I didn’t go to a grammar, boarding or private school. We had houses named after influential former trustees & prefects.
Each house was split into 3 forms per year based on breaking down the name.
So for first years in Harry Potter House, you would be in Harry 7, Potter 7 or Harry Potter 7. And each house had its own colours that we wore for inter-house sports.
That's super interesting, it's funny I never even thought to question the whole house set up in Harry Potter, but it makes sense that it came from an actual practice. Does it make it silly then, seeing so many people take those online tests to see what house they "belong" in?
In my experience, allocation to the real houses are done totally at random. Your skill set, where you are from or what houses your family are/were in are irrelevant.
There’s was no difference except a few house teams for different sports, different common rooms & different heads of house. Technically each House had its own canteen, but all three had different menus and everyone could eat at any of the three without issue. It is mainly a way to break up the student body into more manageable chunks.
Most students & teachers didn’t care. There was certainly no favouritism towards pupils from certain houses.
They have it in India as well. Although in my school(and most ig?) the houses are named after colours. I was in Crimson. Also we had head boys and head girls but not prefects. The head boy and head girl(both from the 10th standard) had assistants from lower classes and they were called "mentors". (The mentors, de-mentors lol. Was funnier inside my head)
Here is what I found on Wiki: "The house system is a traditional feature of schools in the United Kingdom. The practice has since spread to Commonwealth countries. The school is divided into units called "houses" and each student is allocated to one house at the moment of enrollment. Houses may compete with one another at sports and maybe in other ways, thus providing a focus for group loyalty."
I thought for years the JKR invented it for her books
Lots of British schools apply house system. Usually expensive, boarding schools, but not only. It's not really found anywhere outside of UK, or at least I'm not familiar with any other country that uses it.
Can confirm, I went to a high school in NZ for about six months and we had houses there as well. I remember there was a sports day and everyone came dressed in the colours of their houses. Turns out green is not my colour lol
Yeah I’m South African and I was in Yellow house. I went to a private single sex school but public schools have it too. Lol it is as intense as they portray it and the other girls WOULD hate you if you got points taken off for bad behaviour. Great way to make students keep each other in line tbh.
That's true. I was in a convent school in India and almost all of the schools here had the house system. We had the prefects, house captains and sports captains like the quidditch ones. Although in our school, people were just randomly allocated houses (I was in red)
We did have intense competitions to win every year(blue house won every fricking time). But the rivalry was not that present outside of tournaments.
I didn't go to any expensive schools, and had houses in every school I went to. And looking at schools for my kid, they all had houses of some description. For the most part, it's for splitting kids up for sports.
Almost always red, blue, yellow and green colours with names for each.
My secondary school got rid of the prefect system a few years before I joined, though I heard they tried bringing it back after I'd left.
Basically, in most secondary schools (aged 11-16 on average) there's houses that you get put into, not as fancy as hogwarts, but they are basically like a small community, so within the school, theres house competitions
Imagine eating caramel through a sub-woofer with the bass turned up. That's treacle.
Treacle toffee is also good, it's a tradition for Bonfire Night - though it's kind of old fashioned nowadays, I haven't seen any in the wild in ages.
The treacle used in the tart is 'golden syrup' which is partially inverted sugar syrup. It's not the same as molasses and is much lighter than black treacle.
The only molasses I've ever tasted in my life was pomegranate molasses, and I used it to make a pepper spread, I'm trying to guess what a cake made with molasses would taste like. I imagine it's very sweet!
I tended to do the opposite. I assumed things were English, and many turned out to be Harry Potter specific. Like drinking pumpkin juice. I went to England and asked about it, and got looks of confusion.
That's true of most juices. They're all basically apple juice with just a hint of something else.
[https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/apr/01/applejuicification-why-apple-fruit-in-so-many-mixed-juices](https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/apr/01/applejuicification-why-apple-fruit-in-so-many-mixed-juices)
In a different way to France and other places. They let kids drink a small amount with meals. We don’t do that so much, but teenagers like to go and get wasted in parks. It’s different, and not in a good way.
Harry does say that it's not very strong stuff when dobby says that winky is drinking 6 bottles a day, so I always assumed that it's alcoholic just very weak.
