(no subject)

[arcanetrivia]

Do you notice something slightly unusual here?

Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the goblet of fire
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the half-blood prince
Harry Potter and the deathly hallows

(Hint: all capitalization, or lack thereof, is intentional.)

These are the voyages of the "sentence case" formats of the titles which we use in our library catalog. ("Sentence case" means everything is lowercased except the initial word and any proper nouns: i.e., it is capitalized as you would an English sentence, rather than "title case" which capitalizes "significant" words.)

This is annoying me here because a lot of these are proper nouns, as they are used within the text anyway. Take "prince", for example, just to, you know, pick a totally unbiased and not at all current-topical example at random. Not only do we know that it is revealed to be a surname, but within the text it is capitalized like a name ("the Prince", vs. "the headmaster" or "the king") while Harry is still not cottoning on to that fact. While I suppose styling this Harry Potter and the half-blood Prince would give it away a bit soon since we're meant to think it's a literal prince as long as possible... *shrug* still.

While we're on that topic, I've often wondered why it would be so impossible. We're told "there are no wizarding princes" and that seems to be true in this time and location, but even assuming it holds for other times and places, why not "princely wizards", i.e. wizards who were also Muggle nobility? I don't see why not. And in that case it should be quite possible to get a "half-blood prince" in the literal sense.

Comments

[sunlit-music.livejournal.com]

These are the voyages of the

What do you mean by 'voyages of the'? *is confused*

True - the idea of princely wizards is quite possible. It is odd how JKR never thought of that. A real wizard who was also a Muggle Prince would solve the problem of creating a half blood prince.

[arcanetrivia]

"These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise: its continuing mission to seek out new life and new civilizations..." ring a bell? :) It has no connection to anything else I said, just that sometimes my brain will go off on a tangent like that when I start a sentence with a phrase that also happens to start a different commonly-known one.

[sunlit-music.livejournal.com]

"These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise: its continuing mission to seek out new life and new civilizations..."

Ah, right. Makes sense. :)