Discovering another diadem

"Beneath her fingernails, the frost makes billions of tiny diadems and coronas on the slats of the bench, a lattice of dumbfounding complexity."

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, 2014 Scribner

One funny way that Joanne Rowling and the Harry Potter books have affected me is in introducing me to words and names in the English language, words and names of which I had never before heard nor read, words and names that now jump at me from the page when I encounter them in my daily life.

It's quite wonderful, really, for me. I already had a decent education in English Literature and the history of Western Europe and North America, through university and into grad school, and my career as a journalist and then a lawyer had exposed me to all kinds of different areas of study, of expertise, of knowledge. So my vocabulary was already pretty good.

That's why it is such a thrill for me to find an author who can expand my knowledge base even further, who can introduce me to names and words and phrases that I had never before encountered.

Rowling is one of those people. And so is Anthony Doerr.

"Diadem" was completely new to me when I first read of the Diadem of Ravenclaw in the Harry Potter books. I had to look it up in a dictionary to find out what it meant.

The second context in which I have found that word, lying like a gleaming jewel in the grass, is in Doerr's novel All The Light We Cannot See. And, amazingly enough, it is from the point of view of a blind character, Marie-Laure, that Doerr presents the word which, for me, has come to convey a sense of dazzling beauty.

"Hermione" is another such word, a name of which I had never heard until a buck-toothed, frizzy-haired little brainiac walked into my life in The Philosopher's Stone. I have already written about my later encounter with another Hermione in another context.

I wonder how long this will continue to happen to me. When I am 90, will I stumble across "diadem" in yet another book and be immediately transported into Rowling's magical world yet again?

For me, some words and names are Rowling's property -- she introduced me to them, she made me cherish them. Anyone else who uses them is merely borrowing them from Harry Potter.