to be coincidental have turned out to have great importance
(Mrs. Figg the babysitter = Arabella Figg of the Old Crowd, for instance).  
In particular, we haven't seen any recycling of names so far, not even
fairly common names like Bill and Susan and Tom.  Everyone seems to get a
unique first name (with one exception from OOP, which I'll mention in a
minute), and everyone sharing a last name turns out to be related, a la
the Boneses.  So it seems likely that little Mark Evans will be important
somehow, though I'm at a loss to explain how that will be.

Am I the only one who noticed that the Minister of Magic prior to Fudge
was named Millicent (Something-or-Other)?  There is also a student named
Millicent -- Millicent Bulstrode, a Slytherin and member of the
Inquisitorial Squad.  (She's the one with the cat whose hair ruined
Hermione's Polyjuice Potion in CoS.)  Since this is the first time we've
seen two people share the same name, I tend to think there must be some
connection.  Perhaps little baby Millicent was named after her
great-auntie, who was Minister of Magic at the time she was born.

----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"