Discworld Annotations (8) - Guards! Guards! - part 1

[p. 10/10] "'Hooray, hooray for the spinster's sister's
daughter.'"
This recalls the ritual question "Is there no help for the Widow's
Son?" in Masonic ritual.

[p. 16/15] "'Let's say a skion turns up, walks up to the Patrician
[...]'"
The correct spelling is actually 'scion', meaning "young
descendant of a noble family".

[p. 18/17] "'Yea, the king will come [...] and Protect and Serve
the People with his Sword.'"
This is Terry having fun with foreshadowing again. The prophecy of
Brother Plasterer's granddad describes Carrot to a tee, with the
"Protect and Serve" tying in neatly with the motto of the City
Watch (see the annotation for p. 51/48).


[p. 20/19] "'They were myths and they were real,' he said loudly.
'Both a wave and a particle.'"
Reference to the wave/particle duality theory of e.g. light, which
appears to have the properties of both a wave and a particle,
depending upon what context you are working in.

[p. 21/19] "'That was where you had to walk on ricepaper wasn't
it,' said Brother Watchtower conversationally."
Reference to the old David Carradine TV series, Kung Fu. In one of
the earliest episodes our Shaolin monk-in-training was tasked to
walk along a sheet of ricepaper without ripping it or leaving a
mark.

[p. 26/24] "It wasn't only the fresh mountain air that had given
Carrot his huge physique."
Someone on a.f.p. asked Terry if the name or the character of
Carrot was perhaps inspired by an old American comic called
Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. Terry answered:  "Never
heard of it. The TRUE answer is that when I was writing the book

an electrician was rewiring our house and the nickname of his
red-haired apprentice was Carrot. It kind of stuck in my mind."

[p. 29/27] "'And Bob's your uncle.'"
Some people have been wondering just where this expression comes
from (the joke also occurs on p. 16/15 and p. 108/98).  Terry
himself gives the following answer: "Apparently from a 19th
Century Prime Minister, Lord Robert Stanley, who was a great one
for nepotism. If you got a good Government job it was because
"Bob's your uncle". It came to mean 'everything's all right'."

[p. 52/48] The fizzing and flashing illuminated sign outside
Captain Vimes' office is a reference to the tired old visual
clich‚ from most film noir. The seedy detective's office or
apartment always has a big neon sign just outside the window.

[p. 51/48] The motto of the Night Watch, "FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC",
is dog Latin for "Make my day, punk". "Go ahead, make my day" is a
well-known Clint 'Dirty Harry' Eastwood quote. The 'punk' comes
from another famous Dirty Harry scene (see the annotation for p.
136/124) Notice also that the translation Terry supplies ("To
protect and to serve") is actually the motto of the Los Angeles
Police Force. My source tells me that Hollywood writers and
directors, notorious for the accuracy of their movies and TV
shows, tend to have all police cars bear this motto. In a sort of
reverse formation, this has caused some individual police forces
across the USA to adopt it, so that by now the motto has become
fairly wide-spread.

[p. 53/49] "'The E. And the T sizzles when it rains.'"
The magic tavern sign Brother Watchtower is stealing has a burnt-
out "E" and a sizzling "T" just like the 'HOT L BALTIMORE' sign in
the play of the same name.

[p. 54/49] "[...] a certain resemblance to a chimpanzee who never
got invited to tea parties."
For the entertainment of their younger visitors, British zoos used
to have the tradition of holding Chimpanzees' Tea Parties, where
the chimps were dressed up and seated at a table, drinking and
eating from a plastic tea set. Chimp tea parties have remained in
the British consciousness due to the TV advertisements for PG Tips
tea bags featuring chimps pouring tea.

[p. 55/51] "'Shershay la fem, eh? Got a girl into trouble?'"
"Cherchez la femme" ("look for the woman") is a clich‚ phrase of
pulp detective fiction: when someone's wife has been murdered one
should always search for signs of another woman's involvement.

[p. 60/55] "'Good day! Good day! What is all of this that is going
on here (in this place)?'"
Carrot's actions and words in this scene mirror the behaviour of
the stereotypical British friendly neighbourhood bobby attempting
to break up a family argument or innocent street brawl. Nearly all
my correspondents trace this stereotype directly back to the
sixties BBC television series Dixon of Dock Green, where every
bobby was your friend and it was perfectly acceptable for a copper
to walk into a room and say "'Ello! 'Ello! What's going on 'ere
then?". Calling people 'sunshine' (next footnote on the page), and
signing off with "Evening, all" are apparently also Dixonisms.

