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Sniffnoy comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3 - Less Wrong
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Downvoted for reading in distinctions that aren't there. What Fowler may have thought is irrelevant, what matters is what was actually meant and how the words are actually used. "Will" and "shall" are interchangeable in almost all dialects of English, and in the few in which they aren't, the exact distinction is complicated.
The change since Fowler has been to use ‘will’ in place of ‘shall’, not the other way around. I have read more than Fowler on ‘will’ vs ‘shall’, but I've never read anything to suggest that any dialect uses ‘shall’ with the third person in a declarative statement to mean the simple future.
This is all only a minor point, since Harry didn't say ‘shall’ and it's clear what wedifrid meant. But I hope that it gets downvoted for unimportance rather than incorrectness. Some time a character may say ‘shall’ for a good reason.
ETA further clarification: My previous comment contains an element of saying that wedifrid used bad grammar. I stand by that, but I also accept the response (from your reply) that grammar usage varies and what wedifrid really meant is what matters. And that's why I wouldn't write a comment whose purpose was to say that wedifrid used bad grammar.
But my real purpose was to point out how, with a certain interpretation, ‘will’ and ‘shall’ give different meanings, which are just the meanings that people are debating as to what Harry meant: a factual claim that is (I admit) unjustified, or a declaration of intent that is (I would argue) justified. And the second meaning could be what Harry meant, if he used bad (or at least unnecessarily ambiguous) grammar.
The problem is that this isn't a "change since Fowler", since it predates him by centuries. Also really we shouldn't speak of using either in place of the other, since after all the original meaning of both of them became replaced with the meaning of just being a future marker. (Also this isn't exactly "grammar". :P )
I should be clear - I didn't downvote it simply because it was wrong as such, I downvoted it for spreading confusion about language when there's already a lot of that. :P
This is not correct. For further discussion, I refer you to Fowler. I will write no more on the subject, since I think that it's getting pretty far off-topic.