Men At Arms

1

De’ath is an existing old English name. The De’aths came over with William the Conqueror, and tend to get very upset if ignorant peasants pronounce their name… well, you know, instead of ‘Dee-ath’ as it’s supposed to be pronounced.

2

Kodak’s first mass-produced affordable camera was called the “box brownie”. A brownie is also the name of a helpful type of goblin. And we all know how cameras work on the Discworld…

3

Burke’s Peerage. Burke’s Peerage is a book that lists the hereditary titled nobility of the British Realm (the Peers of the Realm, hence the title of the book). It contains biographical facts such as when they were born, what title(s) they hold, who they’re married to, children, relationships to other peers, etc. For example, under ‘Westminster, Duke of’ it will give details of when the title was created, who has held it and who holds it now.

Also, ‘twerp’ and ‘berk’ (also spelt as ‘burk’) are both terms of abuse, with ‘twerp’ being relatively innocent, but with ‘berk’ coming from the Cockney rhyming slang for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’.

4

Arthurian legend, Holy Grail, that kind of stuff.

5

Cf. the real life Jewish Anti-Defamation League.

6

Columbo had a glass eye (or rather, Peter Falk, who played the part, had one). And he was rather short.

7

“Nil desperandum” is a genuine old Latin phrase, still occasionally in use, meaning “don’t despair”.

8

Reference to Prometheus, who gave fire to man and got severely shafted for it by the previous owners.

9

The desk sergeant in Hill Street Blues used to say this in each episode of the TV series, at the end of the force’s morning briefing.

10

Bauxite is the name of the rock that contains aluminium ore.

11

In other words: a bloodsucking lawyer, right?

12

Only funny the second time you read the book, because it is then that you realise that the first time every reader will have gotten this wrong…

13

Not very surprising at the Assassin’s Guild: black pudding is made with blood.

14

Acting like a bumbling fool, making as if to leave, then smacking his head, ‘remembering’ something in the doorway, and unleashing an absolute killer question is exactly how TV Detective Columbo always drives his suspects to despair.

15

This paraphrases the motto of the US postal service: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”.

In Tom Burnam’s More Misinformation it is explained that this quote by Herodotus is not really the official motto of the Postal service, since there is no such thing. But it is a quote that is inscribed on the General Post Office building in New York, and has been construed as a motto by the general populace. It refers to a system of mounted postal couriers used by the Persians when the Greeks attacked Persia, around 500 BC.

16

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1715–1783) actually existed, and was a well known landscape gardener and architect. His nickname derived from his frequent statement to prospective employers that their estates held great “capabilities”. The existence of Sagacity Smith and Intuition De Vere Slade-Gore must be questioned, at least in this particular trouser-leg of time.

17

A haha is a boundary to a garden or park, usually a buried wall or shallow ditch designed not to be seen until closely approached.

I’m told there’s a rather nice haha at Elvaston Castle just outside Derby. From the house there appears to be an unobstructed vista into the distance, despite the presence of the main road to Derby crossing the field of view about 200 yards away. Unfortunately, when the house was designed, they hadn’t invented double-decker buses or lorries, so the effect is a bit spoilt by the sudden appearance of the top half of a bus going past from time to time.

18

The Amazons of legend had a famously cutting way of solving this particular problem…

19

Quite stereotypical of course, but the bar from the TV series Hill Street Blues is the one that I was immediately reminded of.

20

Phosphoric acid is in fact an ingredient of Coca Cola. It’s part of the 0.5 % that isn’t water or sugar.

21

There is an existing cocktail called a ‘Slow Comfortable Screw’, or, in its more advanced incarnation, a ‘A Long Slow Comfortable Screw Up against the Wall’.

This drink consists of Sloe Gin (hence the ‘slow’), Southern Comfort (hence the ‘comfortable’), Orange Juice (which is what makes a screwdriver a screwdriver and not merely a bloody big vodka; hence the ‘screw’), a float of Galliano (which is in a Harvey Wallbanger; hence the ‘up against the wall’), served in a long glass (hence… oh, work it out for yourself).

22

‘Gonne’ is actually an existing older spelling for ‘gun’ that can be found in e.g. the works of Chaucer.

23

Discworld’s unusual setup, and this is one of the more elegant ones, since there obviously can’t be polar bears on the Disc…

24

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl. Of doo-wop fame.

25

Terry has admitted that the Duke of Eorl’s conversational style was a bit of a dig at the way discussions on the net are typically held. People posting to Usenet newsgroups will often prefix even the most dogmatic monologues or megalomaniacal statements with the words “In my humble opinion…”, in a (usually futile) attempt to render themselves invulnerable to criticism. The qualifier is used so often on the net that it even has its own acronym: ‘IMHO’, so you won’t have to type so much when you use it.

