I’ve been wanting to go back and read the Harry Potter books in order. I remember reading the first one soon after it came out.<\/p>\n
I was in a book store in the late 1990s, looking for a good book to read. The proprietor said “This recent book is quickly becoming very popular.” Which is how I came to buy the first one.<\/p>\n
The title was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” It was a great read, but the title puzzled me. It soon became obvious that the book was about the philosopher’s stone.<\/p>\n
So if I was reading a book that was obviously about the philosopher’s stone, why did everybody in the story keep calling it the sorcerer’s stone? I eventually learned the answer from a British friend.<\/p>\n
The original UK title was indeed “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, but the U.S. publisher thought that was too sophisticated for American readers, so they changed it. Basically, it was because they thought that we Americans are stupid.<\/p>\n
Given where our nation’s current political choices have led us, it’s kind of hard to argue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been wanting to go back and read the Harry Potter books in order. I remember reading the first one soon after it came out. I was in a book store in the late 1990s, looking for a good book to read. The proprietor said “This recent book is quickly becoming very popular.” Which is … Continue reading “Harry Potter and the Stupid Title”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27518"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27519,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27518\/revisions\/27519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}