Alicornutopia

My "nooooo" above was in reference to the Love Potion Hijinks Strategy in general.

Timothy at the ball in particular was where this was at the time.

By the way, muggles at this time did not outlaw witchcraft but they did outlaw claims of witchcraft. It would be perfectly legal to levitate something, but not to claim you could do so.

Yeah the love potion thing is :(

Assuming I'm interpreting it correctly myself: Timothy Stunning his girlfriend.

ETA: oh, other people already said. :P

Ooh, interesting question, do any of the wards handle AC differently?

And when will Minor learn enough about the world and himself that he is no longer overconfidently wrong? His father looks overconfident but is usually right, at least on non-social matters of fact like “an alphabet is obviously superior to logosyllabic writing in all cases” or “There are not different kinds of electricity”.

Wait, something was deleted?

Also, what's the case in favour of Logosyllabic Writing Is Bad?

Minor may not know enough to care but there's probably a case to be made for "AC and DC are still both fundamentally the same electricity, just moving in various directions."

Minor’s immediate reaction on hearing "I might be remembering wrong but I think [China has] symbols for words not sounds?" was "Huh! They probably didn't have [sounding things out instead of silent reading] then - though sounds is obviously the superior way to do written language -", and then kept arguing that it was a bad idea instead of potentially a good idea for unknown reasons.

But different Chinese dialects are very different, to the point that if they didn’t share the same army and navy people might call them different languages, and can share written material perfectly. There are probably other advantages I don’t know, given that I don’t know Chinese.


There is a case to be made there, but they behave in very different ways. It would not be surprising for the wards to mess them up differently, or even for the wards to completely ignore AC. If they stopped everything that was fundamentally the same as lightning by a broad enough definition, everybody woukd go blind (no light), die (no neuron activity), and disintegrate (no molecules).

Kappa: Timothy's and Frederick's discussion went in a slightly different direction for a while, and then it got rewound (presumably lintamande decided it wasn't going where she'd hoped).

They share written material somewhat imperfectly, since loanwords are represented phonetically using sound-alike logograms and this has obvious problems between dialects. But yeah, being able to write with near-complete mutual intelligibility between wildly different spoken languages is cool.