You are so brilliant, there are no words. You've just summed up why my reaction to the title has been luke warm at best; I just couldn't articulate as well as you. Thank you!
I'm guessing she means "deathly" in the third adjectival sense you list: of or pertaining to death. I doubt she means it in the sense of "deadly." And "hallow" as a noun certainly is archaic, but why is that bad? This is a fantasy series after all. Archaic words are cool. ;)
It just goes to show you that she has a lot more clout now than when she was starting out. I doubt that there will be a US version using words other than "deathly" and "hallows" like we had "Sorcerer's Stone" for "Philosopher's Stone". It's also, the archaism aside, a wee bit on the melodramatic side, IMO. ("Harry Potter and the THINGS THAT STINK OF DEATH!" ZOMG!!111!!) :snort:
I think there's a great deal of difference between using "hallows" and using "philosopher's". "Philosopher's Stone" - to anyone not familiar with the ideas of alchemy - is going to conjure images of Aristotle. "Hallows" is either a term one knows or one doesn't, and if they don't they look it up. "Hallows" also has the benefit of not sounding as ... well, boring as "philosopher's" might seem to those who don't know what Rowling means by it.
"Order of the Phoenix" is my favorite of the seven titles. I'm willing to let her have "Really Hard to Find Old Things" if she changes her mind. Or "Harry's Antiques Roadshow".
Interest comments! As someone else speculated, JKR isn't really mysterious with her titles. After you read her books, the titles are rather simplistic, which leads me to believe that we have a tendency to over-analyze and the "Deathly Hallows" is probably a specific place that Harry visits.
There's no reason that it couldn't have been a name for a place, of course (both words--"Deathly Hallows"). Since when have British place names made much sense, after all?
I did the same exact thing as you :) Looked up both words, how they differ, such as deadly vs. deathly... hallows...
The one thing that just stuck out w/ the fact that JKR usually makes her titles objects, places, or people, but all something specific, not actions. My first thought was a place, but I'm considering that she is referring to Halloween and something major is to happen during this day, therefore referring to the Deathly Hallows (meaning more than one Halloween involved, which is true b/c that was when Harry's parents were murdered).
But overall, my head hurts from probably over analyzing every possible word and detail, lol.
Yeah, I thought of something actually occurring on Halloween, but there are problems with this, if she is dedicated to sticking to the structure she's used for the other books:
1) This could place the climax of the book in October of the year Harry turns 17, which is terribly early and means either that the book ends there or we get another eight months in which there is no Voldemort, a highly unlikely development.
2) If the climax is on the Halloween after Harry turns 18 then the book will extend beyond when he would have finished his seventh year at Hogwarts (assuming that he doesn't go back to school, as implied at the end of HBP), which would also break the patterns from the previous books.
Usually, All Hallows is one of those British phrases from which the possessive apostrophe has disappeared, rather than a plural of a noun. It should properly be All Hallow's Eve (the eve of All Hallow). So I doubt that it refers to two Halloweens for the two above reasons and the fact that it's properly a possessive, not a plural noun.
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The one thing that just stuck out w/ the fact that JKR usually makes her titles objects, places, or people, but all something specific, not actions. My first thought was a place, but I'm considering that she is referring to Halloween and something major is to happen during this day, therefore referring to the Deathly Hallows (meaning more than one Halloween involved, which is true b/c that was when Harry's parents were murdered).
But overall, my head hurts from probably over analyzing every possible word and detail, lol.
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1) This could place the climax of the book in October of the year Harry turns 17, which is terribly early and means either that the book ends there or we get another eight months in which there is no Voldemort, a highly unlikely development.
2) If the climax is on the Halloween after Harry turns 18 then the book will extend beyond when he would have finished his seventh year at Hogwarts (assuming that he doesn't go back to school, as implied at the end of HBP), which would also break the patterns from the previous books.
Usually, All Hallows is one of those British phrases from which the possessive apostrophe has disappeared, rather than a plural of a noun. It should properly be All Hallow's Eve (the eve of All Hallow). So I doubt that it refers to two Halloweens for the two above reasons and the fact that it's properly a possessive, not a plural noun.
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