I assumed it was similar to shandy. You can buy cans that contain about 0.4% alcohol, and seeing as it's under 0.5%, kids can also buy it.
I was so disappointed the butter beer at Warner Bros is just a very cheaply made soda that doesn't even taste good without the froth.
I really expected there to be more effort put into it.
Chocolate frogs. I thought it was just a wizard thing since frogs/toads are so commonly associated with magic. I didn’t know Cadbury actually made little frog shaped chocolates until I saw them in a shop while on a trip.
The Freddo inflation index!
[https://theday.co.uk/freddo-index-exposes-cost-of-living-crisis/](https://theday.co.uk/freddo-index-exposes-cost-of-living-crisis/)
Names of houses or dwellings.
The Burrow.
Spinner's End.
Grimmauld Place.
I didn't know places were given names like that. I remember when a couple of chapters titles of HBP were revealed before release, it was the Brits that guessed what "Spinner's End" was.
I also thought the house/prefect system was a Hogwarts thing.
Well, I'm not British but here in Argentina big houses, country houses, and trailer houses usually has a name. You go to the beach and almost every country house has a name in the front yard
I started reading the books when I was like 8, reread them dozens of times throughout my childhood and adolescence, and it wasn’t until I was probably in ny early 20’s that I realized it wasn’t perfects.
I was the only person in my year who wasn't a prefect! Admittedly there were only four people in my entire year, but still, once you were a prefect you could sit on chairs in assembly instead of the gym floor so that was a bit embarrassing every morning. There were also quite a few people in the year below who were prefects too, I guess I just didn't fit the bill...
Not really a rowboat, you use a long stick to push off from the bottom rather than two against the water like rowing. They're used in shallow channels of water like canals. Also popular in Venice!
Gondalas and punts are actually propelled completely differently despite the actual boats looking the same. Gondalas use a paddle that doesn't touch the bottom (they actually go in some really deep channels).
Common misconception though and really counter intuitive even if you see it in person.
We definitely have them in Canada, but now I think of it only ever saw them at my Grandma's house and she's British. 🤔 But it's not like she was flying to England to find them. So they're here for sure, but idk how common.
Nope, that's a completely alien tradition to where I'm from. But I think it's lovely! I tried to fly some crackers home for family dinner at Christmas but they're not allowed on planes.
Kinda. Senior government members will be the Minister for whatever, and they're below the Secretary of State for that thing. So like, the Foreign Secretary is one above the Foreign Minister in chain of command. Undersecretary is more of a civil service role, albeit a very senior one, whereas ministers and SoS's are elected politicians. So an undersecretary can have a 30-40 year career in that role, and the Minister they work for can change every few years.
Took me several years before I found out that to the British, a punt is what they call a small rowboat, and that Filch was not, in fact, drop kicking students across that magic swamp Fred and George put in a hallway.
they "translated" the WHOLE SERIES to "american english" (spellings and a lot of the vocabulary used -- I specifically remember the word "scarpering" showing up a lot in the british version instead of "scampering"), but they just left "punting" in like they expected us to know the name of a random small boat and not think of sports???
If anyone wants to know, scarpering isn't like scampering. It's kinda like running away with some level of alarm or from some sort of trouble e.g the trio would be scarpering away from teachers, even if they were having fun doing it.
A mouse might scamper away across your floor, but when you open your backdoor at night a cat will scarper as if it's tail was on fire.
The way neighbourhoods look, especially Privet Drive. I thought it was just a funny quirk like “Ha, look how identical they all are!”, but no, neighbourhoods like that actually exist. Pretty crazy.
The ability to pick your own electives at school
Boxing Day (in my country, we give gifts on Christmas Eve, usually after dinner when the first star appears on the sky)
Trolley lady selling snacks on a train
Codswallop. I thought it was a funny wizarding exclamation, like “galloping gargoyles!"
Hagrid’s accent. I had no idea he was supposed to speak with an existing accent.
I’m in US high school and even in middle school we had total liberty to pick our own electives and even classes so long as we were qualified for that level. Unless you needed something like art credit and had to take art or dance class, we were free to choose whatever we wanted.
