[the_old_crowd] Re: HBP spoiler(ish): Hor-thingies: etymology

[Richard]

At 22:58 17/07/05 , Barry Arrowsmith replied to my previous:
>--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, Richard <hp at p...> wrote:
> >
> > To insist that "Patronus" must have a plural of "Patroni" is to make
> > incorrect suppositions based on a fractured knowledge of Latin grammar.
>
>Possibly.
>But it looks neater and contains fewer letters. RSI, you know.

Yeah, but it reeks of showing oneself to be uninformed and verges on 
illiteracy. Which is never a good thing when discussing works of literature.

As for RSI, surely you of all people, Barry, shouldn't be going on about 
saving a few keystrokes? :-)

>And 'hor' - try something derived from hors de combat, hors d'oeurves or 
>the like. It means 'out' in this context, doesn't it?

Ah. Sorry. I knew I'd missed listing one of my ideas in my previous post 
(there were a couple of others I didn't mention, either, but things were 
getting long).

Yes, "hors" means "outside" or "beyond", and it sent my thinking in the 
opposite direction of the ideas I mentioned. Whilst the others were (I 
assumed) a method of "preserving" acts of cruelty, this one was to be a 
method of saving oneself *from* acts of cruelty, i.e.  putting oneself 
"outside the range of" an Unforgivable. I discounted this at the time 
because a) I doubt a Hogwarts teacher would refuse to discuss a method of 
protecting oneself against Dark activity; b) he'd ask the DADA teacher 
rather than the Potions prof.; c) while Riddle might be interested in 
protecting himself against Dark activity, he'd want something more pro-active.

I also discounted "hors" from my etymology of what Horcruxes *are* (as 
opposed to what I surmised they *might be* from their name), because they 
are clearly something you put your soul *into*; removing your soul seems 
easy enough (get a Dementor).