16 years of teaching at Hogwarts? (wasRe: Copyediting Errors - Listed?)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 157243

Carol earlier:
> > Other examples, (snip)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. 
> 
> 
> Potioncat:
> I snipped everything except the Snape part because that's the part
I'm addressing.
> 
> If Snape had been teaching 14 years in the fall during Umbridge.
Then he had been teaching for 15 years the fall he was DADA. But we
don't know that he wasn't already spying on DD before that. It seems
he was spying on DD that autumn before Harry was born. So I think the
16 years of information on DD wasn't just while at Hogwarts.
> 
> I'm not sure which of us is correct, I'm just not convinced the 16 
> years is an error.

Carol responds:
I agree that Snape was *spying* for Dumbledore for about a year before
he started teaching, but he wouldn't want to reveal that information
to Bellatrix. He would only have wanted to mention the fifteen years
of teaching as a means of (ostensibly) gathering information on
Dumbledore to provide to Voldemort if and when he returned. But I
think that either "sixteen year worth of information" is one of JKR's
little math/continuity errors *or* it's a slip that Bellatrix didn't
catch. But if it's a slip, it should have been followed up on (an
added reason for Bella's suspicion of Snape), and it's
uncharacteristic for Snape, who is usually very careful about what he
does and doesn't reveal and exactly how he words what he reveals, to
make a slip of that sort. And Snape *is* talking about teaching in the
context of that remark:

"'Why did you stay there [at Hogwarts] all that time, Snape? Still
spying on Dumbledore for a master you believed dead?'

"'Hardly,' said Snape,'although the Dark Lord is pleased that I never
deserted my [teaching] post: I had sixteen years or information on
Dumbledore to give him when he returned. . .'" (HBP Am. ed. 27).

Oops. Where did that extra year come from? If it's not a math error on
JKR's part (which should have been caught and queried by a
copyeditor), then it must be a slip on Snape's part since Bellatrix
surely knows that he began teaching at Hogwarts a few months before
Godric's Hollow (she asks why he wasn't with the Dark Lord when he
fell and Snape reminds her that he was teaching at Hogwarts, where LV
had sent him to spy on DD, p. 26). So he apparently expects Bellatrix
to remember when he began teaching, which, AFWK, was two months before
Voldemort fell.

Surely JKR can't have forgotten when the events at Godric's Hollow
occurred, but might she be thinking that Snape began teaching a year
before he actually did, assuming that "fourteen years" in OoP is
correct? Or has *she* somehow conflated the year or so of spying *for*
(not *on*) Dumbledore with the years of teaching? Given the
inconsistencies elsewhere, it seems to me more likely that it's JKR's
error than Snape's. He can't afford fuzzy thinking or lapses in
concentration.

Carol, who's also confused as to how having Draco complete his
assigned task (killing DD) would give Snape a little more time to spy
at Hogwarts since there would be no one left to spy on except
McGonagall and Flitwick, neither of whom seems particularly important
to the Order