Thought

[nineveh_uk]

An awful lot of the idiosyncrecies (to put it nicely) of Hogwarts can be put down to the fact that it doesn't have a school secretary. I thought it was a law of nature that a school cannot run without a cardiganed middle-aged woman in the office doing everything to keep the place on an even keel.

I blame Dumbledore. There probably was a secretary, but she resigned because he was impossible to work for and he said that there was no need to replace her. So the heads of house have to do all her work, which takes them a lot longer than it took her, which is why they have no time to check that their pupils haven't vanished/had all their stuff stolen/been lured into looking for werewolves/ been beaten to a pulp. It comes back to haunt him when the lack of that sort of knowledge leaves a gap for people like Malfoy (as a governor) and Umbridge to exploit.

Comments

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I am not thinking about the Connotations, and I intend to go on not thinking about them!

(Piling things in heaps goes back a long way - a friend did his Master dissertation on the piling of books in heaps in an early modern library. The result turned out to be that they book bit books at the bottom of the heaps and little ones on the top.)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

When I mispronounced "epitome" one day, my brother solemnly informed me that an eppy-tome was a little book on top of a big book.

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

There is formal nomenclature for the filing of things in heaps, including FIFO (first in, first out) and LIFO (last in, first out). Mind you, it tends to be used for metaphorical heaps, filing cabinets and computer databases, rather than desk tops. But still.