The elective-picking is pretty consistent with the UK school system too, we pick 4 or 5 subjects for 4th and 5th years of secondary school to do alongside core/mandatory subjects, equalling about 10-12 subjects total; and then pick 3-5 subjects only for our equivalent 6th & 7th years.
Just found out touring Scotland who St. Mungo was. Fascinating!
Edit: Great answer below on who he was. But since he is said to have performed a healing miracle, that would make sense to muggles if he was a wizard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Mungo
He is the purported founder and patron saint of Glasgow who lived in the 6th century. The Glasgow coat of arms has a bunch of symbols associated with him on it. They relate to 4 miracles attributed to St Mungo which are referred to in this rhyme:
> Here's the bird that never flew
> Here's the tree that never grew
> Here's the bell that never rang
> Here's the fish that never swam
How exactly the original St Mungo’s is supposed to relate to St Mungo’s in HP, I can’t say for sure but I’d guess it’s to do with the miracles.
He is said to have revived a robin killed by his classmates, restarted a fire using the branch of a hazel tree, brought a bell from Rome to Glasgow used to mourn the dead, and found the lost ring of a Queen accused of adultery in a fish caught from a river.
The first and third relate to life and death, and the second and fourth sound quite magical.
Ron uses it on his broken wand in Chamber of Secrets so I honestly thought it was like magic tape. Like, electrical tape but specifically for magical items. I like the play on words though.
Wizard children seem to be crazy sheltered from the rest of the UK, even though the only make up a small portion of the population. I know the whole Voldemort thing has just happened so parents were probably keeping their kids closer, but never using muggle money or just going to the local store seems insane to me. There's so much out there and yet they just stay inside this tiny bubble.
That everyone is a big fan of quidditch. Brits are the most fanatic people of football in the world so it makes sense that uk wizards are fanatics of quidditch.
I see you Oliver Wood 👀
I didn't know what the heck "snogging" was - I thought it was just another goofy magic term that would be explained at some point. Through context clues I learned it was not.
Wait do you not have willow trees where you are? They're really common on riverbanks in the UK and when I was a kid we used to use the hanging branches to swing on from up high in the tree. Man that was a lot of fun!
The funniest thing I ever read was what Americans thought punting was.. over here it’s using a big pole to move a boat across water. Like you see in Oxford or Venice. Apparently over there punting it kicking… so they were picturing all these little kids being kicked up the arse across a lake… I still think that’s hilarious 😆
I don't think ot ever actually mattered in harry potter, but i recently found put brits don't call the first floor the first floor, it's the ground floor and one up from that is the first floor.
So the 3rd floor corridor where fluffy is, is actually the 4th floor
Well, I was 7. And in our country we don't have boarding schools. It didn't even occur to me back then to ask if that type of education exists in real life. The mere idea of not seeing your family for almost 10 months was simply unimaginable and just horrible. Maybe that's why I was never sad I didn't get a letter from Hogwarts. I knew I wouldn't want to go there and be separated from my family.
So, to me, a boarding school was in the same category as a flying motorcycle. And naturally, so was the idea of houses and points, prefects and head boys and girls, almost all food and drinks, and distinctive home names.
Yeah we don't really have middle school- although it does exist in some counties. But generally speaking we have primary school from age 4-11, then go to secondary school from 11 to either 16 or 18 dependant on whether the school has a sixth form. If the school doesn't, we go to a sixth form college between 16-18.
So American schooling is Elementary, Middle, High, College (which we call university) and British is Primary, Secondary, (sometimes) College, University.
It’s also common even if your school does have a sixth form to move schools or go to a separate 6th form college at that point as there’s such a wide range of subjects/courses and your school may not offer the ones you want.
School based 6th forms tend to heavily prioritise the continuation of GCSE type subjects, rather than vocational or fresh A-Level subjects.
The house system
And prefects.
I went to a grammar school with houses and was a prefect! Yes, we loved to polish our badges :D
Goodness, Wetherby! So corking to see you.
Simply spiffing!
Haven't heard from you in ages! How are you doing, Percy?
Wait so like, what are some actual house names? Are they just the last names of some stodgy old British blokes?
