the upshot of potter

We've been Pottering for the last couple of days, Catherine on the fourth book, Goblet of Fire, and I on the latest. Prince is turning out to be excellent. One of the features of a long series is that all the stuff that made the first installment a treasure chest of wonders is now old hat. You either need to focus on characterization (on which Rowling is weak) or plot (on which she's laugh-out-loud strong), or you need to keep coming up with new wonders. She'd done a good job so far of bringing out new things. There was the Quidditch World Cup in the fourth book, and the Triwizard. And then in the fifth we got to see the Ministry and St Mungo's, both mentioned liberally in previous books, for the first time.

This last one, though, returns to the tone of the first couple of books, with new fresh stuff that has made me giddy with delight. She's returned to her old masterful trick of revisiting old incidents — including, of course, that fateful, central night — and investing them with new details that change how we see them.

She also charges forward with vocabulary that will possibly give the first Potter generation a spike in the verbal SAT. One word stuck out to me for some reason. It's not even particularly an uncommon one, but I decided to look it up anyway. Upshot. As in, "the upshot was,...." Of course we all know what it means, but I began to wonder where on earth it came from. Webster was no help at all. So I went to our modern Alexandria, and within one minute had found exactly what I wanted: it originally referred to the final, decisive shot in an archery match. So. There you have it.

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