Surprising word choices!

[frozen-jelly.livejournal.com]

I am so loving this rpg, its so intriguing to follow a game right from the start and really wonder about all the little clues thrown to us, fantastic! Thanks all players!

I try not to Brit-pick, but some things really throw you out of the HP world... Today I noticed Lucius used the word 'nonce' in the title of his post recent post. Last week Molly used it in one of her entries. This completely threw me, the first time I saw it because in the UK a nonce is a slang term to refer to a paedophile! :S I actually had to look it up to discover it had a meaning that referred to time! Just wondered if anyone else was initially off-put by that word.

Comments

[alt_moderator]

I actually did know about this, but in the books it's pretty clear that they have at least some afternoons free. We worked out their schedules to harmonise as closely with the books as we could, and there was just no way around it. What would they call it?

[frozen-jelly.livejournal.com]

Wednesday afternoons are traditionally spent playing sports, so that tends to be a free one in many schools. It makes it easier to schedule matches with other schools that way. Similarly no one wants to do any work on Friday afternoons so many schools finish one/two periods early then - depending on how many periods you have in your school day, how long your breaks are, whether the school timetable has 5 or ten minutes allocated for moving classrooms in between periods - it varies from place to place.

I can't think of how you would refer to it, just as free periods really. But you wouldn't expect any lower school to have any at all. Ron has some in the books because he drops some previously compulsory subjects, and only takes the minimum required amount of OWLs. But there would be unlikely to be any specific place for them to go and work, perhaps the library or an empty classroom, maybe they would be expected to return to their common room. Its not really clear in the books what they do in these situations! But there would not be a clearly defined timetabled period called 'study hall'.

[alt_moderator]

Well, it sounds like we have the schedule itself right - just possibly the way that someone referred to it was wrong. Perhaps I'll post the schedule of classes as a "special edition" on alt-fen at some point. But that's totally consonant with what I've got down for Hogwarts, so :)