{"id":467,"date":"2010-07-23T08:55:05","date_gmt":"2010-07-23T13:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.manhattangre.com\/blog\/?p=467"},"modified":"2019-08-30T16:53:42","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T16:53:42","slug":"vampires-and-moon-girls-more-vocab-in-harry-potter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/blog\/vampires-and-moon-girls-more-vocab-in-harry-potter\/","title":{"rendered":"Vampires and Moon-Girls: More Vocab in Harry Potter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia’s list of Harry Potter characters is a veritable trove<\/a> of names based on Latin and Greek roots.<\/p>\n

The girl pictured at right is Luna Lovegood. Luna’s name comes from the root for the moon, which also gives us lunar<\/a> and lunacy<\/a>, which was originally thought to be associated with the changing states of the moon. (This is not a likely GRE word, but you might also be interested to know that lunambulism<\/a> is “sleepwalking only in the moonlight”).<\/p>\n

But even more fun than that is Sanguini the Vampire (the tall guy on the left!)<\/p>\n

If you speak French, Spanish, or another Romance language, Sanguini’s name might remind you of that language’s word for “blood.” There are at least two important GRE words related to this root:<\/p>\n

Sanguine<\/a> means “cheerful; reddish, ruddy.” The Ancient Greeks thought the body was ruled by the “Four Humors”: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile (this idea also gives us the words bilious<\/a> and phlegmatic<\/a>). To be sanguine was to be ruled by the blood — that is, having a reddish, healthy complexion, which it was thought would also make one cheerful.<\/p>\n

However, the “blood” idea leads much more directly to the word sanguinary<\/a>, which means “bloodthirsty” — just like Sanguini.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, consanguineous<\/a> means “related by blood,” and “sangria,” the alcoholic beverage, also comes from the same Latin root (via Spanish).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia’s list of Harry Potter characters is a veritable trove of names based on Latin and Greek roots. The girl pictured at right is Luna Lovegood. Luna’s name comes from the root for the moon, which also gives us lunar and lunacy, which was originally thought to be associated with the changing states of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[199],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gre-strategies","category-vocabulary","tag-harry-potter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7398,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions\/7398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}