Dumbledore's age.

[va32h]

No: HPFGUIDX 176573

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Zara" <zgirnius at ...> wrote:
> zgirnius:
> I find that it might be easy to misspeak when trying to say "115", 
> and end up saying "150" instead. The words differ only by the 
> presence of a final consonant sound in the former, in English.

va32h:

Yes, and when a husband works late every night of the week and comes 
home smelling of cheap perfume, he might have simply taken a second 
job in a cheap perfume factory. 

But not likely.  

JKR got lazy - that's the simplest explanation, and as such the one 
most likely to be true. 

It's not entirely her fault - fandom placed FAR too much emphasis on 
her interviews.  More from Petunia, Harry's green eyes, a person 
doing magic late in life...these were all blown completely out of 
proportion by fans; one sentence or phrase extrapolated into some 
kind of "promise" by JKR to build a massively significant plot point 
around them. 

And then there is the greatest and grandest HP myth of all - that 
every single aspect of the series was planned in excruciating detail 
from Day One.  I have never understood why people believe this.  JKR 
says herself that she had an outline, but adjusted the details as she 
went along.  On her own website, you can READ chapters and plotlines 
that she discarded or changed - she acknowledged having to radically 
revise GOF.  

So I don't blame JKR entirely -- but for her part, she did seem to 
enjoy giving cryptic answers to (we now see were) irrelevant 
questions and enjoying the resultant fan frenzy. 

Many television programs employ interns to patrol the internet and 
see what the fans are saying about their shows.  JKR might have been 
well served to do something similar...then she could have nipped some 
of the hysteria in the bud. 

JKR either forgot what she'd said earlier or changed her story as she 
wrote it -- neither are a crime.  But I'm still calling it lazy, 
because it is lazy.  When an author wants something to happen in her 
story that can't happen because of what she's already written she has 
three options: discard what she wants to happen, pretend that what 
already happened didn't happen, or come up with a solution that 
allows both situations to happen believably. 

The third option takes the most effort - and I just don't believe 
that JKR cared enough to invest that effort in DH. 

va32h