HouseElves/Pettigrew/Shunpike/Bertha/Slytherin/Rewrites/Economic/Carol, Carol

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 180477

a_svirn:
> When I finished DH I thought my English is horribly deficient,
because I simply couldn't see how "neither can live while the other
survives" can be translated into "one cannot be killed, while the
other lives".  I still don't see it.
> > 
> > Pippin:
> > The explanation's in "The Other Minister" - "Yes, alive," said
Fudge. "That is--I don't know--is a man alive if he can't be killed? I
don't really understand it and Dumbledore won't explain properly --
but anyway he's certainly got a  body and is walking and talking and
killing, so I suppose, for the purposes of our discussion, yes, he's
alive."
> > 
> > But not for the purposes of the prophecy, evidently. 
> 
> a_svirn:
> That would mean that Harry "hadn't been alive for the purposes of
the  Prophesy" as well.
>
Carol responds:
Besides, Fudge isn't explaining the Prophecy, which he hasn't heard.
He's explaining how LV could be "alive" when he can't be killed.
That has nothing to do with "neither can live while the other
survives" being interprete as "one of us has to kill the other."

Now, I happen to agree that LV isn't really "alive" in any normal
sense; he ought to have died from the first rebounded AK and would
have done so had it not been for the various Horcruxes and he has only
a mangled fragment of a soul with which to possess a body not his own
or inhabit a magically created/restored body. Harry, I suppose, can't
"live" in the sense of not having a normal life while LV survives.

But that has nothing to do with Harry's interpretation of the phrase
as meaning "one of us has to kill the other" and DD's cool agreement
with that statement. (He knows that LV has to "kill" Harry to destroy
the soul bit, but he's concealing that bit of information from Harry.)
"Neither can die while the other survives" would make more sense, but
those words couldn't be interpreted to mean "One of us has to kill the
other," either. Harry comes away from the discussion of the Prophecy
thinking that he either has to commit murder or be murdered, and he
bases that deduction on "Neither can live while the other survives."
Odd, given that they're both surviving at the time, and no mention of
killing occurs in those words.

It has nothing to do with your understanding of English (which happens
to be excellent), a-svirn. It has to do with JKR's (and therefore
Harry's) apparently thinking that the words mean something that they
can't be interpreted to mean.

Carol, realizing that a prophecy has to be ambiguous but not to the
point of making words mean something that they can't possibly mean