Does anyone besides me think it was pretty stupid for the ministry under Voldemort's control to put the Taboo on Voldemort's name?

Any underground organization with enough spite could have used it fairly effectively to kill off quite a number of death eaters and death-eater sympathizers:

Coordinate an `ambush` wherein teams of Order members, or other people on the run all hide using muggle means (the Taboo may cancle out a disillusionment charm, but it won't make a pile of leaves fly off you) and have several people in the team all say "Voldemort" in rapid succession. *CRACK* in pops a team of death eaters or snachers and everyone on the ambush team AKs them from under cover. Have all the team members in a pentagonal formation so that they can AK any other snatcher or death eater that dove out of the way, and the Snatcher/DE can't concentrate fire on any one location without being offed.

Have multiple teams do this all around the country. By the time the ministry realized what a horrendous mistake the Taboo was, they probably will have offed just about every snatcher and a fair good number of lower-ranking DEs.

 

Sounds like a fairly sensible plan. Except that the good guys would never enact it, because... well. their good guys.

 

Well won't the snatchers appear around the ambushers as opposed in middle of them. They appeared outside the tent not inside.

Also it may happen once or twice, then they'll surely notice missing squads. How do they co-ordinate anyway? How is it that only one team appear at a particular site? Surely they have a means to report their positions.

 

I imagine that the ambushers would probably figure that out before trying it, and instead go ahead and use a decoy or three to do the name calling.

 

Sadly, this is true.

 

The order members are vastly outmatched by the Death Eaters + Ministry, both in magical ability and numbers.

this plan sounds kind of retarded, there's no way to tell from where the snatchers/death eaters will come from and they get an exact location when you say the name. If the Taboo can go as far as to pierce protection charms and give an exact location to the bad guys then a stupid pile of leaves probably won't do much to conceal a person.

 

A pile of leaves or snow keeps a person very well hidden. Certainly long enough for them to get a spell off. Even Hominim Revalo (sp?) only tells you that someone is there, not exactly where they are. I think the snatchers are given a fairly precise general location, but not an exact location. The snatchers in the book appeared near the tent, which, was not exactly the greatest of camoflauged equipment of all time.

Of course, as someone else suggested, they could use a decoy person while multiple others remain hidden.

 

Personally, I thought the Taboo thing was a bit stupid. If I were Kingsley and Bill, I'd round up about 10 or so order members in a nice spot, say a rock outcropping surrounded by a large open field where you have cover and trigger the tabboo. Five or so DE's / Snatchers show up and you toast them. Apparate to the next area, wash rinse and repeat. It would have thinned the herd so to speak and forced the DE's into allocating more resources.

Hagrid goes down to the Arcomantula nest and orders dinner for his 'friends'.

Want to confuse people, put on some DE robes and mask. Go to a DE house and trigger the taboo. When the Snatcher show up start ordering them around and have them attack the DE house.

After the first couple of times, when the DE's think they're on to them and plan on bringing a friggin army, find a nice place build a firebreak where you and your buddies can stand turn the surrounding area into a roaring inferno and let the 'dark army' arrive in the middle of a towering inferno. If they try and apply fire prevention charms just yell out Voldemort and negate their protections.

Yeah the whole Taboo thing sounded neat, but like IP said it could be abused in so many ways.


Jim

 

Absolutely. Agreed in full with your post.

A few more possibilities:

You could find a nice place to act as a backstop, put in a protective bunker for the 'trigger' and set up snipers a long way off (especially if you're playing with muggle sniper rifles) or something like that. Stolen anti-personnel mines shouldn't be a problem either since the good guys seemed to have gotten over their squeamishness about the imperious. All you'd need is an armoury supply worker who could move the stuff.

A massive do it yourself gas chamber could work pretty well too - a good gas mask/suit proof against whatever fast acting agent you've chosen could work wonders. I doubt the DE's would be very interested/capable of catching/killing you after they've sucked in their first lungful of chlorine gas or some nerve toxin. (a few years ago in my hometown, some guy accidentally urinated in a bucket of powdered swimming pool chlorine in his shed, and ended up with most of his throat eaten out and severe lung damage in a major hurry).

If the taboo would trigger on a recording (I don't remember if the book said anything about whether live or memorex made a difference), several hundred recordings (magical or muggle, whatever) saying Voldemort could be placed/physically hidden all over the Isles in remote places and a few turned loose on small buoys and put out to sea, set to randomly go off every few minutes. The annoyance factor alone could be priceless. If you could come up with a nice lake of fire, well, so much the better.

Again - if you can taboo the word "voldemort" why couldn't/didn't the ministry taboo the incantation of the unforgivables, at least during the first war? It isn't a bad idea, but it should have been introduced early in the series. On the other hand, why in the world would you want to use something like that which could be so easily turned against you, especially if the taboo doesn't give you any idea of the terrain, the number of people present, and so on. The last thing I'd want to do is leap blindly into an utterly unknown tactical situation.

