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At last! (Tabouli dabs at happy tears). Spurned and smiled at indulgently forall these months, FLIRTIAC finally has a genuine supporter!
Two, Tabouli. You have two of them now. No amount of whining and wheedling and cajoling could convince my husband to accept for a moment my Fourth Man Theory (hmppph!), but one brief run-down of FLIRTIAC, and he was clambering into your dinghy.
Er...so to speak.
And as to why Mrs. Norris' first name wouldn't show up on the Marauder's Map—why she's not, say, "Annie Norris" or something like that—I say that's because the Marauder's Map is (like so much else in the Wizarding World) a little bit archaic. According to proper Victorian etiquette, a woman's first name is never used along with the prefix "Mrs." Her husband's name is used instead.
So why doesn't the Marauder's Map show her as, say, "Mrs. Cepheus Norris" then?
Well, because Mr. Norris has since remarried, that's why! "Mrs. Cepheus Norris" is technically his current wife's proper nomen. His estranged ex-wife is still entitled to use his name—and indeed, to refer to her by her maiden name without her consent would be a very dire insult, as that would imply that she herself in some way bore the culpability for the estrangement—but to distinguish her from Cepheus' current wife, she is referred to simply as "Mrs. Norris."
<Elkins nods firmly to herself, not without a certain degree of self-satisfaction, and lights another cigarette>
Tabouli wrote:
Could the cat shape be a curse Mr Norris put on his cheating wife, which he maliciously set up so that it could only be broken by Filch himself?
I like that theory a great deal. It's really really really mean, for starters, and you know what an absolute brute I can sometimes be.
<Elkins absently claws a few stray owl feathers out of her hair, glances down at them, and then tosses them, with a slight shudder, into a nearby tide-pool>
But then, I love Mrs. Norris. It always irks me somewhat that the kids all hate her so. I mean, I can see why they have a problem with Filch—he's scary, and he's mean, and he gives nasty detentions, and he threatens them with torture in his creepy old office—but what's poor Mrs. Norris ever done to them? So she glares balefully at them, so what? So she rats them out to Filch. That's her job, for heaven's sakes! And just think of all of those times she stares right at Harry in his Invisibility Cloak, and then doesn't alert Filch to his presence. She's cutting Harry slack all the time, if you ask me, and the rotten little kid doesn't even appreciate it.
(Tabouli, suspecting that most listmembers are by now well and truly tired of her voluminous defences of her favorite ship, flourishes her last two LOLLIPOPS)
::concerned look::
Oh, dear. I hope that my teasing wasn't part of what gave you that impression. Teasing, like prank-pulling, is all too easy to "get wrong," especially in a forum that allows for no observation of body language or facial expression. If I came across genuinely exasperated—or worse, as hostile—then I do apologize. And just for the record, I always really enjoy reading your LOLLIPOPS defenses.
—Elkins, wondering if a FLIRTIAC post really needs to be prefaced with a SHIP warning.
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on February 14, 2002 6:24 PM
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