26

Webster’s defines chrysoprase as an applegreen variety of chalcedony, used as gem, but literally from the Greek words ‘chrusos’, gold and ‘prason’, leek. Chalcedony is a semi-precious blue-gray variety of quartz, composed of very small crystals packed together with a fibrous, waxy appearance.

Note how both the ‘gold’ etymology and the ‘waxy appearance’ perfectly match Chrysoprase’s character as the rich, suave, uptown Mafia-troll.

Chrysoprase already appears (off-stage) in Wyrd Sisters, but his name is spelled ‘Crystophrase’ there.

27

This may be far-fetched, but exactly the same joke appears in the 1980 movie Airplane! (renamed Flying High in some countries).

28

This mushroom actually exists. The Latin name translates quite literally to “Shameless penis”. In English its common name is “Stinkhorn fungus”, and it has been described to me as a large, phallus-shaped, pallid, woodland fungus smelling very strongly of rotten meat, and usually covered with flies. “Once experienced, never forgotten”, as my source puts it.

Another mushroom expert subsequently mailed me a long, detailed description of the toadstool’s appearance, which I’m not going to include here. Suffice it to say that it’s full of phrases like “yellow, glutinous goo”, “the head exudes a black slime” and “I’ve smelled these from 50 paces on a still day”.

And no, the Phallus Impudicus is not edible.

29

In reality, nitro-cellulose (also known as guncotton) is an extremely explosive substance that was discovered by people trying to make artificial ivory for billiard balls. Camphor is nicely flammable in its own right.

30

As well as being alchemist-speak for ‘back to the drawing board’ (a crucible is a container used in high-temperature melting), there is also the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield where the World Snooker Championships are played.

31

It can easily be observed that the Mona Lisa’s eyes follow one around the room; Leonardo da Vinci supposedly achieved this by using some mysterious painting technique that only the greatest of painters are capable of. But as Tom Burnham explains in his Dictionary of Misinformation: “The eyes-that-follow-you trick is a simple one, used by innumerable artists in everything from posters to billboards.”

32

Joseph (Joey) Grimaldi was a famous English clown and pantomime of the 19th century. He was so influential and instrumental in creating the modern concept of the clown that circus clowns are still called “Joeys” after him.

33

A reference to C. S. Lewis’s classic fantasy story The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, in which the heroes are magically transported to the Land of Narnia through the back of an old wardrobe, which was made from a tree that grew from the seeds of a magical apple taken from that Land long before.

34

This is almost a direct quote from a scene in Twin Peaks:

35

For a while I thought we had finally found a troll whose name wasn’t mineral-related, but no: zorgite is a metallic copper-lead selenide, found at Zorge, in the German Harz Mountains.

36

Ogham is the name of an existing runic script found in the British Isles (mostly in Ireland) and dating back at least to the 5th century. The Pratchett Archives contain a file with more information about the oghamic alphabet, including pictures of the individual characters.

37

People keep seeing a Monty Python reference in this, because they are reminded of the “Eggs, bacon, beans and spam…” sketch.

But Terry says: “It’s not really Python. Until recently transport cafes always had menus like that, except that ‘Chips’ was the recurrent theme. I used to go to one where you could order: Doublegg n Chips n Fried Slice, Doublegg n Doublechips n Doublebeans n Soss…

..and so on…

The key thing was that you couldn’t avoid the chips. I think if anyone’d ever ordered a meal without chips they’d have been thrown out.

Note for UK types: this place was the White Horse Café at Cherhill on the A4. Probably just a memory. It wasn’t far from where some famous rock star lunched himself in his car, although, come to think of it, not on chips.”

38

Some people on a.f.p. indicated that they had difficulty understanding just what the Gargoyle was saying, so here is a translation into English of his side of the dialogue:

39

The last two items are equivalents of two of our world’s ‘seven wonders of antiquity’: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes. The Quirm memorial is less obvious. Perhaps Mausoleus’ Tomb?

There is also a similarity between the Colossus of Morpork and the sequence in Rob Reiner’s 1985 movie This Is Spinal Tap where a Stonehenge menhir, supposedly 30 feet high, is constructed to be 30 inches high, and ends up being trodden on by a dwarf.

40

Terry is probably just referring to a generic stage musical stereotype here, but the production number mentioned most frequently by my correspondents as fitting the context is ‘Who Will Buy?’ from Oliver!, a musical version of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

41

This comes from the nursery rhyme Hark! Hark!. The Mother Goose version goes:

Opies’ Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes gives the last two lines as:

Terry’s household nursery rhyme book must strike a balance between these two versions. The rhyme is said to be about the mob of Dutchmen that William of Orange brought over with him to England in 1688, with the “one in a velvet gown” being the Prince himself. Or else it is a reference to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, forcing monks to beg on the streets for a living. Take your pick.