[p. 62/56] "'Evenin', Detritus.'"
'Detritus' is a word meaning "any loose matter, e.g. stones, sand,
silt, formed by rock disintegration".

[p. 64/59] "'What'd he mean, Justices?' he said to Nobby. 'There
ain't no Justices.'"
This annotation has been the subject of some heated a.f.p.
discussion (and if you think that this is a silly thing to get
worked up over, you are obviously not familiar with
alt.fan.pratchett. Or with Usenet, for that matter). Anyway, there
were a few people who felt that Terry was referring here to Larry
Niven's Ringworld series, where the main character, Louis Wu,
always uses the phrase "There ain't no justice" (abbreviated as
"TANJ"). Other people found this connection incredibly far-fetched
for such a generic sentence, and said so rather forcefully.
Eventually, Terry stepped in and short-circuited the entire
discussion by writing: "Mostly in the Discworld books,
particularly Mort, the phrase is "There's no justice" so that it
can be balanced with "There's just me/you/us". And that phrase is
truly generic. Really, so is "There ain't no justice" -- it's just
that Niven does use it a lot and, I suspect, uses it because it is
familiar to readers. Admittedly, it's become 'his' via repetition.
But there's a difference between using an established phrase which
another author has commandeered and using one specifically
associated with one person -- "Make my day" has one owner, whereas
"There ain't no justice" is a clich‚. To be honest, I didn't have
anything particularly in mind when Charley uttered the phrase --
but if you think it's a Niven reference, fair enough."

[p. 76/70] "'Do real wizards leap about after a tiny spell and
start chanting 'Here we go, here we go, here we go', Brother
Watchtower? Hmm?'"
"Here we go, here we go" is a chant (usually sung to the tune of
Sousa's 'Stars and Stripes Forever') commonly associated with
football (soccer) fans.  According to my correspondent it is also
used, historically, by gangs of striking miners just before they
realise that the mounted policemen with big sticks are coming
their way. Definitely a British phenomenon.


[p. 91/83] "It was strange, he felt, that so-called intelligent
dogs, horses and dolphins never had any difficulty indicating to
humans the vital news of the moment [...]"
Just for the record: some famous television/movie dogs fitting
this description are Lassie and Rin Tin Tin; horse examples are
Champion, Trigger, Silver ("I said posse!"), and Black Beauty; the
only dolphin example I know of is probably the most famous of them
all: Flipper. Australian fans have expressed their disappointment
that Terry left out Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, whose ability to
communicate very complex, often extremely abstract concepts with a
bit of clicking and hopping around was apparently a wonder to
behold.

[p. 93/85] "'Who loves you, pussycat?', said Nobby under his
breath."
Nice amalgamation of TV detective Kojak's use of the word
'pussycat' and his catchphrase "Who loves ya, baby?".

[p. 94/86] "'I've seen a horsefly [...] And I've seen a housefly.
I've even seen a greenfly, but I ain't never seen a dragon fly"
Sounds reminiscent of the 'I've never seen an elephant fly' song
which the crows sing in Walt Disney's 1941 movie Dumbo.  Another
similar children's song is called 'The Never Song' by Edward
Lipton.

[p. 97/88] "[...] Gayheart Talonthrust of Ankh stood fourteen
thumbs high, [...]"
The breeding of swamp dragons is a parody of British high
society's obsession with horse breeding. The height of a horse is
traditionally measured in hands.

[p. 99/90] "'One just has to put up with the occasional total
whittle.'"
Describing Errol as a whittle is actually a quite clever pun. On
the one hand 'whittle' simply means something reduced in size
(usually by means of slicing bits and pieces off it), while on the
other hand Sir Frank Whittle was the inventor of the modern
aircraft jet engine.  When Whittle showed his original design to
his supervisor at Manchester University, the latter said, "Very
interesting, Whittle my dear boy, but it will never work".

[p. 103/94] "'Just give me the facts, m'lady,' he said
impatiently."
"Just the facts, ma'am", is a catchphrase from the Dragnet radio
series (later a TV series, and later still a Dan Aykroyd/Tom Hanks
movie).

[p. 103/94] "Of all the cities in all the world it could have
flown into, he thought, it's flown into mine..."
Pretty obvious Bogart/Casablanca paraphrase, in keeping with
Vimes' role as the Discworld equivalent of the ultimate film noir
anti-hero.

[p. 114/104] The bit about the hero killing a monster in a lake,
only to have the monster's mum come right down the hall the next
day and complain, is a reference to Grendel and his mother, two
famous monsters from the Beowulf saga.

@~To be concluded next issue
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