Sirius' words about Snape WAS: What is poetic justice?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 143578

Alla wrote:
<snip> 
> Sirius' reminiscences about Snape keep coming true, no? At least " 
> knew more dark curses than..." received solid canon support in HBP.
> JMO,
> Alla, who thinks that some other Sirius comments about Snape may
turn out to be true too.
>
Carol responds:
The actual quote is "knew more curses when he arrived at school than
half the seventh years." The word "Dark" is not included. I seriously
doubt that "half the seventh years" were casting Dark curses, and in
any case, the number of genuinely Dark curses that we know of is quite
small. Certainly neither eleven-year-old Severus nor the students six
years ahead of him were casting the Unforgiveables at Hogwarts, and he
hadn't invented Sectumsempra yet. Unless we count Serpensortia, the
spell that Snape had Draco cast in CoS (and which Snape easily dealt
with by silently Evanescoing the snake, so maybe it doesn't qualify as
Dark), the only genuinely Dark curse that I can think of is the one
with the jet of purple light that Dolohov used to injure Hermione in
OoP (unfortunately, we don't know its name because Hermione had just
Silencio'd Dolohov).

To return to young Severus, it seems likely that Sirius Black is using
the word "curses" rather loosely to mean jinxes and hexes, and perhaps
DADA countercurses like Expelliarmus and Protego, rather than "Dark
curses," (We know from Severus's detailed DADA O.W.L. responses that
he was very knowledgeable in that subject a few years later. I suspect
he was a child prodigy "collected" by both Slughorn and Lucius Malfoy
for his precocious abilities in both DADA and Potions.) Even at
fifteen, he was not perhaps quite as steeped in the Dark Arts as Black
suggests. Only one of the invented spells in his Potions book,
Sectumsempra, qualifies as Dark. Levicorpus, which suspends a person
upside down without physically harming him, became a fad among the
whole student body, not just the Slytherins (I doubt that James would
have used it if he considered it Dark magic), and Muffliato (which
Harry considers highly useful) creates a buzzing in the ears of
would-be eavesdroppers, again without harming them. Neither can by any
stretch of the imagination be called a Dark curse. 

My point is that the word "Dark" is not part of the original
quotation, and I think the misquotation creates altogether the wrong
impression of the talented and clever little boy with his repertoire
of jinxes and hexes.

Carol, who thinks that Severus, whether he was eleven or seventeen,
would have been more than a match for James when he wasn't caught
off-guard with two (or more) against one