Before you Harry Potter fans start planning on planting Dungbombs in my room or surreptitiously slipping a few Puking Pastilles into my food at dinnertime, let me explain my intentions for having written this article. Though I could have come up with about a thousand reasons for trashing a Harry Potter book in the time it takes me to tie my shoelaces, most of them would be argued on the basis of the ‘perspective’ argument , meaning “I think its bulls***”. To this end, I propose to present the one single argument which I believe is irrefutable, even by the most hardcore of Harry Potter fans.
It hit me at 7:35 in the morning, after a night spent reading Harry Potter’s newest adventure. I was in the middle of yet another uninteresting and drawn out Potter book, when it stuck me (on page 327, to be exact) that J K Rowling couldn’t have come up with a single decent name for a character if her life depended on it. Come to think of it, she probably made up all the names in the books as a personal joke just to keep herself awake while writing them. God knows there wasn’t any other way she could have survived them all.
The way I see it, she probably started earnestly naming the characters in her book in order of importance and then got just plain bored. That, by me, would have happened around name three. So we have exactly three acceptable names in the whole book. Potter, Hermione, and Dumbledore. That’s where the naming stops and the fun begins. After that, she probably put in as much thought into it as I do in deciding how exactly to break my eggs for breakfast. I can clearly imagine her now, sitting at her table, trying to come up with new names.
“Ok. I need to name one of the villains, the teacher who is very strict. Hmm… strict... severe… Severus! Yes! … And he’s the head of the house with the stupid snake logo… Snake… snate… snale.. (naa…too slow)… snape!.. that’s it. Severus Snape! God! That was tough. Guess I’ll go grab me a large cappuccino and a couple of aspirins.”
She could just as well have named him Mr. Poisonious Piethone.
Before you trash this as being imbecile Potter bashing, try coming up with just 3 names that have absolutely no silly connection with something else in the book. (You may even be able to accomplish it, but don’t even try bluffing me that it wasn’t bloody hard!)
Let me just clear up a point here. I have absolutely nothing against her naming all the spells in her books in accordance with the English translations of the effect they have, like ‘Expelliarmus’. That, to me, is acceptable, because the spells could have been named after the effects that they had and since they live in Britain… blah blah. But try telling me that Luna Lovegood was named that way because she was obviously loony by birth itself, and I’ll get the distinct feeling that you’re trying to yank my chain here.
I’m also fully convinced she was on speed when she came up with the founders of Hogwarts. Pray, how else could all four of them have had rhyming names to begin with? To top things off nice and good, there’s the matter of the characteristics of the houses to match the names. Rawenclaw is for sharp wit. Gryffindor is for bravery and ferociousness (or something like that). Hufflepuff (I really think she could have done better than that) is for huffing, puffing and working hard! (Duh!), and finally the snake house, Slytherin. (At this point I try hard to shake off the image of the students slithering along like snakes into the common room. It doesn’t work.) Some would call it being imaginative. I would call it one joint too many.
Add to that the Weasleys, who live in ‘The Burrow’ (frankly, who would name their own house that way), and who’s patronus is a weasel (Duh!), OlliVANDer who makes (you guessed it!) wands, and the non-human elf who is called (a) Kreacher, and Voila! You have one author, seven books and a truckload of ridiculous names.
This was the point at which I became inspired to secretly rechristen her Miss. Nutty Nitwitious in my mind.
Going by her standards, I don’t think she was very satisfied by the name Lord Voldemort. It’s too random. Too unconnected. Too normal. That’s the precise reason why she gets everyone to call him “He Who Should Not Be Named”! Makes perfect sense to me.
Come to think of it, “You Know Who” is by far the most outstanding and inspired name across all her books by a long shot!
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