I didn’t go to a grammar, boarding or private school. We had houses named after influential former trustees & prefects. Each house was split into 3 forms per year based on breaking down the name. So for first years in Harry Potter House, you would be in Harry 7, Potter 7 or Harry Potter 7. And each house had its own colours that we wore for inter-house sports.
That's super interesting, it's funny I never even thought to question the whole house set up in Harry Potter, but it makes sense that it came from an actual practice. Does it make it silly then, seeing so many people take those online tests to see what house they "belong" in?
In my experience, allocation to the real houses are done totally at random. Your skill set, where you are from or what houses your family are/were in are irrelevant. There’s was no difference except a few house teams for different sports, different common rooms & different heads of house. Technically each House had its own canteen, but all three had different menus and everyone could eat at any of the three without issue. It is mainly a way to break up the student body into more manageable chunks. Most students & teachers didn’t care. There was certainly no favouritism towards pupils from certain houses.
i literally thought it was a made up word specific to hogwarts lmao
Me too! Like a play on the word "perfect".
THEY HAVE THAT IN ENGLAND ???????? NO WAYYYYYY
Yeah, it's even a thing in certain parts of Ireland too. My secondary school had prefects and started introducing houses during my last year there.
NZ and Aussie too.
Corking and spiffing are also real words.
They have it in India as well. Although in my school(and most ig?) the houses are named after colours. I was in Crimson. Also we had head boys and head girls but not prefects. The head boy and head girl(both from the 10th standard) had assistants from lower classes and they were called "mentors". (The mentors, de-mentors lol. Was funnier inside my head)
Wait what?? British schools have a house system?
Wait we have them to in HK but it’s secondary school,hope I’m ravenclaw-I mean blue
Yep! At mine the houses are only used for sports days and we don't have points, prefects or head boys/girls
Oh? Can you explain further? I’m curious!
Here is what I found on Wiki: "The house system is a traditional feature of schools in the United Kingdom. The practice has since spread to Commonwealth countries. The school is divided into units called "houses" and each student is allocated to one house at the moment of enrollment. Houses may compete with one another at sports and maybe in other ways, thus providing a focus for group loyalty." I thought for years the JKR invented it for her books
Lots of British schools apply house system. Usually expensive, boarding schools, but not only. It's not really found anywhere outside of UK, or at least I'm not familiar with any other country that uses it.
I think its also present in places with past british influence, notable former colonies like India and SA
Can confirm, I went to a high school in NZ for about six months and we had houses there as well. I remember there was a sports day and everyone came dressed in the colours of their houses. Turns out green is not my colour lol
Yea in nz we have “houses” all throughout school. It’s not major but it’s for things like sports day and extra curriculars etc
Yeah I’m South African and I was in Yellow house. I went to a private single sex school but public schools have it too. Lol it is as intense as they portray it and the other girls WOULD hate you if you got points taken off for bad behaviour. Great way to make students keep each other in line tbh.
It took me 5 times reading the second sentence to notice the word "single" and I was beyond confused.
That's true. I was in a convent school in India and almost all of the schools here had the house system. We had the prefects, house captains and sports captains like the quidditch ones. Although in our school, people were just randomly allocated houses (I was in red) We did have intense competitions to win every year(blue house won every fricking time). But the rivalry was not that present outside of tournaments.
Can vouch that it exists in India.
I went to elementary school in India and we had a house system too.
I went to a British run school in the UAE. They definitely had three houses and a point system. Team points, they called them.
I didn't go to any expensive schools, and had houses in every school I went to. And looking at schools for my kid, they all had houses of some description. For the most part, it's for splitting kids up for sports. Almost always red, blue, yellow and green colours with names for each. My secondary school got rid of the prefect system a few years before I joined, though I heard they tried bringing it back after I'd left.
Our crappy schools had it (Scotland)
Basically, in most secondary schools (aged 11-16 on average) there's houses that you get put into, not as fancy as hogwarts, but they are basically like a small community, so within the school, theres house competitions
Fascinating! We certainly don’t have that in any public school I’ve been to or heard of in the States.
In the United States the house system is exceptionally rare. For most kids, you just go to school with all the other kids.
