Ah, got it. Language is so fascinating, IMO--it'd be boring if we all spoke our English the same way!

it'd be boring if we all spoke our English the same way!

But if we had to, I highly recommend my way. Which is with the -t past tenses as often as possible.

I also encourage the use of et as the past tense of to eat.

So the word "breeches" as in riding or knee - long "e" or short "i" - I've always used the latter but I find my midwestern friends prefer the former.

there's breetches and then there's britches

right?

In my experience people pronounce the garment one way or the other.

(For me "breech" long "e" means something like "rear" or "backwards" as in "breech birth".)

Breetches doesn't look like a word to me. I better consult my dictionary.

Did I say breetches? I meant breeches.

I'm a bit gobsmacked that the US text went out of its way to inject a brand new line that established Dean's skin colour during the sorting. Huh.

Rowling says that line was in her original, and the British editor cut it for space, and then it got reinserted in the American edit: [link]

Well, I guess that makes sense, in a DVD Extra kind of way.

I'm looking at the list of edits for some of the later books (which are almost entirely just switching the spelling), and there are a few that switch verb forms around. The use of the subjunctive seems to be entirely random: Sometimes, it's there in the British and they take it out in the American, and sometimes it's not there in the British and they put it there in the American. "As though it were encased" became "as though it was encased," but "as though the sudden darkness was an" became "as though the sudden darkness were an." I'm extremely puzzled.