ass
I have this theory that Neville is supposed to represent everything that Peter could have been. You know, both of them were the weak link in the friend group, the guy easily influenced. But instead, Rowling made Neville weak to prove the two paths an individual could take. How each of our weaknesses manifest in different ways. Peter’s weakness made him a villain, ultimately worse than Voldemort because he betrayed his friends, while Neville’s weakness made him work harder and in the end made him Harry’s strongest ally.
Harry = James, Ron = Sirius, Hermione = Remus, Neville = Peter, Ginny = Lily, Luna = Snape.
You will notice that none of the six from the old generation survived. The kids each have traits from the old generation but they’re here to fix the past, and thus must survive the series to metaphorically right the past. Some may raise their eyebrows at Luna as Snape, but just as Harry represents James (the popular kid who was good at quidditch, but didn’t become arrogant like his father) or like Peter and Neville (two people who could have been cowards, but Neville rises to life’s challenges) Luna mirrors Snape in being mocked, a pariah, Looney Lovegood and Snivellus. Instead of being resentful, she rose above it, and loved herself regardless.
If you went with Harry to the Ministry of Magic in book 5, you mattered beyond just backing him up against Voldemort. This core six represented the loss and failure of the Marauders generation, and the hopes of a post-Voldemort future.
Holy shit
I’m weighing in on the gif pronunciation wars at Mental Floss with the help of corpus linguistics:
Sure, the creator of the gif, Steve Wilhite, prefers a soft g, and sure, gif originated as an acronym for graphics interchange format, but inventors aren’t always good at naming (the zipper was originally called the “clasp locker”), and acronyms aren’t always pronounced like their roots (the “a” in NATO isn’t the same as the “a” in Atlantic). In truth, language is far more democratic.
So Michael Dow, a linguistics professor at Université de Montréal, decided to investigate a different way, and I talked with him about his findings. The idea is, people decide how to pronounce a new word based on its resemblance to words they’re already familiar with. So we can all agree on how to pronounce snapchat because it’s made up of familiar words snap and chat, and we don’t have any problems with blog because it rhymes with frog, log, slog, and so on, but we have no idea how to pronounce doge because there aren’t any other common English words that end in -oge.
The problem with gif isn’t the back half—we already know how to pronounce if. The problem is the front half: Does the i make the g soft or not? It’s clearly not an absolute yes or no—there are English words in both categories: gift has a hard g before i, whereas gin has a soft g before i. What matters is the frequency. So Dow looked at a large corpus of 40,000 unique words with their frequency and pronunciation taken from The English Lexicon Project. Of these words, how many were like gift (hard g) and how many were like gin (soft g)?
“It baffles me that grown men would be obsessed with a cartoon intended for children.”
“I know, man, I totally agree, the Pokemon fanbase weirds me the fuck out”
