3 unrelated OOP questions (long Sunny Jim answer)

[Eustace_Scrubb]

No: HPFGUIDX 96557

leb wrote:

> 2.  In ch 17 when Harry takes the injured Hedwig to the staffroom to
> find Professor Grubbly-Plank one of the gargoyles calls him 
> "sunny Jim".  Is this just some type of british phrase that I'm
> unaware of or is it an allusion to his father James and the fact > >
> that they look so much alike?

Eustace_Scrubb:

The Australian Broadcasting Company
(http://www.abc.net.au/classic/breakfast/stories/s994023.htm) says
this about "Sunny Jim":

"It's an oddly common expression, isn't it? Dyspeptic uncles
use to say to us, "That's enough out of you, Sunny Jim".
Ill tempered school teachers used the expression in much the same way
– as a kind of generic name for a younger person you wish to
belittle
in some way. Well, Sunny Jim turns out to be the name of an energetic
character created to promote an American brand name breakfast cereal
around the beginning of the 20th century. The cereal was called Force
and the advertising slogan said: `High over the fence leaps Sunny
Jim – Force is the food that raises him'. It appears that the
Force Food Company ran a competition to find a suitable character to
promote Force. The competition was won by an American schoolgirl, a
Miss Ficken (Christian name unknown). The doggerel appearing in the
advertisements about Sunny Jim was written by Miss Minnie Hanff for
the Force Food Company. (That company name, by the way, gives a whole
new meaning to the expression `force feeding'.) By the way,
Sunny Jim was invented in 1903, so this year he should have received
his telegram from the Queen."

Apparently W.W.Denslow, who illustrated The Wizard of Oz, created a
booklet called _Through Foreign Lands with Sunny Jim_ in 1910 as a
premium for Force, and in the 1930s the character was revived to
advertise Force in Great Britain.  These latter tidbits come from
http://www.salemstate.edu/sextant/volXII_2/SEXT-essay4.htm , a
scholarly journal (!).

My guess is that JKR had the gargoyle use "sunny Jim" in the same way
a dyspeptic uncle would.  Then again, one imagines she knows a bit
about Oz, so perhaps she knows about the Denslow booklet.  Could there
be a connection between the Salem Witches Institute and Salem State
College?

No matter how she came to the phrase, the possibility that it's a pun
in this context is intriguing.

Cheers,

Eustace_Scrubb