CHAPTER DISCUSSION: PS/SS 7, The Sorting Hat

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 188168

Someone (attribution snipped) wrote:
> > If Hermione had memorized "Hogwarts: A History" before she got to school, why didn't she know how the Sorting was done? Surely the definitive reference book on the school would have covered the Sorting Ceremony, wouldn't it?

Rick replied: 
> You'd think.  OTOH, perhaps it was the kind of humdrum procedural  activity that was dropped in the editing.  After all, they've got a lot of history to cover. 

Carol responds:
>From a copyeditor's perspective, it's a very odd error. Clearly, the British copyeditor (the one apparently responsible for the omission) was under no pressure to reduce the length of the book by cutting "humdrum procedural activity." We don't see any other sentences omitted from PS that appear in SS, only that one relating to Dean, a total of fifteen words. (The American copyeditor was preoccupied with Americanizing the diction and spelling, but I won't discuss that here.)

We don't see any other students omitted, either, apparently. Lisa Turpin, a Ravenclaw who is never mentioned again, is presumably included in the British edition. Why drop a Gryffindor, a boy in Harry's House and year, who will clearly be his dorm mate? 

I think that the answer is JKR's math. The narrator has just stated, "And now there were only three people left to be sorted." One of those "three" people is Ron, who clearly can't be dropped. The other "two" are Lisa Turpin, Dean Thomas, and Blaise Zabini.

The copyeditor should have queried "Four?" and listed the four students or just changed "three" to "four" with a note of explanation, as I would have done. Instead, the British copyeditor apparently decided to sacrifice, erm, red-pencil one of the students. Instead of choosing the Ravenclaw nonentity (sorry, Miss Turpin!) or the Slytherin with the unusual name, he or she chose, for reasons unknown, Harry's fellow Gryffindor, Dean. To me, it seems like an idiotic solution: What if Dean turns out to be important? At least *query* JKR before you omit a student who may or may not have a role to play in the story. Better to insult her ability to count and point out that one Ravenclaw, one Slytherin, and two Gryffindors equals four students.

Carol, who was jarred by the error even on a first reading but is more disturbed by the British copyeditor's "solution"