I’m re-reading Harry Potter (again!) but this time with a twist — the first four books are the English Bloomsbury editions.

Having grown up in Ireland, I learned that there is “colour” and “humour” in the world and various other bits of “proper” (or improper, depending upon where you are) English, as well as English slang.

So, I wanted to see if the US editions had edited out any truly intriguing bits of English slang. So far, the Scholastic editions win hands-down for quality and craftmanship. The books have better type-setting. In the Bloomsbury editions, for example, none of Hagrid’s letters use special type (remember the tear-stained letter in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”? Well, in the US edition Hagrid’s letter has tears-stains, not so in the UK Bloomsbury edition). Also, the UK edition appears more stingy on paper — starting chapters pretty much at the top of the page.

The only slang I noticed was the use of “grass” when applied to Tom Riddle’s snitching on Hagrid.

A real surprise in Book IV was Harry “cottoning” on to something — I’d thought that was an Americanism that had been inserted by the US publishers but it’s there in the UK version. As I’d never heard that verb used when I was growing up (okay, it was a while back), I was surprised to see it crop up in J.K. Rowling’s works.

There are a few other slight changes but they’re all so small that they don’t come to mind.

I’m working my way through Book IV right now — I didn’t get the UK edition of Book V because it’s in hardback and the quality is not as good as the US Scholastic hardback.

As a writer, I’m interested in what J.K. Rowling does and how she does it. The first three books all start with Harry in the Muggle (or normal) world and end up with him returning to it. And, in the first three books, there are no scenes which the children either aren’t directly in or didn’t overhear.

However, at the start of the fourth book, with the Riddle Mansion, we have the first break from her standard. In it, we have a chapter told from a more omniscient point of view — Harry wasn’t there. But then in the next chapter we realize that Harry could have dreamed what we read, so the book is similar to the first three.

Interestingly, there’s a pattern in telling stories, as outlined in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces or more approachably in Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey wherein the Hero (or Heroine) always starts out in the Ordinary world, journeys into a magical realm, and ends up back in the Ordinary world — just as Harry does.

Maybe that’s part of the charm of the Harry Potter books — that J.K. Rowling follows a time-honoured tradition and does it so well.