Non-british readers, what's something from the books you thought was magical but turned out to be just british?
QuestionSame, I thought it was something like butterbeer or chocolate frog lol, I found out it was real two months ago.
Butterbeer is also real and absolutely delicious.
Made real but not pre-existing!
No, there are recipes for butterbeer in 1588.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_universe_of_Harry_Potter#Butterbeer
Here is Heston Blumenthal recreating a Tudor recipe for his "Tudor Feast"
Hang on, if there are real recipes for this, why the hell does Harry Potter studios decide to instead serve weird pimped up cream soda?
Probably don't want a bunch of drunk kids trying to avada kedavra each other. I mean, I would but then again I'm not a theme park executive.
1) it’s literally beer, so they’re hot going to be selling it hand over fist to (American) kids. Esp at universal studios
2) I get a lot of folks in that video are excited about it…. It is def an acquired taste, however.
Oh god it is so fucking good
This was the first thing I thought of.
The school house system
How are students selected in the real world?
In my school there WAS a sorting ceremony. An angry bald man yelled "YOU! YOU'RE IN BEECH" and I was like "OK PLEASE DON'T YELL AT ME"
I'm now picturing Harry begging an angry bald man to not put him in Slytherin
"Not Slytherin not Slytherin not Slytherin"
"YOU'LL BE IN SLYTHERIN. REGISTER'S BY NAME, SORRY"
I was also in beech, trees are a very common house naming system it seems
I believe they were Beech, Cedar, Oak and Maple
My school had Beech(yellow), Cedar (red), Oak (green) , Elm (blue)
and on our darky navy school ties - the school crest was the colour of our house
so my tie had the school crest in yellow
In mine, Beech was blue, Maple was red, Cedar was yellow and Oak was green.
Ours were names of nearby hills, my fiancé’s were historical writers (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Chaucer etc), and my cousins’ were nearby rivers.
In my elementary school in Texas, our “houses” were named after colleges. We had Texas Tech, TCU, OU, UCLA, etc.
At random when you first join the school, or in boarding schools the houses are based on which house you decide to live in
What if you have siblings already in the school? Can you directly go to their same house, or you get randomly assigned too?
So it depends I moved senior schools half way through and in my first one, registration/ form groups had a mix of houses so they tried to keep family members in the same houses to stop disputes, the houses where names after navel ships so me and my brother where both in ‘Vigilent’ in my second one each of the form/ registration groups where different houses and named after saints so I was in ‘Vincent’ and he was in ‘Margaret’ so it depends on The school!
At my school you went into the same house as your elder siblings. My little sister was in the same house as me and blamed me for it as her mates were in a different house 😂
When my school implemented houses they were just like 'here's yo house, have fun!'
Randomly. My primary school had houses with names after prominent hills in the area and the colours were red, yellow, green and blue. This was before HP was a thing. Weirdly I was in the yellow coloured house.
Then high school had seven houses, named seemingly randomly but I think it was after prominent people in history from the area.
My husband's school named their houses after mountains in the area. They ran out after 3 and named the fourth house after a local hill instead.
Our school used famous Australian Olympians. And have the red blue green yellow The houses is mainly used for sports.
My primary school was rivers, secondary was local hills.
What do you mean, selected? When I started school we were just randomly divided into equal size classes
Yeah, that was my question, how do they divide the students. My lizard brain refuses to understand English today.
THIS! I was shocked to find out houses were a real thing and that my friend's school had them.
Wait WHAT?
I wish my school had had those. If someone had been forced into feeling a sense of comradeship with me I might’ve actually managed to make some friends.
Ours didn’t work like that- we had house meetings a few times a year and an annual sports day where people competed for their house. That’s it. People were no more likely to be friends with their own house than others. Boarding school might be different though.
im south african and we also had houses 😉
I sort of had this in America, but I went to a boarding school based off the Prefect system used there.
Can't speak for other systems but my school in Scotland divided us into houses alphabetically by surname
not necessarily "magical", but PUNTING. When Filch had to punt students across the Fred and George's swamp, I'm over here thinking he was kicking them across like an american football. not ferrying them in a boat. my mind was blown.
One of the favourite things I learned about American readers is they actually thought Filch was kicking kids across a small swamp. Just marvellous 😂
Funny thing is it’s perfectly within character, if well beyond his physical abilities
Yes!! I can totally see why American children/people believed it, that's why it's so funny. You wouldn't question it 😂
Filch came to Hogwarts after Ohio State and a few years in the League.
If anyone at Hogwarts would be kicking students, it would be Filch.
Literally just found out at this moment he wasn’t kicking them 😭
The way I thought kicking students across the swamp was totally normal and I didn’t even bat an eye 💀
well he was perfectly prepared to chain students up by their wrists from the dungeon ceiling, so there’s that
Same! The publisher apparently thought we couldn't handle "philosopher" but this use of the word "punting" made the cut?
