Lupin Means Wolf

[potioncat]

No: HPFGUIDX 150736

Potioncat ducks. Ginger has a bag of tomatoes that she's about to 
throw and Geoff is about to chuck a dictionary at her...Oh, Ginger 
is making a salad and Geoff doesn't need the dictionary to explain 
that Lupin does NOT mean wolf. Both are frowning at Potioncat.

OK, a bit of history and a question. I'm reading romance 
novels...it's OK they're rather old British Romance, so they're 
almost literature. Mary Stewart, Pilcher, Binchley...that sort.

So everyone of them has several (at least several) scenes that take 
place in the English Garden. It appears to be a requirement of the 
genre that the garden and all its flowers are described in great 
detail. Every garden ever mentioned has lupins.

One book by Stewart has a pair of sisters that the neighborhood 
children think are witches. One of them makes wild predictions about 
people that can't possibly be correct and no one takes her 
seriously. She's rushing around among the lupins looking for her 
neighbor's lost turtle/tortoise which has just laid an egg although 
they thought it was a boy. I had to read that chapter twice, and 
double check the published date because it read like a parody of HP. 
The dotty divination character turned out to be right in an 
unexpected sort of way.

So, although I've learned at this site that Lupin is a flower, I 
didn't realise it was a common flower and that every decent person 
in the UK grew it in their garden....or else! 

So, way back when, when PoA was new, and you didn't yet know his 
name was Remus or that he had a furry problem,  did you see 
Professor Lupin in the same way that you might have seen Professor 
Flowers or Profesor Rose? (Both of those are real names.) It just 
seems to me that if you know it's a flower, the name Lupin makes him 
seem so much more gentle. Never mind it also sounds like looping, or 
makes one think: Lupine.

Potioncat, who currently needs books that don't challenge the mind 
too much, if at all, and enjoys listening to Sir Paul sing about 
English tea and gardens.