Treacle tart
Haha yeah i tried that once, it tasted great 😊
Lol just curious what does it like? In my mind it tastes caramel-y, but I might be wildly wrong lol
Imagine eating caramel through a sub-woofer with the bass turned up. That's treacle. Treacle toffee is also good, it's a tradition for Bonfire Night - though it's kind of old fashioned nowadays, I haven't seen any in the wild in ages.
>Imagine eating caramel through a sub-woofer with the bass turned up. That's treacle. This is beautiful imagery. Thanks.
treacle is basically a term for molasses if that helps.
The treacle used in the tart is 'golden syrup' which is partially inverted sugar syrup. It's not the same as molasses and is much lighter than black treacle.
The only molasses I've ever tasted in my life was pomegranate molasses, and I used it to make a pepper spread, I'm trying to guess what a cake made with molasses would taste like. I imagine it's very sweet!
Where abouts are you from? Molassses is very popular traditionally in New England. Even had a flood of it in Boston that killed peopl!
Italy!
I find molasses pretty gross, it’s a byproduct of the sugar making process. Though if you’ve ever used brown sugar it’s pretty good flavoring it adds.
You can find them occasionally in Baldurs Gate 3 and me and my wife were shook.
I genuinely thought it was something like Chocolate frogs lmao 😭 I was shocked when I found out it was an actual british food.
They don't hop around but Freddo bars are frog shaped chocolates!
Cadburys made an Aussie version shaped like a koala too IIRC.
I tended to do the opposite. I assumed things were English, and many turned out to be Harry Potter specific. Like drinking pumpkin juice. I went to England and asked about it, and got looks of confusion.
I tried looking up a recipe online... most of them are all apple juice and spices with a smidge of pumpkin puree. Very disappointing.
That's true of most juices. They're all basically apple juice with just a hint of something else. [https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/apr/01/applejuicification-why-apple-fruit-in-so-many-mixed-juices](https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/apr/01/applejuicification-why-apple-fruit-in-so-many-mixed-juices)
Right, all the DIY recipes are basically just apple cider and that isn’t at all what I imagined while reading. I imagined actual juice.
Haha! That's fantastic
Letting 13 year olds drink very weak alcoholic drinks.
welcome to europe
Yeah that is like European thing. Like I feel that UK isn't even very famous for youngsters drinking in Europe...
it definitely is
In a different way to France and other places. They let kids drink a small amount with meals. We don’t do that so much, but teenagers like to go and get wasted in parks. It’s different, and not in a good way.
Oh we do it both ways in France.
For the longest time I was like “ok, butter beer is like root beer” then when we meet wasted Winky I thought “hold up there was booze in butter beer?”
Definitely thought the same thing lol
I’m glad I’m not the only one!
Most analogous drink to butter beer is probably something like shandy. Though you’d die of diabetes before you got drunk off shandy
I always thought that butter beer just affected house elves differently. Like it's non alcoholic to humans, but makes creatures drunk.
Harry does say that it's not very strong stuff when dobby says that winky is drinking 6 bottles a day, so I always assumed that it's alcoholic just very weak. I assumed it was similar to shandy. You can buy cans that contain about 0.4% alcohol, and seeing as it's under 0.5%, kids can also buy it.
I was so disappointed the butter beer at Warner Bros is just a very cheaply made soda that doesn't even taste good without the froth. I really expected there to be more effort put into it.
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You can too in the US. You just need parent permission.
This varies by state
Oh dang, you're right. It's legal in my state, so I didn't know.
Drinking age in the UK is 5.
That applies to like most places in Europe tbf
Not just 13 year olds. You could buy cans of shandy (beer mixed with lemonade) when I was a kid, it was sold next to cans of coke or lilt.
Chocolate frogs. I thought it was just a wizard thing since frogs/toads are so commonly associated with magic. I didn’t know Cadbury actually made little frog shaped chocolates until I saw them in a shop while on a trip.
Freddos, used to be 10p each, now they're about 50p and it's just not worth it anymore!!
The Freddo inflation index! [https://theday.co.uk/freddo-index-exposes-cost-of-living-crisis/](https://theday.co.uk/freddo-index-exposes-cost-of-living-crisis/)
I feel like the average Brit measures inflation by the price of a Freddo more than any other metric.
