Courtly love in Potterverse WAS: What triggered ancient magic

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187181

Pippin wrote:
<snip>
>  Then he had to go and prove *her* suspicions, by using the "unforgivable word" -- but IMO it didn't prove anything except that he trusted the wrong people (and had poorer impulse control than Lily, who managed to suppress her momentary urge to laugh at him.) 

Carol responds:

I'm snipping the parts of the post that I agree with. I'm just not sure that Lily had better impulse control than Severus. After all, it's easier to suppress mild amusement that you're rightly ashamed of than it is to suppress anger, and *she* wasn't being attacked two on one and being publicly humiliated with her own spells used against her. (I think it was a further humiliation to have a girl step up to protect him, Prefect or not, and, as you say, she wasn't acting like his friend.) Once *she's* insulted by being called a "dirty little Mud-blood," as you say, her suspicions that he's just like his friends take over, and she insults *him* by calling him "Snivellus."

If we assume (as Lily does) that calling Lily a Mud-blood means that he must have been habitually using that word to refer to other Muggle-borns, we have to assume that Lily has been habitually referring to her one-time best friend as "Snivellus," or at least mentally applying that term to him. Obviously, she had heard Sirius and James calling him or referring to him by that revolting epithet just as he had heard his Slytherin friends calling or referring to Muggle-borns as "Mud-Bloods." But we can't assume that either of them has actually used the term or even thought in those terms. Either that or Lily is lying when she says they're still best friends. (Obviously, Severus isn't lying about his feelings for her. He loves her.)

Carol, who finds calling someone "Snivellus" an odd illustration of impulse control