Pottertastic Tuesday

In my family, my obsessive love for Harry Potter has turned into a bit of an injoke. When things get too boring or some sort of Potter-related business comes up, my cousins find it necessary to mock me. As if I cared one bit what other people thought of my on-going Harry love affair. Psht. Harry is my man through and through and even my boyfriend of over two years knows that he would lose if I had to chose between him and Harry. Fortunately for Jim, Mr. Potter is fictional and can't come woo me away from him.

But I don't just love the story lines and surprising twists that Jo Rowling throws in there. Oh no, because if that was all, it would get super-duper boring reading the same thing over and over again. At some point, I lost count of exactly how many times I read each Potter book, but it's exceedingly excessive, that much I know. I read the book in discussion today, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, at least eleven times since my fourteenth birthday--no joke. And yet, only one of the last times I read the book did I even notice this tidbit.

Now that I've superfluously built up suspense, I can reveal this little fact from the books that prove, yet again, JK Rowling's a Genius. That's right, she gets a capital G. What of it? I'm tangenting again, sorry folks. So, any dolt can look at the table of contents and discover that chapter eight is entitled "Flight of the Fat Lady." And while some people are less oblivious than I and may have spotted this prior to the tenth reading of the book, others may not know that this flight is mentioned later on in the text. In chapter fifteen ("The Quidditch Final"), after the fat lady is restored, the password is a word that here means a flighty woman. The proof is on page 295 (Scholastic hardcover):

They passed the security trolls, gave the Fat Lady the password ("Flibbertigibbet"), and scrambled through the portrait hole into the common room.

Rowling didn't have to include the password there; the sentence totally would have worked otherwise, but she did. Know why? As the Beastie Boys might concur, she's crafty. Oh JK, how I love thee so. It is to you and your brilliant universe I devote my Tuesday, every Tuesday honoring here in this hallowed blog. I can only hope that I can penetrate all the little crevices of these books with subsequent rereads.