stuttermoan

(Yay, new Fanstudy survey!)

I was channel surfing the other day when I came across an old black-and-white movie. The scene: two old guys sitting on a porch, and one is telling about a beautiful rocking horse he wanted as a child, and how, after his family had saved up the money to buy it for him, it fell apart the first time he rode it. The guy likened the rocking horse to the misleading, misused aspects of the Bible. From that point forward, I was hooked.

Turns out that the movie I ran across was Inherit the Wind, a movie version of the play version of the famous U.S. 1925 court case over the teaching of evolution.

Naturally, there was a lot of intense court speaking in the film. At one point, Henry Drummond, the lawyer defending the man arrested for teaching evolution, used an uncommon word I had heard recently.

"For I intend to show this court that what Bertram Cates spoke quietly one spring morning in the Hillsboro High School is not crime. It is incontrovertible as geometry to any enlightened community of minds."

In the OotP trailer, Dumbledore asserts to the officials at Harry's hearing that evidence of Voldemort's return is "incontrovertible". My copy of OotP is currently being borrowed, so I can't check, but I really don't remember that word actually being used in the text. So why'd they add it in? Is it just a nice word to throw around in a court situation?

There are more similarities between the scene in Inherit the Wind and Movie 5 than vocabulary. Both are, as stated, in court. Both are spoken by an older, educated man who is defending another's right to speak their controversial views on what they see as truth. Okay, I know technically Harry's hearing is concerned with his use of the Patronus charm, but if Dumbledore is speaking about the Dark Lord's return at the hearing, the subject had to have come up. I suppose the issue of free speech was placed there to lead up to Umbridge's reign of enforced ignorance. (And there's another similarity, the issue of limiting what can and cannot be taught in school.)

It is entirely possible that I'm reading too much into this based on word choice, but still, I think it's an interesting set of parallels.

Well, we already know JKR used the astrological elements to create the Hogwarts Houses. According to The Secret Language of Birthdays by Gary Goldschneider and Joost Elffers, Snape's birthday (January 9) is also The Day of Ambition. As if that wasn't enough of a coincidence, JKR's own birthday (as well as Harry's) is The Day of the Human Portrait. Like Snape's birthday, many of the astrological details mentioned in the birthday book really seem to match Harry (and Jo, albeit a bit less obviously).

( Leo - July 31 - The Day of the Human Portrait )