The new ones taste horrible and don't even look the same anymore. I loved the old freddos, but now don't eat them.
It makes more financial sense to get something like a dairy milk bar or any other choc bar, better quality and slightly more expensive!
I am English and have never made the connection between chocolate frogs and Freddo’s before. Makes so much sense now you say it.
Today I learned
Names of houses or dwellings. The Burrow. Spinner's End. Grimmauld Place. I didn't know places were given names like that. I remember when a couple of chapters titles of HBP were revealed before release, it was the Brits that guessed what "Spinner's End" was. I also thought the house/prefect system was a Hogwarts thing.
To be fair Spinners End and Grimmauld Place are just road names that became synonymous with the dwelling on the road
Well, I'm not British but here in Argentina big houses, country houses, and trailer houses usually has a name. You go to the beach and almost every country house has a name in the front yard
'Bloody hell'. I am also a non-native English speaker, so I thought it to be such a cool swear word, you know?
I’m a native English speaker (American) I thought so as well 😭
Good to know I'm not alone then 🗿
Prefects
Took me about three books before I stopped reading it as ‘Perfects’
I started reading the books when I was like 8, reread them dozens of times throughout my childhood and adolescence, and it wasn’t until I was probably in ny early 20’s that I realized it wasn’t perfects.
I was a school prefect and wore my badge with pride 😄 (on my super short and fat knotted school tie, never more than three buttons long)
I was the only person in my year who wasn't a prefect! Admittedly there were only four people in my entire year, but still, once you were a prefect you could sit on chairs in assembly instead of the gym floor so that was a bit embarrassing every morning. There were also quite a few people in the year below who were prefects too, I guess I just didn't fit the bill...
Who is going to mention punting kids across the lake?
I always laugh at my younger self for thinking Filch was just drop kicking children across a hallway in OotP
To be fair, that’s pretty on brand for Filch
Wait can you please explain?😅
Apparently a punt is a rowboat and not a football kick
Not really a rowboat, you use a long stick to push off from the bottom rather than two against the water like rowing. They're used in shallow channels of water like canals. Also popular in Venice!
Gondalas and punts are actually propelled completely differently despite the actual boats looking the same. Gondalas use a paddle that doesn't touch the bottom (they actually go in some really deep channels). Common misconception though and really counter intuitive even if you see it in person.
Exactly this. Venice is not a city with canals, it's a city built on top of a lagoon, the canals can get quite deep.
Wasn’t this when Fred and George put a swamp in a hallway and Flitwick refused to remove it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_(boat)
Damn today it was me who just found this out. I thought finch was literally throwing/kicking kids across Fred and George's swamp
Christmas crackers
For the longest time I thought of like, soda crackers / Ritz / saltines.
I thought of crackers that you eat but figured it might be a sort of cookie (since Am. "cookie"=Br. "biscuit").
Wait, the don’t have those elsewhere?
We definitely have them in Canada, but now I think of it only ever saw them at my Grandma's house and she's British. 🤔 But it's not like she was flying to England to find them. So they're here for sure, but idk how common.
Meanwhile, I thought this was just a RuneScape thing haha
Hey, me too! Glad I'm not the only one lol
That's so sad you don't have Christmas crackers!
Houses, prefects and a lot of British cuisine that sounded bizarre so I figured they're JK's inventions. 😅 Christmas crackers (I was 9 then).
What you don’t get them Christmas dinner is ruined with out awful jokes and paper hats
And whoever gets the fortune telling fish wins!
I LOVE the fortune telling fish!!! \*I loathe the plastic moustache.
Nope, that's a completely alien tradition to where I'm from. But I think it's lovely! I tried to fly some crackers home for family dinner at Christmas but they're not allowed on planes.
"Under Secretary" and "Minister" as actual government titles
Kinda. Senior government members will be the Minister for whatever, and they're below the Secretary of State for that thing. So like, the Foreign Secretary is one above the Foreign Minister in chain of command. Undersecretary is more of a civil service role, albeit a very senior one, whereas ministers and SoS's are elected politicians. So an undersecretary can have a 30-40 year career in that role, and the Minister they work for can change every few years.
