Philosopher's stone (was:Significance of missing line/Hurt/Comfort

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 156241

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, <mail at ...> wrote:
>
> Nikkalmati:
> > I had never heard of Philosopher's Stone and probably would have 
> > been thinking Aristotle, Kant, etc. I suspect the change was 
> > pretty much on the order of changing skirting to baseboard (where
> > does that occur?) or biscuit to cookie.
> 
>   
> It just UK terms/names in the UK book and USA terms in the USA book.
> 
> Some words that the UK would use, USA might not understand or mean 
> something different.
>    

I am US born, bred, and educated. I lived in England for 6 months over
the summer of 1988 and I can attest to the fact that there are
hundreds of differences in our daily vocabularies. While I was there a
young lady in the factory I was working at asked me for a "biro". I
had to make her repeat herself several times to even figure out that
it was "biro" she was saying since I was totally unfamiliar with the
word. Then I told her I didn't have one, sorry. Much later I found out
that she was asking to borrow the pen she could plainly see clipped to
my shirt pocket! I felt very bad then, but I never saw her again to
explain and apologise. 

However, I am very disappointed in the way this has been handled in
the HP books. I read books by British authors all the time and in the
main we are just expected to deal with vocabulary differences as
readers and I have no problem with that. JKR seems to say otherwise
but the entire rest of the world understands that the HP series is
written for school children and why, oh why, would you spoon feed US
children intellectual baby food instead of taking the opportunity to
teach them the vocabulary differences? Isn't Scholastic supposed to be
in the educational publishing business? What were they thinking?

Wouldn't a better approach have been to leave the vocabulary intact
and put an English to American glossary in the back of the books?
Wouldn't that have been useful for English, Australian, and all other
English speaking children around the world as well? I knew that a
Philosopher's stone was associated with alchemy long before HP was
written and before JKR was born. I am a product of the US educational
system. If I could handle it certainly the US children of today could
handle it. They seem perfectly bright and inquisitive. It is the
editors at Scholastic who seem the dim bulbs to me.

Ken