The prophecy - a maverick view....

[M.Clifford]

No: HPFGUIDX 128430

> Geoff:
> Being, like Winnie-the-Pooh, a bear of very little brain, would you 
> care to expand on that [below now after edit. V] for my benefit?

Valky:
Which part would you like me to elaborate on?


> > Well here's an Irony for that question? By the prophecy, if it is  
> > not a contradiction of the facts (place my bet now that it 
> > reflects the facts more than anything else we know), then one of 
> > these people (Harry/Voldemort) is already dead... What if it's The 
> > boy who "Lived",

Having the opinion that you are not quite 'so of little brain' Geoff I
would say you probably have a pretty good idea what I am saying here
and that this is not the part that you really wanted me to explain.
But in case I am too deprived of sleep some 50 hours since I last woke
up and am assuming irrationally, what I meant here is pretty much, I
think, a simple agreement with what you had said before but with my
own flavour added. In your original post you said that the prophecy
seemed to contradict the facts, and that the words of the prophecy
implied by 'neither can live while the other survives' that neither is
alive and that one of these two is quite possibly dead. I expanded on
this with the word Irony because I wondered if "The Boy who *Lived*"
was an ironic misdirection by JKR placed in plain view at the
beginning of the series. 

> > hey if misdirection is theoretically tradition employed here  
> > there's a really good chance that Harry IS Dead already.. 
> 

I think this is the part that most needed clarification so what I did
here was:
I then postulated, well in my mind at least and perhaps wasn't clear,
based on another point made in this thread about the literary
tradition of misdirection being one of JKR's watermarks that if JKR is
notorious for misdirection and there is reason to believe that The Boy
who *Lived* might be a misdirection, then the chance that it is a
misdirection is fairly high. All told I get a respectable p-value that
Harry is Dead on those terms. Or in other words, the statistics of the
books we have imply that the hypotheses that Harry is dead should not
be rejected yet because the model fits the surprises of previous
books... ie From the start we are led to believe _he_ was "..." but in
the end _he_ really wasn't "..." at all. 
>

Also earlier was said: 
> Valky:
> > Sorry Geoff but if JKR says someone's dead they're dead ;D 
> > remember. 

> Geoff:
> Yes, but who has she said is dead?

Valky replies:
Ahhh I agree :D that is still a question at this time. 
I hope that my ramblings above have you understanding to a better
degree why I decided to consider Harry as a strong candidate.