That and sherbert lemon. In the american release its like lemon tart instead or something i cant remember
"Lemon drop," I think?
Seems so on character for him to kick them across the pond! I remember thinking this years ago as well!
Well TIL
Filch has an all star career ahead of him!
Oh my god a whole load of you really though he was kicking students across a corridor I cannot breathe.
Oh
To be fair, that definitely fits Filch's character.
I'm a brit, I also thought this
I had the same exact thought when I first read that. Haha. I’m surprised Scholastic didn’t change the word to be more comprehensible, since they made other edits. I almost want to purchase the UK editions and read those instead.
I'm glad I came here to learn this. For years I've had mental images of Filch (more specifically David Bradley) kicking children across a swamp. I just assumed JK was having playing it loose!
Fuck that, Imma still imagine it
I had no idea how many of the names of magical items were actually borrowed English words. The one that comes to mind is spellotape, but there are others I thought were original
Was looking for this one. I just learned this was wordplay on a British thing within the last 5 years. Just assumed the "spello" was helpful somehow - extra sticky or...something.
Wow, because of this I just learned about sellotape
Same- did not know this was an actual thing until today.
Are you telling me sellotape is a British thing?
Conversely: as a kid I really thought pumpkin juice was a British thing, not a magic thing.
Wait, pumpkin juice doesn’t exist?
Go juice a pumpkin and see how it goes
It sounds pretty gross to me :/
I mean there is carrot juice 🤷🏽♀️
I mean to be fair pumpkin anything would be gross without seasoning or sugar…..
I've had pumpkin juice, it's tasty!
Haha! I've always wondered this - Muggle borns just accept pumpkin juice? Is it sweetened? Is it like carrot juice? A smoothie?
As someone who likes pumpkin juice. It's swetened. Kinda taste like xarrot juice and made from more sweety pumpkins. It's a real thing.
Treacle tarts. I didn‘t know what they were, so I imagined some kind of cake that looked like an octopus or squid.. Guess my young mind went treacle=tentacle.
And we already had chocolate frogs.. so it somehow made sense..
It's cool haha when I first read the books I thought of hargrid as a giant lizard type man but I was 11 years old haha.
Omg you can even look up a recipe. I even have golden syrup that I bought for a recipe I can make these. Hopefully better than Hagrid.
Christmas crackers. I thought they were like… a food type of cracker? I was so confused when two characters were pulling apart the crackers and there was stuff inside of them. But I was just like, “oh this wacky magical world and their novelty-filled giant cheezits!”
Is this British? We have them here too, but I'm in Canada so we get a lot of British things too
I’m in the US and we do it every Christmas. Though, my mom is a bit of an Anglophile.
I have a friend that gets them every year here in the US, but her family is British. They're not hard to find, they sell them in regular department stores and I think Costco where she's bought them before.
But like, can we get giant novelty-filled cheezits anyway? Because I could totally get down with that. I know in the US we have that stupid "can't have something inedible hidden in an edible thing" rule (oh how I long for REAL kinder surprise eggs...) but damn getting a prize from a huge cheezit would be amazing.
The story about that law is pretty interesting, it's a law from 1938. My dad is a retired AF pilot and used to bring back the eggs (and Toblerone, gummy bears, nut crackers, etc) when he'd fly trips to Germany. The real ones are cool, the ones you can get in the US now are a poor substitute.
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/08/kinder-surprise-eggs-banned-united-states/
I only knew this one because of runescape
Same with me and old world of Warcraft
Prefects
I read it as "perfects" for like 5 years and I made total sense that Percy was a bitch if they were giving him a title like "perfect"
Me too!!
I did to. My parents were so confused.
Wait what… please don’t tel me that-
TIL
We have prefects in south africa.
Absolutely. We have class representatives (CRs) at best
We had none of this here in the Netherlands. We were all just students.
My school in the US had prefects! It’s was a boarding school so they were upperclassmen selected by each dorm faculty to help organize the younger students.
We didn’t have houses per say, but freshmen were all in the same dorm then after freshman year you could request to be in one of the four upperclassman dorms. It was a coed high school and the dorms had separate girls and boys sides with a shard common room. We’d have sports days where the dorms would compete.
Tbh there was nothing really magical about the experience, high school is bad enough and without the actual magic prefects and houses kinda suck
Conversely, as a Brit I have found out a lot of things I considered to be normal were just British from reading stuff non British fans have posted Bout house systems etc.
In the german version, the game "exploding snap", which is obviously just a spiced up version of the real, British snap, was mistakenly translated as "exploding Snape". Which I still think is very funny.
There used to be a flash game back in the 2000s. There was a Snape figure moving around on the screen and it exploded when you clicked it, which you got points for... That must have been really confusing for anyone not German.
