It’s December, and as I always seem to do in this final month of the year, I find myself thinking about Harry Potter (1). In the past, I’ve used this time to reflect on important topics such as Dumbledore’s Ideal Gift Theorem or which book is the best one to reread (#2, it's our choices that show what we truly are). I’ve even ranted about whether anyone would actually watch Quidditch (A: no - J.K., just add flying to soccer!) and I sometimes entertain myself by arguing that the series will eventually be considered sexist (2).
This year’s topic is more of general literary interest. I just wanted to share with you, dear reader, that I consider anagrams the single stupidest literary device. Harry Potter uses them at the end of the aforementioned book #2 (yet somehow remains my favorite). It's use is something like this - let’s say there is a fake character named ‘MIA LEVI’, #2's big revelation is that if you rearrange those letters you get ‘I AM EVIL’. This apparently is evidence that my hypothetical MIA LEVI is evil, this evidence being sorely needed because up until then it wasn’t THAT clear whether You-Know-Who was evil... sorry, spoiler alert?
Why are anagrams prevalent? It’s not good enough until some random combination of letters can be rearranged to spell something? Why does this matter? Maybe a disproportionate number of writers love Scrabble and anagrams are like a dog whistle, a high-pitched exclusion of the faux writers like me. I care so little about playing with letters that I'm like the guy who never sees ‘ooooooo’ in his Honey Nut Alphabits.
And no, I’m not bitter about sucking at Scrabble, I don’t even want to be good at a game where you can play ‘JEWS’ for 84 points just because the idiot who designed the board didn’t think carefully about where to put the triple word score. Yup, you know who you are, using a BLANK to play E. Honestly, whoever designed the board was probably the same person who told J.K. that a Golden Snitch worth 150 points was a good idea, or that Muggles would pretend non-Muggles would like such a sport.
You know what, reader…
I think that’s enough for today.
-Tmi
Often soot / sonneted
0. Footnotes / endnotes
Fine, I got help with those.
1. Well, at the time of writing it’s December…
Actually, it’s November 30.
2. Maybe more in an upcoming post…
Here's the shortest available plot summary of the series – Hermione fails, then Harry succeeds.
