Originally posted by AidenBurn
To join this absurdity, two words can't kill anyone. All I'm saying is this is fiction, so we shouldn't rely on real-life facts.
On the contrary, we have to rely on real-life facts. Obviously J.K. Rowling hasn't created an entirely fictitious world. She has assumed that we will take some things for granted and she won't have to describe them. Things like gravity, inertia, friction, anything that has to do with pysics, but also other things like the dynamics of human relationships, human emotion, the phisiology, ad anotomy of the characters. She doesn't mention these things because she doesn't have to. If she says "Harry ate some treacle tart" she doesn't have to describe what how he does it, because we know the characters have human anatomy and we know the culture from which he's from. So, the reason for my rant is that there are elements to the story and setting, in fact almost of the elements come from real life. Magic is just a miniscue part of the world Rowling created. You are right, people don't die from hearing two words. Ava Kedavra acually has to do something. Using real life facts to determine what it does in terms of phisiology will end this conversation.