Because I'm petty, I'm going to gather you all around and tell you about that time JK Rowling was extremely wrong about something and, by being wrong about it, poisoned Google search results for it for years afterwards and generally made the world ignorant about it
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Replying to @arthur_affect
I'm looking at that website you linked and staring at Albus, Rubeus, Caput Draconis, Fortuna Major, etc. It's like she lazily got all her ideas there. Wild.
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Replying to @thebronzey @arthur_affect
"Albus" is specifically listed as the European name for "Alohamora", meaning that by JK's own logic Albus Dumbledore is favourable to thieves.
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Replying to @YetUnrealised @thebronzey
It is interesting that "Alohomora" comes from the Arabic word for "red" while "Albus" in Latin means "white" I.e. the specific stuff associated with the sign (colors, compass directions, etc) varied a lot regionally
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Having done some very brief looking into the extremely scattered dribs and drabs about Malagasy sikidy and European geomancy online -- which I find very confusing to the same degree as I do the hexagrams of the I Ching -- my sense is that it's very easy to oversimplify
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Like, the "Albus" or "Alohomora" sign is one that's associated with the direction of East and with the sunrise (hence "red" or "white") And associated with big crowds of people, big news, big exciting events
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Something associated with chaos and novelty, a shift of power Hence "favorable to thieves" being a colorful description, but not one relevant to most querents whose line of work isn't thievery (it's also "favorable to entrepreneurs" or "challengers in an election")
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Oh, fun fact, by the way, for people who enjoyed my analogy with the zodiac sign "Pisces" -- There actually is a Sidiky sign called Alohotsy, which is a Malagasy rendering of the Arabic word "al-Hout", "the whale", the name for the constellation Pisces
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Much like the stereotype for people who are born with Pisces as their sun sign is being "generous of spirit" and therefore highly emotional and empathetic, the standard reading of the Alohotsy sign is a time of "generosity of spirit" when debts are forgiven, hatchets buried, etc
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JKR apparently remembered "generosity of spirit" as "lightness of spirit" and decided to make "alihotsy" the name of an "African bush" whose leaves make you laughpic.twitter.com/YKRd54ewgr
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I hate that she keeps on taking shots at Steve Vander Ark for somehow being lazy because he didn't figure out how a Malagasy word for "the whale" could possibly end up being the name of a bush that makes you laugh Like he's the stupid one here
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Apparently it's an alternate name for the "hyena tree", because, again, JKR is thinking of entirely the wrong part of Africahttps://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Alihotsy
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Anyway it's pretty clear what happened here is that JKR jotted down some notes from this one page of this New Age book that had a list of the Sikidy signs because she thought they were really cool words and didn't bother to write down what country they came from
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