Thank you and another question - Pureblood vs. Halfblood

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 191433



--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Alanna <lilandriss at ...> wrote:
>
> Hey all! Thanks for the responses to my questions on wolfsbane and portkeys.  They were very helpful.  I have another question now.  I'm having trouble understanding Pureblood vs Halfblood.  I get the Halfblood when one parent is magical and the other isn't as in the case of Voldie and Snape, but why is Harry considered a Halfblood? Both his parents are magical despite his mother being muggleborn.  If he's considered Halfblood because of that, then what would you call the child of two 
muggleborns?

Pippin:
Assuming that the child is not a Squib,  I'd use  witch or  wizard regardless. But  a pureblood fanatic must  suit his language to  his audience -- a difficult proposition as Snape found to his cost. 

The halfblood/pureblood/muggleborn/muggle/mudblood distinctions aren't entirely  genealogical or magicological, so trying to parse them strictly on the basis of ancestry or magical ability only leads to frustration. It seems bizarre to say that   powerful witches such as Lily  and Hermione are Muggle, but Voldemort and his followers do so all the time.

They, and others,  use Half-blood when they want to acknowledge the idea that witches and wizards with mixed ancestry have (or should have) more standing in the WW than those with Muggle ancestors alone, though not as much as those whose bloodline is (supposedly) unmingled. 

Consider all the real-world tribes which reserve the word which means "human" to themselves. Like the real world concepts  "humanity" and "race", "halfblood" and "pureblood" are ethnic and social groupings which are based partly, but only partly, on ideas about ancestry and heredity.

So to determine what someone would be called in the WW, you not only have to know something about the ancestry and magical ability of the subject, you need to know something about the social and ethnic identity of the speaker and his goals. 

Voldemort is a special case. He is  a liar,  besides being out of touch with reality, so what he says may  reflect neither his beliefs nor the facts already in evidence.  

 Alanna:
> Also, I'm still looking for an answer on the question of fic searches. 
>  

Pippin:
The fic search at FictionAlley seems to be working, despite what it says on the main page.
Here's a link:
http://forums.fictionalley.org/fics/search.php

 
Pippin