Names. Cornelius Fudge? Bathilda Bagshot? Grimmauld Place? I thought they were all so whimsical!
Then come to learn as I got older about all sorts of silly sounding names of towns and people. Upton Snodsbury? Blotusfleming? Benedict Cumberbatch? British are, if nothing else, very creative with names.
Just you wait until you hear about the street in my hometown called St Gregory’s Back Alley.
Grimmauld place is grim Auld (the Scottish word for old) place
There's a village near where I grew up called "Wetwang".
I went to a city in Germany called "Ulm". Like, way back in the day, the founding fathers of the town needed a name, someone said "Ulm" while thinking of a really, really good name, and someone else goes "Ulm it is!".
I used to live near a place called Six Mile Bottom
I work in Upton Snodsbury!
Members of my family once lived in Upper Dicker. It even has its own boarding school.
Spotted dick.
I was so shocked at 1st. I was like whytf Ron is showing Hermione his dick in the middle of great hall?? Then I learned it was apparently a british dessert..
This will always shock me, every single time I read it not only in Harry Potter. I can't believe there's a dessert with that name.
"Dick" in this context is related to the word "dough" (similarly related to the German word "Teig"), so it's just dough spotted with raisins!
So, basically, raisin bread?
It's more of a steamed sponge cake, that you eat hot, with hot custard
There are a lot of jokes to be made about eating your spotted dick with hot custard all over it.
Also there is dollar store in UK called poundland 💀
I mean... It'd be weirder if it was called a dollar store.
THIS MADE ME FREAKIN CACKLE THANK YOU 😭
Peppermint Humbugs. I imagined little red and white roaches crawling along the table like a peppermint bug version of chocolate frogs.
Pasties, which have...a very different meaning and pronunciation over here. Color me extremely confused. And mildly amused.
Depends where you are. Michigan, especially northern, is big on pasties because of the immigrant population.
See, it's the opposite for me. I read the first book when I was 10. I wasn't exposed to the world of adult stuff yet. Later, when I was exposed to the those vocabs, I was sooo confused! Couldn't even ask anyone because English is my second language and you don't go and ask your teacher about this things. Took me a good while to figure out where it's food and where it's not.
Not exactly magical, but it took me a while to realize why Umbridge asked Harry if he wanted sugar in his tea, but poured milk in it without asking.
Wait why?
The actual answer is that she was spiking it. It’s rude to assume someone’s milkiness without asking
The weird-ass currency system. I thought Rowling was just being zany until I had an older coworker explain shillings and ha’pennies and tuppence to me
You can thank Ben Franklin for lobbying extremely hard for a metric-style currency system on the US.
Now make the rest of it metric
We tried, we really did! The ship with the reference kilogram was attacked by pirates.
I thought you were joking, but I looked it up and this really happened. Jefferson invited a French scientist to demonstrate the kilogram to Congress, but his ship blew off course and he was captured by pirates and imprisoned for the rest of his life.
W H A T
"My dog ate my homework"
Ignore witches, acquire groats
I didn't know the school houses and prefects were a British thing.
I only learned this from this exact post. Thought those were just HP things until today
Rock cakes are real.
Yes, the first thing you learn (or at least used to) in your first year of food tech in the UK is how to make rock cakes.
I was today years old. I thought Harry just called them that cause Hagrid couldn’t bake 😮
Trains with food trolleys and compartments
Back in the 80’s there were smoking carriages. Absolutely stunk but usually where you could find a seat on a crowded train.
As a british guy this comment thread is hilarious.
Yeah I love it. Growing up in the UK in the 90s we consumed so much US media we had to know all their words, so I enjoy the US people on here learning our stuff because it feels nicely full-circle.
Punting kids across the swamp. I thought Filch was kicking kids across.
I legit just learned from this comment section he wasn’t kicking them
I just read this scene to my seven year old last week, and she asked what he was doing. I also thought he was basically drop kicking them across. She accepted that answer.
As a non native who only learned English in school and then mostly via reading books, almost all the foods sounded weird.
Have you tried Shzlgzngahr?
The parents would just send their kids away for most of the year.
Boarding schools are a thing :/
But I'm from the US. The only time that happens in my experience is when the parents are extremely wealthy and can't drag the kid around the world for business or the kid is extremely out of hand behaviorally.
Yeah, us Americans only send our kids to boarding school if they're rich. If they have behavioral issues, they're usually sent to like military school or something equivalent but it might also be called boarding school as well
Even in the UK, approximately 1% of the population was educated at boarding school. Since they're normally fee paying and few other British schools are, they're strongly associated with wealth.
Boarding school is super expensive and definitely not affordable for most people in the UK.
It’s no different in the UK.
So like a boarding school?
Other countries have those, including the United States.
I went to a boarding school as well, in India. I was homesick often, but it did make everyone who studied there self-reliant and self-sufficient. And because it was only accessible to kids who passed a highly competitive standardized test, the quality of students was pretty high too.