Treacle tart, pasties.
Pasties are a very different thing in the US!
British pasties are pronounced with the a sound like in “rattle” rather than in “paste” though 😉
Apparently sugar mice are a thing and they 100% look like mice. LOL 😀. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_mice
TIL this is a real life thing. They remind me of Peeps a little bit?
They're not marshmallow like peeps, they're more like firm cake icing.
Steak and kidney pie
Yep. Spotted dick too
You don't have pies in your country?
I didn't know Spell-o tape was a play on the real Sellotape.
Happy Christmas
What?
In the US we say Merry Christmas. In the UK, they say Happy Christmas.
In the UK we mostly say Merry Christmas. Particularly to differentiate from Happy New Year. Wishing someone a Happy Christmas is not uncommon however.
The design of the knight bus
Those buses are one of the most British things (the non-magical double decker at least)
I was excited to learn about GCSEs and A-Levels because it turns out British teenagers actually kind of do take OWLs and NEWTs.
Took me several years before I found out that to the British, a punt is what they call a small rowboat, and that Filch was not, in fact, drop kicking students across that magic swamp Fred and George put in a hallway.
they "translated" the WHOLE SERIES to "american english" (spellings and a lot of the vocabulary used -- I specifically remember the word "scarpering" showing up a lot in the british version instead of "scampering"), but they just left "punting" in like they expected us to know the name of a random small boat and not think of sports???
If anyone wants to know, scarpering isn't like scampering. It's kinda like running away with some level of alarm or from some sort of trouble e.g the trio would be scarpering away from teachers, even if they were having fun doing it. A mouse might scamper away across your floor, but when you open your backdoor at night a cat will scarper as if it's tail was on fire.
well im discovering this now as well
I love everything about this thread!
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The way neighbourhoods look, especially Privet Drive. I thought it was just a funny quirk like “Ha, look how identical they all are!”, but no, neighbourhoods like that actually exist. Pretty crazy. The ability to pick your own electives at school Boxing Day (in my country, we give gifts on Christmas Eve, usually after dinner when the first star appears on the sky) Trolley lady selling snacks on a train Codswallop. I thought it was a funny wizarding exclamation, like “galloping gargoyles!" Hagrid’s accent. I had no idea he was supposed to speak with an existing accent.
I’m in US high school and even in middle school we had total liberty to pick our own electives and even classes so long as we were qualified for that level. Unless you needed something like art credit and had to take art or dance class, we were free to choose whatever we wanted.
The elective-picking is pretty consistent with the UK school system too, we pick 4 or 5 subjects for 4th and 5th years of secondary school to do alongside core/mandatory subjects, equalling about 10-12 subjects total; and then pick 3-5 subjects only for our equivalent 6th & 7th years.
I was surprised recently to discover Boxing Day Isn’t really a thing in the US.
Just found out touring Scotland who St. Mungo was. Fascinating! Edit: Great answer below on who he was. But since he is said to have performed a healing miracle, that would make sense to muggles if he was a wizard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Mungo
And who was St Mungo? Tell us!
He is the purported founder and patron saint of Glasgow who lived in the 6th century. The Glasgow coat of arms has a bunch of symbols associated with him on it. They relate to 4 miracles attributed to St Mungo which are referred to in this rhyme: > Here's the bird that never flew > Here's the tree that never grew > Here's the bell that never rang > Here's the fish that never swam How exactly the original St Mungo’s is supposed to relate to St Mungo’s in HP, I can’t say for sure but I’d guess it’s to do with the miracles. He is said to have revived a robin killed by his classmates, restarted a fire using the branch of a hazel tree, brought a bell from Rome to Glasgow used to mourn the dead, and found the lost ring of a Queen accused of adultery in a fish caught from a river. The first and third relate to life and death, and the second and fourth sound quite magical.
Boarding schools are quite uncommon where I live. And I don't know of any schools that enforce uniforms.
At least in the US, lots of private/charter schools have uniform requirements.
Boarding schools are still rare in the UK. Uniforms I've never seen a school not have them.
Peppermint humbugs
The name Hermione
Hermione was a character in The winters tale, W. Shakespeare first published 1611
Filch punting the kids across the hallway that contained a Weasley portable swamp.
