Herm-own-ninny.

Everyone has some skeletons in their closet. This is one of mine.
(Double posting today because I wrote this on the way home from Chicago and just remembered it now.)

I remember my first foray into the Harry Potter universe with what can only be described as shame. Having caught Potter fever in its early but decidedly dire stages, I was finishing up a much-labored-over presentation on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to my fourth-grade class, who I imagined could have been nothing less than enraptured with my inspired recounting of the story. This was, for the record, likely also the first but not last instance of my burning the midnight oil to finish a paper to my insane personal standard of satisfaction. Digression: two years later, I would find myself embarrassed with the gentle criticism on a twelve-page analysis, so-called, of Louis Sachar’s Holes that my English teacher informed me was a good effort, but more a retelling than a report. Considering that I had doubled the recommended page length and had an un-athletic sixth-grader’s difficulty applying adequate force to the stapler when it came time to hand it in, she wasn’t wrong. At the time, I thought myself some sort of feverishly inspired literary journalist, duty-bound to inform the masses of the brilliantly rendered coming-of-age story that I had already read twice that summer; actually, I had just babbled on for pages and pages with my keyboard only too willing to cooperate in an embarrassing outpouring of seriously-no-one-cares. I only made that mistake once. End digression.

I remember distinctly the boy I argued with: Billy Morris, forever engraved into my memory as the teasing little twerp who called me “Pancake,” which certain current friends of mine have appropriate into more a term of endearment than the bizarre juvenile disparagement it was originally intended as. (Thanks, friends.) I can’t vouch for much wit on my part as a generally speech-shy fourth grader, but I know that most comebacks I made to that round-faced blond kid inevitably played on the pun of Billy Morris living in Morristown. Clever and also hilarious! Or maybe not, but I’ll never forget his name. Unfortunately, that means he stands out in my admittedly selective memory as my antagonist in a heated debate over the correct pronunciation of Hermione, the bookish, smart and occasionally smart-alecky female best friend, with whom I and thousands of other readers inevitably identified: I was, and here comes the confession, a proponent of the “Hermy-own” theory. I have absolutely no idea where I came by this pronunciation, and even less regarding the origins of the particular conviction with which I self-righteously and incorrectly corrected he who dared to challenge me. But seriously, what a little creep: was I the one giving this report, or wasn’t I?

The release of Goblet of Fire, with Rowling’s sly lesson in How To Correct Widespread Misperceptions About Your Main Characters (or alternately, “Get Your Shit Right, Readers: 101”), dealt a devastating blow to my argument. For the benefit of more casual Potter fans who can’t quite remember the scene I’m referring to, not even Hermione’s Yule Ball date Viktor Krum can get her name down, and Harry hears her correcting the clueless foreigner on the dance floor: “Her-MY-oh-nee,” she enunciates. I went through a few stages of grief after that scene, not least of which was denial: “What a stupid way to pronounce it!” If arrogance were one of the stages of grief, I could check that one off, too: “My way is totally better.” I came around, eventually; a fifth-grade independent study I conducted on all things Harry Potter (my school district really let Gifted & Talented kids get away with anything) inspired an exhaustive exploration of character name origins, leading me to discover the beloved authoress’s habit of adopting literary names, Hermione having been appropriated from the queen in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. When confusion ensued about character names during a read-through of the play in my senior year AP Lit class, I basked in the knowledge that this time around, I really was right about Her-my-oh-nee.