Mysterious people in cloaks all over the place? And a whisper, a whisper about the Potters... Mrs. Dursley came into the living room carrying two cups of tea.
And have her be somebody that, you might have seen that person on the street and kind of been like, oh, what a weirdo, but this is what's going on actually inside that weirdo.
Scarlett thought: What damnably queer people Yankees are! Those women seemed to think that because Uncle Peter was black, he had no ears to hear with and no feelings, as tender as their own, to be hurt.
Matters in physics have now reached such a pitch that, as Paul Davies noted in Nature, it is almost impossible for the non-scientist to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the outright crackpot.
Rather than being viewed as the local eccentric, Socrates was now being seen by many as a dangerous spreader of radical ideas that were leading others to the most vile excesses.
Now one had to be able to blabber on about anything with any old sod who happened to stray within an arm's length of you purely because it was " nice."