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"those whose blood is purest"…
I haven't read the rest of the post yet, and I imagine I will agree with your final conclusion, but this brought an interesting hypothetical to my mind that I wanted to share. Could the fact that a given child has been sorted to Slytherin say something otherwise non-apparent about the purity of their blood? By this I don't mean that e.g. Severus or Tom are not half-bloods, but that it is an indicator of more wizarding ancestry than might at first be apparent, or the strength or purity of the wizarding part of the line?
JKR apparently said in interviews that purebloods make up about a quarter of the Hogwarts students (and magical population), Muggleborns another quarter
I thought that if we actually counted up known Muggleborns we didn't quite get this number she said she'd intended. Have you read Secrets of the Classlist? ("If we add the information from the classlist to the information in canon [CoS], we find five Muggle-borns, twelve half-bloods, thirteen pure-bloods, and ten students whose status is difficult to deduce. This suggests that Muggle-borns comprise about 20% of the student body, while pure-bloods and half-bloods are 40% each.")
And notice that neither father nor son, speaking privately, attached opprobrious epithets to the despiséd Hermione.)
I imagine it's not considered "proper", that "Mudblood" is a very coarse word and is eschewed in favour of euphemisms by upstanding people of good manners.
despite his father’s unfortunate misalliance.
"misalliance"?
I haven't read the rest of the post yet, and I imagine I will agree with your final conclusion, but this brought an interesting hypothetical to my mind that I wanted to share. Could the fact that a given child has been sorted to Slytherin say something otherwise non-apparent about the purity of their blood? By this I don't mean that e.g. Severus or Tom are not half-bloods, but that it is an indicator of more wizarding ancestry than might at first be apparent, or the strength or purity of the wizarding part of the line?
JKR apparently said in interviews that purebloods make up about a quarter of the Hogwarts students (and magical population), Muggleborns another quarter
I thought that if we actually counted up known Muggleborns we didn't quite get this number she said she'd intended. Have you read Secrets of the Classlist? ("If we add the information from the classlist to the information in canon [CoS], we find five Muggle-borns, twelve half-bloods, thirteen pure-bloods, and ten students whose status is difficult to deduce. This suggests that Muggle-borns comprise about 20% of the student body, while pure-bloods and half-bloods are 40% each.")
And notice that neither father nor son, speaking privately, attached opprobrious epithets to the despiséd Hermione.)
I imagine it's not considered "proper", that "Mudblood" is a very coarse word and is eschewed in favour of euphemisms by upstanding people of good manners.
despite his father’s unfortunate misalliance.
"misalliance"?