 

The thing, I feel, which made the Taboo work so effectively in the first place is that once people started getting ambushed by Death Eaters and being made rather gruesome examples of, people, not naturally disposed to fighting for the most part, made the (individually) good decision to quit saying it, although it was a poor (collective) decision in the long run because it wasn't turned back against the Death Eaters to thin V's ranks even if he himself couldn't be killed thanks to the Horcruxes and god only knows what else he did to himself to make himself hard to kill.

 

Remember, the fear of saying Voldemort's name is pretty much ingrained into Wizarding Society by this point. The Taboo is sort of as cop-out by JKR, since almost nobody ever says the name anyway. Even the Order generally says You-Know-Who or The Dark Lord, if memory serves.

The Taboo is a fairly transparent plot device to put the hero into danger and further the plot, since he's standing about in the woods not really getting anywhere.

And only the Order would have tried one of those ambush plans, and they are basically hunted and on the run, recoving from a great loss, and generally in major damage control mode. Not really a situation conducive to clever strategic thinking. Moody would have been the one to think it up, but the Order just doesn't have th resources to pull it off at this point in the series. By the time they finally get organized enough, the Final Battle is up, and there's really no need.

 

I quite liked the Taboo, and you can get around some of the plot holes it creates by sating you need the resources of something like the Ministry to put a Taboo over an entire country.

On a smaller scale, it has some interesting applications.

I can easily see Molly Weasley sticking up a Taboo on swearwords around the Burrow. It's like a wizarding swear-jar.

 

personally I think the taboo was a poorly thought out thing by Rowling (all of a sudden the Ministry is almighty and can even Monitor conversations in warded areas.... not to mention bring down wards in seconds etc / the previous administration must really really REALLY have been incompetent if they couldn't win a war this way)
but back to the original topic: the previous suggestions might be very well incorporated in dark!Harry fics to off DE in the most creative/gruesome ways imaginable and I would really like to read some of those one day

 

Perhaps it was tabooed for a dual purpose:

1) psychological warfare, before it was a social no-no, now you get a pretty serious 'spanking.' Part of the Ministry's efforts to hide their true boss from the masses, if only offically.

2) Prevent the tracking spells/equipment in the ministry from being overloaded, only the wizards too brave for their own good (I mean you HARRY) get the 'wizards' shaft, though Greyback seemed to want to give Granger. So much for werewolf instincts.

Though I will admit that number 2 is based on the understanding that Voldemort was using his name as a tracker well before he took over the ministry. (though maybe i read the book too fast)

Question, could the tracking spells differenciate between two people speaking the name; one in fear, the other in anger.

Brave Wizard(ie. idiot): Damn you VOLDEMORT.
*CRACK*
Voldemort: Hello. . .
The Idiot: Oh I am SO buggered . . .

 

To be honest, I always assumed (as in, since book one) Voldemort had something like the Taboo - it's a longstanding power of fictional (and I think several mythical) wizards to hear whenever their name is spoken. It cleanly explained the fear of his name.

 

I think the taboo was mainly for catching Harry and the order, they were the only ones who would say Voldemort. And it would be and easy ambush, I think Voldemort did not think there would be an ambush because of his confidance in his DEs. Also, he probably knew the psychological affect of fear and superstition in using his name.

 

The reference to those myths is obvious, but the exposition of the concept in book one of the HP series established quite clearly that in this particular universe, it was a superstition. In the very first chapter Dumbledore says he sees no reason not to say the name, and that a sensible person shouldn't be afraid to do so. In the last chapter of PS, he tells an 11-year-old child that 'fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself'.

I agree that there had to be real-life incidents to get everyone scared of using the name, but I always thought it was a couple of gruesome punishments the Death Eaters performed on people who had been known to use the name. In order to make most people scared that Voldemort just might have been able to create a real taboo and that their names appeared on some sort of people-to-check-upon list if they said 'Voldemort'. The revelation in the middle of the last book that people might have been right to fear exactly that reflects badly on Dumbledore's famous words. Not to mention that there's no indication between the very early exposition and the eventual appearance of the fledged-out version that the taboo was magically enforceable rather than 'only' psychologically.

 

I think the idea of a Taboo was rashly created and ill-thought out by Rowling. It serves absolutely no purpose in the novel.

In fact, you can't even argue that its purpose was to catch Harry. After all, why not make an unpublicized taboo (e.g. just using the same technology/spell) on the word "Horcrux", or "Hermione"? If the Taboo really is that far reaching and accurate, then it would be a foolproof way of catching the trio.

All of the plotholes we have just further affirms how pointless and purposeless the idea of a Taboo is. Unless she planned to further explicate its workings and/or its applications, I don't think the idea was necessary for the novel.

 

You could just keep killing the people who say 'horcrux' until there's no one left who knows what they are. That's one way to keep your horcruxes safe.

Makes you wonder if JKR saw all those fics where Harry or Hermione said something like, "Oh stop flinching! It's not like Voldemort is going to suddenly appear if you say his name!", and decided to give the authors the ol' middle finger.

 

The weird thing is that I remember a fic that had something like the "Taboo" as part of the story. For the life of me, I can't remember what the name of the fic was.