[HPforGrownups] Teeth was Re: teachers' personal lives

[Shelley Gardner]

No: HPFGUIDX 190283


>> June:
>> Page 352 to 353, Chapter The Yule Tide Ball, British/Canadian
>> version Hermione, said Ron looking sideways at her, suddenly
>> frowning, 'your teeth..." "snip
> .
>> She smiled even more widely. "Mum and Dad won't be too pleased.
>> I've been trying to persuade them to let me shrink them for ages,
>> but they wanted me to carry on with my brace. You know they're
>> dentists, they just don't think teeth and magic should-look!
>> Pigwidgeon's back!"
> Potioncat:
> Good catch. I recalled it that they were waiting to apply braces, not that she already had them. Why did JKR wait for 352 pages to tell us that Herminione was wearing braces? And then, just as they were off?
>
> But still, Hemione's parents were taking a conservative approach to dental care--braces rather than magic.
Shelley now:
It is very possible that they were doing braces in stages. It's not an 
uncommon practice to have braces on, get them off, and then rebrace the 
teeth after all the adult teeth have come in. But, given her age, she 
would have been old enough to already have had the braces on for the 2nd 
time.

Frankly, I took this passage to mean that Rowlings hadn't done her 
homework when mentioning the dental care- either she had intended 
Hermione to currently have braces on her teeth already, or maybe she was 
envisioning a retainer or device that comes out of the mouth, which 
wouldn't correct the buck or big teeth at all.  It's really hard to know 
what was in her mind when she writes mistakes or inconsistencies that 
appear in the book.

Shelley