#that and malfoy canonically miming wanking in HBP

[whinlatter]

Are “prat” “git” and “berk” common British terms that people actually use or is it just a HP thing? If people do use it is it regional or class dependent? Why do you think it’s used so often in the HP world?

back at it with the ‘british nonsense’ series, is it! you know i live to oblige.

i can confirm, anon, that these are all words that british people could plausibly have used when HP was published. they’re all quite deliberately cross-class and multi-regional (perhaps a bit southern english, if anything). whether that’s by design or happy instance, i don’t know. they’re all very mild and look a bit dated now, though. ‘prat’ is still knocking about some extent, ‘berk’ remains one of my mother’s favourites, but ‘git’ has largely fallen out of use except for among those being deliberately archaic and whimsical (i can imagine boris johnson using it with little issue, as a case in point).

the reason they’re used so often in HP because they’re all considered a step below actually swearing, and so would be able to get past the very genteel bloomsbury press children’s book editor who would otherwise censor real profanity. in britain this used to be called the watershed test: there were words that were deemed unsuitable to be used in television programmes before the ‘watershed’ of 9pm (so after children are presumed to have gone to bed), so watershed words would be very much off the table in tv and most media either marketed at children or which children could plausibly consume. so all HP swearwords tend to be words that would have been allowed pre-watershed to comply with these pretty strongly held cultural norms.

it’s quite interesting to track the point at which HP becomes a bit more ok with meatier british swear words and insults. the movies were always ahead of the books on this - “bloody hell” in film 1! the scandal! - and i can vividly remember the gasps of mothers everywhere when ron dropped that infamous ‘piss off’ in GoF in 2005. when it comes to the books, OotP in 2003 has vernon saying ‘effing’ and harry is strongly implied to be dropping the f word in narration on several occasions (he’s in his feelings, angst ridden and foul mouthed to boot); by HBP, we get the first use of ‘slut’, and then of course we have our infamous ‘bitch’ drop in DH, which no doubt reflected a view of the editors that the audience was probably old enough to hear at least one good expletive.

(of course, the most accurate british insult wielded in the books is actually when ron, at the ripe old age of thirteen, canonically calls snape a cunt: ‘D’you know what that’— (he called Snape something that made Hermione say ‘Ron!’) — ‘is making me do?’’. it’s enough to make a girl feel deeply patriotic…)