Another reading thought

I have to say, one of the things I love about the Harry Potter series is how JK Rowling has kept up the Dickensian tradition of "meaningful" names - names that either allude to something or tell you some attribute of the character.

Most of the wizards have odd names, though many of the student wizards have fairly ordinary names. Or their names are just a bit "off" (Hermione Granger, for example. Granger is a fairly common surname (her parents, after all, are non-wizards), but the only other Hermione I can think of is Hermione Gingold).

But some of the others have wonderful names. Remus Lupin, for example - a man who is also a werewolf, named Lupin (wolf) and also named Remus (for Romulus and Remus, I presume, the twins who legendarily founded Rome after being raised by a she-wolf). Sirius Black can change into a dog at will, and Sirius is the "dog star."

(Remus Lupin is one of my favorite characters thus far, even if (so far) he's only appeared in one book)

And Ludo Bagshot - the Head of Games for the Ministry of Magic. (Ludo means "I play" in Latin).(And even British readers who had no Latin would likely know it, because there's a board game over there called Ludo. I don't think we have it in the US, at least, I've never known it outside of reading about it in books set in Britain. I think it's kind of similar to the game we have called "Sorry!," which was actually a favorite board game in my family when I was a kid*)

And the names of products - Skelegrow, the Remembrall, the Mirror or Erised - most of them are some kind of a pun or play on words. I love puns and I love referential humor, so those (and the character names) or the names of the characters add greatly to my enjoyment of the books.

(Oh! also the Anti-Cheating Quills. How I wish I had access to those to use in the classes I teach!)

(* One of the really fun things about Sorry! was that you would get the chance to send a competing player back to start or otherwise thwart them in some way, and then you had to say "Sorry!" Which of course was said in the most sarcastic way possible, and that was allowed, at least by my parents, because it was a game.)