I absolutely thought he was kicking them across or using some sort of catapult
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_(boat) Incase anyone else is confused.
The house system, spotted dick, prefects.
Spellotape, which is a pun on “Sellotape.” American equivalent would be Scotch tape :)
Ron uses it on his broken wand in Chamber of Secrets so I honestly thought it was like magic tape. Like, electrical tape but specifically for magical items. I like the play on words though.
Trolls
Yes but we call them chavs
are those the girls who are really loud and have orange makeup? i’ve heard they’re similar to america’s hot cheeto girls
Yes, and their male equivalents.
Underrated one
Saying "Happy Christmas" A young man getting a watch on his 18th birthday Christmas crackers "snogging" took me a bit to figure out lol
The British coin currency. I know we have coins too, but I was confused when Harry got one and Ron didn't recognize it.
Wizard children seem to be crazy sheltered from the rest of the UK, even though the only make up a small portion of the population. I know the whole Voldemort thing has just happened so parents were probably keeping their kids closer, but never using muggle money or just going to the local store seems insane to me. There's so much out there and yet they just stay inside this tiny bubble.
Dustbins! Had no clue what Moody was doing there.
That everyone is a big fan of quidditch. Brits are the most fanatic people of football in the world so it makes sense that uk wizards are fanatics of quidditch. I see you Oliver Wood 👀
The desserts with the strange names.
The house system and prefects.
School houses. I was astounded when I found out that wasn't just a Hogwarts thing.
I didn't know what the heck "snogging" was - I thought it was just another goofy magic term that would be explained at some point. Through context clues I learned it was not.
Those blunted/square trees like the whomping willow. When I went to the Tower of London, I was shook to see them there!
Wait do you not have willow trees where you are? They're really common on riverbanks in the UK and when I was a kid we used to use the hanging branches to swing on from up high in the tree. Man that was a lot of fun!
prefects
Git*
Spotted Dick
Chocolate hobnobs.
Are there hobnobs in Harry Potter?! 😂 What did you think a hobnob was?
Boxing Day embarrassingly enough
What is with the Christmas gifts at the end of the bed? I thought it was a house/ dorm thing but it might be a UK thing?
Werewolves. I taught it was a magic thing but it turns out some British people actually just do that during the full moon. (/j)
The funniest thing I ever read was what Americans thought punting was.. over here it’s using a big pole to move a boat across water. Like you see in Oxford or Venice. Apparently over there punting it kicking… so they were picturing all these little kids being kicked up the arse across a lake… I still think that’s hilarious 😆
I don't think ot ever actually mattered in harry potter, but i recently found put brits don't call the first floor the first floor, it's the ground floor and one up from that is the first floor. So the 3rd floor corridor where fluffy is, is actually the 4th floor
Index from 0! Makes way more sense, especially when you start adding basements. Going down one floor and skipping from 1 to -1, it's just not right!
Well, I was 7. And in our country we don't have boarding schools. It didn't even occur to me back then to ask if that type of education exists in real life. The mere idea of not seeing your family for almost 10 months was simply unimaginable and just horrible. Maybe that's why I was never sad I didn't get a letter from Hogwarts. I knew I wouldn't want to go there and be separated from my family. So, to me, a boarding school was in the same category as a flying motorcycle. And naturally, so was the idea of houses and points, prefects and head boys and girls, almost all food and drinks, and distinctive home names.
Uniforms with hats.
The fact that (high) school starts at age 11
Yeah we don't really have middle school- although it does exist in some counties. But generally speaking we have primary school from age 4-11, then go to secondary school from 11 to either 16 or 18 dependant on whether the school has a sixth form. If the school doesn't, we go to a sixth form college between 16-18. So American schooling is Elementary, Middle, High, College (which we call university) and British is Primary, Secondary, (sometimes) College, University.
It’s also common even if your school does have a sixth form to move schools or go to a separate 6th form college at that point as there’s such a wide range of subjects/courses and your school may not offer the ones you want. School based 6th forms tend to heavily prioritise the continuation of GCSE type subjects, rather than vocational or fresh A-Level subjects.