Filch “punting” students across the swamp the weasleys made in book 5. It’s way more fun to imagine filch dropkicking kids across than boating them across as the word actually means
I thought Nicolas Flamel was just a Harry Potter character, and I also didn't know that Mandrake was a real plant.
Children drinking beer in pub, even if it is low alcohol
That’s the unrealistic bit- when the books were set, most British kids would have been drinking full strength beer in the pub at least.
Or they'd have someone's elder sibling buy bunch of alcopops to drink in the park
lol you’ve got me in the first part. But who am I to be surprised? In where I live kids as young as 6 can drink
I went to Oktoberfest, and there were teenagers in braces across the table from us drinking liter beers. It was strange to me (American)
I just learned last week that boomslang is a real animal lol
Big train stations.
(Please help we've been waiting for a single fucking railline for like 80 years now)
As someone who’s ridden on Muggle trains they’re very disappointing
Wait till you go to Amsterdam - double decker trains!
The closest the US has is in the Northeast. Boston and New York have big train stations, but they still pale in comparison to some European and Asian ones.
Probably a lot of thins, but the one I remember is the Christmas Crackers.
I imagined actual hats appearing after some magical explosion, not confetti and paper "hats", as it turned out to be.
Willow trees. I was imagining American willow trees with low droopy branches. Whomping willow makes more sense when you know what European willow trees look like.
OWLs and NEWTs and the way they choose electives. High school is also very different.
Ahh the whomping willow's kinky cousin; the whipping willow ;)
The Wanking Willow was replanted in the Forbidden Forest after "The Incident."
OWLs are based on pre-1988 O-Levels (O-Grades in Scotland), exams you took at 16. Now replaced with GCSEs in England, and goodness knows what in Scotland (National 5 and 4s?). You would usually do 5-10 depending on your school and ability.
NEWTSs seem loosely based on English A-levels (18) rather than Scottish Highers (17-18). (You would usually do 3 A-levels back then, or 5-6 Highers.)
Schools are Primary (4-11ish) and Secondary (11ish-17/18). So university/college is often called Tertiary.
Thats gonna make me look very stupid, but feet (as a measurmenent). I thought JKR didnt want to bring in real measurments like meters, because she wanted to keep us in the magic mood, so she just made up a different word to use
Snogging
I’m in this thread doing the opposite and learning that these British things such as House Systems and Prefects aren’t actual global
I didn't understand what "All right, Harry?" everyone was saying to him about. I keep thinking "why, what was wrong?" As I grew up I found out it's equivalent to "What's up?"
Still not clear exactly how prefects work in your school system.
Senior students given some additional authority. Can punish students in some circumstances, and can be used for Crowd control and the like.
House points system. I'm not British, but the house system wasn't new, but the points was something weird.
Calling it a (quidditch) pitch instead of a field and keeper instead of goalie.
keeper instead of goalie.
And neither of those is the actual name for that position. They're both shortened forms of goal keeper.
Well I read it in German when I was 12, and shortly after in English, with a dictionary by my side.
So a lot of common things seemed strange and unknown. Like the common toastrack, or boarding schools.
Spotted Dick? Speckled Dick, I don’t remember. It’s pudding or something
Spotted dick. Brits find the name funny, too, to be fair . It's an old-fashioned pudding that most would laugh at, rather than eat, these days
Not magical but, for some reason, I thought “trainers” was a British term for underwear. I was so confused when Harry snuck in the cabin on the Hogwarts express to spy on Draco and his cronies with the invisibility cloak and Draco caught a glimpse of his “trainers” as he climbed up.
I must have thought it was underwear because I was around that age and girls around my age were starting to wear training bras. Either way, I eventually figured it out with enough context.
Not really magical, but I always misunderstood whenever Tonks said "Wotcher, Harry." I knew it was some sort of greeting, but since she was always winking and complimenting him right after, I thought the expression itself is much more flirtatious in nature than it actually is. Turns out, it's just a normal British greeting.
Also, "snogging." I eventually figured it out from context clues, but the very first mention of that word is in OotP when Sirius states that he caught Kreacher snogging his father's old trousers. You don't even want to know what I thought Kreacher was doing...
I thought Hogwarts was so unique. Then I moved to Oxford
Wait treacle tart isn't magical?
Houses, house cups and points.
I was born and raised in America mostly but I attended a British school in Shanghai for a couple of years. I thought the school was influenced by HP but then found out it was actually British
Threads like this is why I love this community. I learned so much here.
Somehow filch was able to kick (punt) kids all the way across a hallway swamp.
I thought Luna really liked pudding. Turns out it's just dessert
Kidney pie lmao
That schools actually start on the same day every year (Sep 1) and get out late June
It’s so specific
Treacle tart