Slytherin House / MALcolm BADdock / Eileen / Sorting Lily

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 185714

Pip!Squeak wrote in
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185647>:
> 
> << In support of this: look at his name. MALcolm BADdock. Given
JKR's love of names that reveal something about a character, I'd guess
that young Mal is a bad 'un. {g} >>

Catlady replied: 
> Strangely enough, considering that I didn't take Remus Lupin's name
as meaning that his parents wanted him to become a werewolf, I took
MAL BAD as indicating that parents were Slytherins whose ambition for
their child was for him to be a bad 'un.

Carol responds:

As I stated earlier, Malcolm means a follower of St. Columba. As I
didn't mention, it was also the name of four Scottish kings. As for
Baddock, I did find the unlikely etymology "open-mouthed idiot" on a
Harry Potter site, but I also found (through Google Books) a more
likely etymology, with Baddock as a variant of Badcock, in which "BAd"
or "Bat" is a variant of Bart (short for Bartholomew) and -cock, like
-kin, in a diminutive, so the name is roughly equivalent to "Barty"
except that it's a surname--manybe "son of Bart" would be closer.

At any rate, singling out this one kid on the basis of his name (if
that's what they did) marks the Twins not only as rude and immature
but ignorant as well. (Someone should tell Fred that his name means
"peaceful ruler"--a name that he would do well to live up to--and
George that his means "farmer"--so perhaps he'd do well to avoid
mocking other people based on their names.) 

That aside, what were the Lupins (with their wolf-related name) doing
naming their son Remus, after the wolf-raised twin who was killed by
his own brother? It seems like an ill-omened name. And Fenrir Greyback
is even worse--It's like saying, "I want my kid to be a vicious,
wolflike monster." (It could be a pseudonym that he adopted himself,
but where would Fenrir learn Norse mythology? Or he could be the child
of two werewolves, one of whom had some education in Muggle mythology
before he was bitten, unlikely as that seems.) And why would anyone,
even a Slytherin Dark Witch, name her daughter Alecto, after one of
the three Furies? (BTW, Alastor Moody's first name also means
"avenging demon" in Greek.) I'm guessing that these names have been in
the families for a long time, and they've lost track of the original
significance (just as James Potter's parents probably weren't thinking
of James as a variant of Jacob meaning "holder of the heel" or
"supplanter"). They just liked the name as a huge number of Muggle
parents also do.

JKR is, of course, selecting the names for her characters, some of
which fit the adult self they develop into, but in some cases, it's
almost as if the name determines the destiny of the character or
reflects the character's character, so to speak. (I can see our
choices revealing who we are, though I'd prefer that they *determine*
who we become, but if our names reveal who we are or will become,
those of us with names like Fenrir and Alecto are doomed.)

Then again, maybe there's hope for Theodore ("Gift of God") Nott.
("Blaise" unhelpfully means "lisping," but Daphne Greengrass, named
after a beautiful nymph who got turned into a laurel tree, might not
be a bad sort based on her name alone.)

Carol, who thinks that, given the inconsistencies in JKR's naming
system, we'd be better off not jumping to conclusions about little
Malcolm Baddock