Wizard Baruffio and the Wingardium Leviosa Charm Revisited

[secca_pk]

No: HPFGUIDX 160107

>Carol wrote:
<snip>
> The word "bison" (or "bisont")was already in existence and 
> referred, not to an American buffalo (probably European wizards
> knew no more than European Muggles of the existence of the
> Americas at this point) but to a European buffalo also called a 
> wisent. 

Secca responds:
I hadn't thought to check if the word 'bison' were in use yet! 
Thanks for this info.

> Carol again:
> Carol, whose first reaction to the wizard Baruffio's blunder 
> was what JKR surely intended it to be, a hearty roar of laughter

Secca responds: 
Aha! See, now we come to the crux of the matter! I did not laugh at 
all. My initial reaction, reading it the first time, and every time 
since, has always been "Hunh? I don't get it." (Originally I thought 
it must just be referring to some British idiom)

Researching into this lately I keep running across Harry Potter 
sites that have discussed this same quote over the years (including 
the HP4GU archives). It seems that there are others like me, who 
have always been bothered/stumped by this quote -- and there are 
also many others, like you, who have always found it funny, and are 
a bit puzzled by all the brouhaha. If my first reaction had been to 
laugh, I don't think I would care about this now in the least. 
Humour is in the eye of the beholder??? 

> Now, montims wrote:
> OK - huge stretch but "Faidi" – Persian Poet
<snip> 
> And "saidi" – The Egyptian buffalo 
<snip>

Secca responds:
Brilliant! This is at least as likely as my Bifon/Bison.
Unfortunately, that means not very likely at all... ah, well...

I had great hopes for "Bifonte/Bisonte" from the portuguese...
'Bifonte' *is* a word in portuguese -- a very modern, corporate word 
meaning 'dual-sourced', so I wasn't planning on mentioning it -- 
then I found a site that used it to mean 'Two-faced'. Aha! I 
thought, and started to run with theories of Baruffio and his 
Potuguese Veritaserum... only to discover that it had been a typo 
and the word intended had been 'bif/r/onte'and is Spanish for 'two-
faced', not Portuguese -- ah well

Well, for anybody still interested in all of this, I must admit that 
I have had a reversal in my opinion. When I started all of this, one 
of the theories that I did *not* like was the "It is a typo, Jo just 
meant to write "said 'f' instead of 's'." But I have come to realize 
how easy it is to get confused by the quote, having done so myself. 
I now believe that Jo, with her history of (understandable) 
inattention to little unimportant details (and inexact maths) -- 
simply got confused as well.

I now stand firmly in the "It was a typo" school." If we re-write 
the quote to read "said 'f' instead of 's'" then the 'answer' to the 
riddle (for those of us who could not just laugh at the surface 
wordplay) Could be one of two things -- both seeming much simpler in 
concept than the flights I was going to to try to make the original 
quote work:

1) This means Baruffio could have simply said /Wingardium Leviofa/
and, in Jo's world 'ofa' somehow means buffalo(remember /Levicorpus/ 
levitates a body). Or not, but there is at least an 's' in the spell.

2) OR , in Jo's world, there is a thing called a 'bussalo', which is 
something that a wizard might use, and Baruffio wanted one. Hence, 
the now infamous misquote was --

"Accio Buffalo -- oops I meant Bussalo.." WHAM!

I like number two, personally.

The funny thing is 'bussalo' has been discussed at great length by 
many people looking for the 'answer' to this riddle -- but as it 
does not work unless you declare the original Flitwick quote to be a 
typo, it bothered me. Now, by putting the two together -- Typo and 
Bussalo -- I come up with something that I can accept. 

I see that you are all ecstatic. =)