Assyria and Wizardly Geography

[jdr0918]

No: HPFGUIDX 99140

<<<In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Liz Muir" wrote: ...the country 
doesn't exist anymore ... How did Uncle Algie manage to bring a plant 
back from a country that doesn't exist?
...Assyria was used just to refer to that region, which is in modern 
day Iraq.  This seems unlikely since using archaic names to refer to 
a region would certainly cause a lot of confusion...>>>

The Sergeant Majorette says

Maybe JKR was assuming nobody would look up stuff like that. If she 
had said "Iraq", a lot of people would be too distracted wondering 
what she meant by it to absorb the story.

Victorian English travelers were notorious for wandering around 
political hotspots infallibly armored by obliviousness; the WW does 
seem to have the sensibilities of an earlier century.

And as for confusion, come to my city sometime and ask for directions 
to Rockefeller Center. The street signs have said "Avenue of the 
Americas" since shortly after Assyria became Iraq, but no New Yorker 
ever calls it that. Even typing the offending phrase makes me feel 
like a traitor to my homeland...

--JDR