Books Blog: English Literature & Linguistics

After selling 8.3 million copies in the US in just 24 hours, Harry Potter 7 is billed as the “the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling’s magical series.” We, however, having read the novel, could not agree less with J.K. Rowling and her publisher Scholastic’s publicity-drumming campaign of artificial supply restriction. For we believe that there will be more Harry Potter novels in the future.

Now, if you haven’t finished the series yet, go away because we might ruin the ending!

A mashup of HP covers

There are two reasons that an author continues a series. One is the fun of writing the characters he’s dreamed into life. The other is money. For JK Rowling, Harry Potter offers her both opportunities, a temptation that we believe will be too hard to resist.

One of the Guardian Book blogs argues the financial point indirectly. They claim that over time the Harry Potter series will generate decreasingly exponential interest, and thus revenue. They hold out for a bright spot, but it’s true that Harry Potter is a series of big bangs and a short “long tail.”

The real indicator is that Harry Potter is still alive at the end of HP7. That last chapter, 19 years in the future, indicates that the world of Muggles and Magic still exists in basically the form it had before Voldemort emerged. The whole point of the Harry Potter series is a fight against evil, and once that evil is vanquished–as it is in HP7 without lasting consequence–the world returns to normal, fertile grounds for a sequel. After all, why introduce us to Harry and Ginny’s spawn unless you plan to develop them in the future?

A contronym or antagonym is defined as a word which is in itself its own antonym. They are special cases of homographs, different words which share the same spelling. Rinkworks has a long list of them, some highlights of which I will share here with you:

1. apology – admission of fault in what you think, say, or do; formal defense of what you think, say, or do
2. dust – add fine particles, remove fine particles
3. oversight – error, care
4. pitted – with the pit in, with the pit removed
5. rent – buy use of, sell use of
6. table – propose (in the United Kingdom), set aside (in the United States)

There are doubtlessly many many more out there, so leave tons of comments for us in the hopes of acquiring more of these beautiful words!

Wordie goes by the tagline “Like Flickr, but without the photos” but it’s much more than that.  Until you’ve tried it out, you’d never believe social word-listing could be so fun.  Like shadenfreude?  So do 127 other people, right now.  The interface is clear and intuitive; you make lists of words.  Each word has its own permanent page, with comments, and lists the people who like that word.  You spend time trolling user lists, hunting words related to the ones you like.

Here’s what the interface looks like:

If you want to try it out, the Wordie homepage, my userpage, or my word list feed!