Secret Keeper of GH / "Warlock"

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Talisman wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_old_crowd/message/3967 :

<< If, as many suspect, Snape was at GH, then he would have had to
have known--from the point of his initiation into the secret--that
Wormtail was the traitorous SK, not Sirius. >>

Another nitpick: a person could have been there without having been
initiated into the Secret -- such a person would *be* there but not
*see* whatever was covered by the FC. I imagine that in the 12
Grimmauld Place example, such a person would perceive that heesh was
standing on the street while hiser companion turned toward the tiny
gap between two houses and vanished. In the GH example, the house may
have been visible but the Potters invisible, so the person might have
stood in the street and watched LV shouting and AK'ing at nobody.  

Rebecca wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_old_crowd/message/3979 :

<<  Once in GoF, JKR describes one group of people "wizards", and in
the same sentence another different set are called "warlocks." Is it
just a JKR inconsistency? >>

I've been annoyed by the inconsistency for years, and developed a
theory to explain it away. In my theory, 'warlock' is the wizarding
word for an elected representative to a constituent assembly (with the
advantage that the real-world meaning of 'oath-breaker' is a joke on
politicians). Thus, Dumbledore as Chief Warlock of the Wizengemot is
the Chief of an assembly all of whose members are Warlocks. And
Perkins, as 'an old warlock', is some hard-luck bloke who lost a
re-election campaign but was given a civil service job by his old
colleagues who kept their seats and power. And Council or Convention
or Confederation of Warlocks is the same as Council or Convention or
Confederation of Wizards, because no parliament of wizards ever
consisted of the entire population representing themselves.

As for the other references to people in pubs or wherever as 'rowdy'
or 'rough-looking' warlocks, I enhanced my theory with the assertion
that the 'original' meaning of an elected representative aka
politician had given rise to a slang meaning of a blowhard, expanded
to any loudmouth.