Copyediting Errors - Listed? (was:Voldemort killed personally?)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 157183

Carol earlier:
> > Actually, "in his sixteenth year" is the error, which a copyeditor
should have caught and corrected or queried. (JKR, as we know, is bad
at math and may not know the difference between "sixteen" and "in his>
sixteenth year.")
> 
> Mike:
> 
> Thanks, Carol, for that info. It opens a whole new vista of 
> possibilities for me. Now I have another question. Where did you
find this copyeditor mistake and are there more of them floating out
there? Do we have a list somewhere or do you happen to know a website
that has that info? Can the elves add something here? I'm sure I'm not
the only one who would like to know whether some of their theories are
based on silly mistakes in copywriting. <snip>

Carol again:
Hi, Mike. First a small correction: Copywriting is writing advertising
copy. Copyediting is catching errors and inconsistencies in an
author's work. A good copyeditor familiar with JKR's work should have
noticed and queried the narrator's assertion in HBP that Tom murdered
his father "in his sixteenth year" since we know from CoS that he was
sixteen (he says so himself). To be fair, the copyeditor may not have
almost memorized the books as we have and the books may have been
copyedited by different people, but if I'd been the copyeditor, I'd
have queried: "JKR: Shouldn't it be seventeenth year, not sixteenth?
According to CoS, Tom was sixteen at this point. (If he's in his
sixteenth year, he'd be fifteen.)" It would be up to JKR as the author
to make the correction or not, but I would think she'd have made the
correction if the copyeditor caught it.

Other examples, some of them caught and corrected and some not,
include Nearly Headless Nick having not eaten for nearly four hundred
years in SS/PS but dying five hundred years before (she knows about
that one and SS/PS will be corrected, but he still has the
anachronistic Elizabethan ruff) and Snape having taught for fourteen
years at the beginning of OoP but having sixteen (should be fifteen)
years worth of information on Dumbledore. (Of course, that one could
be a slip on *Snape's* part that Bella didn't catch, but a copyediotr
familiar with the books should at least have queried it. Maybe one did
and JKR chose not to accept the correction, but I think it's an
oversight and one more example of JKR's abysmal math skills. The most
annoying one, to me, is Charlie Weasley: "We haven't won the cup since
Charlie left" and "We haven't won the cup for seven years" are
incompatible with Charlie being only three years older than Percy.
(Fortunately, his age is never mentioned in canon, only  in
interviews. All we have is Bill's statement in GoF that he hasn't been
to Hogwarts in five years. JKR seems to think that he's about
twenty-three, which would make Charlie twenty-one. But for "the
legendary Charlie Weasley" and his team to win all the cup when
Charlie was a seventh-year, he'd have be nine older than Percy (a
fifth-year when Harry enters Hogwarts), not three. So in GoF, Bill
should be about twenty-nine and Charlie about twenty-seven as opposed
to twenty-three and twenty-one, as JKR seems to think. (It's probably
not important to anyone but me, but she really seems to have no grasp
at all of numbers.)

Not all the inconsistencies relate to numbers, and some may be
intentional (conflicting accounts of the eavesdropping incident, for
example). There are other things that haven't been caught, however.
For example, even though the order of the "echoes" coming out of the
wand in the graveyard has been caught and corrected, when Harry tells
the story to Dumbledore later, the echoes are still in the wrong
order, with his father coming out before his mother (GoF Am. ed. 696). 

Another continuity error that jumps out at me, even though no one else
seems to care about it, is Ron's reference, months before Draco lets
the DEs into Hogwarts, to "Malfoy's Hand of Glory." How did Ron know
about that? Harry never mentioned it, and even he didn't see Draco
buying it. Draco asked his father if he could have it and Borgin
recommended it as an aid to thieves and plunderers, but Lucius sneers
that he hopes his son becomes something better than a thief or a
plunderer, and besides, Lucius is *selling* Dark artifacts, not buying
them. So Draco himself must have bought the Hand of Glory at some
point, but neither Harry nor Ron could know that.

To return to Tom Riddle's age and the question of how I know that
sixteen, as opposed to sixteenth year, is correct: Tom is a prefect,
so he must be in at least his fifth year, which means he's at least
fifteen. Since Myrtle's death and Hagrid's expulsion occurred in June
and we know from HBP that Tom was born on New Year's Eve (or perhaps
the early hours of New Year's Day), he must be sixteen, not fifteen at
that point. (He can't be seventeen, or he wouldn't be worrying about
returning to the orphanage.) Tom himself confirms that he's sixteen by
referring to "the memory of my sixteen-year-old self." (I can find the
page numbers if necessary.)

Since the Riddles were murdered after Myrtle's death, apparently the
following summer, Tom must still have been sixteen (he would not have
turned seventeen until the end of December). He certainly was not
fifteen ("in his sixteenth year"). The error is JKR's ("Oh, dear.
Maths"), but a copyeditor should have caught and corrected it. Had he
or she done so, we wouldn't be pulling our hair out for nothing.

I had thought that the Lexicon had a list of errors that JKR is aware
of and has corrected or plans to correct (Nearly Headless Nick's death
date and "last remaining ancestor" for "last remaining descendant"
among them), but I can't find it. Maybe it's on Mugglenet. The closest
I can find is a list of typos and apparent typos in the US edition 
http://www.hp-lexicon.org/about/books/hbp/changes_hbp.html
(which leaves out some of the more glaring errors, including the
annoying omission of "from" in "left leg still standing feet away
where she had started," HBP am. ed. 385). Not very helpful, I'm afraid.

Carol, who shouldn't drive herself crazy with errors and
inconstistencies but still wishes that they'd been caught and
corrected while the books were in manuscript