42

This makes perfect sense: since trolls have silicon brains, naturally they’d think in binary. Every number, no matter how large can be represented in binary (29, for instance, is 11101; sixteen plus eight plus four plus one). Cuddy is therefore absolutely right when he points out to Detritus: “If you can count to two, you can count to anything!”

43

In one of the early Twin Peaks episodes, Agent Cooper praises the coffee at the Great Northern Hotel, and is very precise in ordering breakfast, specifying the way the bacon etc. should be cooked and asking for a cup of coffee which is “Black as moonlight on a moonless night”. Although the waitress at the Hotel is considerably less inclined to nitpick than Sham Harga, she also makes a comment along the lines of “That’s a pretty tough order”.

44

This entire scene is a loose parody of David Lynch’s cult TV series Twin Peaks, where the protagonists are forever eating doughnuts and drinking “damn fine coffee”.

45

“Corpus delicti” is a Latin phrase meaning the victim’s body in a murder case.

46

Paraphrase of a famous quote by Winston Churchill, referring to Russia: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”

47

Terry has confirmed that Grope Alley is based on Threadneedle Street in the City of London, which used to be the haunt of prostitutes and hence rejoiced in the name ‘Gropecunte Lane’ — its modern name is just a more euphemistic way of putting things. It’s the site of the Bank of England. Some would consider this to be appropriate.

There’s also a Grope Alley in Shrewsbury, getting its name from the Tudor buildings on either side almost meeting each other at roof level, causing one to have to grope along.

48

As far as I can tell this is utter and total balderdash. ‘Policeman’ indeed comes from ‘polis’, but ‘polite’ comes from the Latin ‘polire’, to polish.

49

This, however, appears to be true, according to Brewer’s, who says that it is “more likely” that ‘copper’ derives from ‘cop’ (instead of the other way around!), as in the verb ‘to cop something’, which indeed comes from the Latin ‘capere’, to take.

50

From the folk song ‘Molly Malone’:

I am told that the statue that was put up in Dublin in honour of Molly was such an artistic failure, that it is now fondly known by the Dubliners as “The Tart with the Cart”.

51

This time, Leonard has invented the rubber-band-powered model aeroplane.

52

From the saying (of inventions): “the greatest thing since sliced bread”.

53

The reference to Charlie Brown’s struggle against the kite-eating tree in Charles M. Shultz’s comic strip Peanuts will be obvious to most readers, but perhaps not everyone will realise that in Leonardo da Vinci’s time a cartoon was also a full-size sketch used to plan a painting.

54

I’m rather proud of figuring this one out, because I really hadn’t a clue as to why this Fish Bar would be such a bad idea. Then it occurred to me to look up the word ‘Dagon’. Webster’s doesn’t have it, but luckily Brewer saves the day, as usual: ‘Dagon’ is the Hebrew name for the god Atergata of the Philistines; half woman and half fish.

It was actually a Dagon temple that the biblical Samson managed to push down in his final effort to annoy the Philistenes (Judges 16:23, “Then the lords of the Philistines gathered them together for to offer a great sacrifice unto Dagon their god, and to rejoice: for they said, Our god hath delivered Samson our enemy into our hand.”)

After including this annotation in earlier editions of the APF, there have been numerous emails from people pointing out that H. P. Lovecraft also uses the entity Father Dagon as the leader of the Deep Ones in some of his horror stories. Terry has confirmed, however, that the inspiration for his Dagon goes back to the original source, not Lovecraft’s incarnation.

55

Take an old, battered car of the type that the Waynes and Kevins of our world (boyfriends to Sharon and Tracey) often drive — a Ford Cortina or Capri is the usual candidate in the UK. Respray it metallic purple. Some go-faster stripes, possibly a la ‘Starsky and Hutch’ may be appropriate at this time. Plaster rear window with car stickers in dubious taste: “Passion wagon — don’t laugh it could be your daughter inside”, “My other car is a Porsche”, or even: “I ♥ Ankh-Morpork”. Advanced students might like to experiment with a stick-on cuddly Garfield in the rear window. Put in stretch seat-covers, preferably in luminous pink fur. Add a Sun-strip, possibly with the names of the owner and ‘His bird’ on them (so they can remember where to sit presumably). Hang a pair of fluffy dice from the rear-view mirror. That kind of vehicle.

56

Coprolith = a fossilised turd.

57

“Toute suite” = immediately. One of the few bits of French that the typical Brit is said to remember from schooldays.

58

Terry is not referring to Mountain Dew, the American soft drink, but is using the term in its original meaning, as a colloquialism for whisky — particularly, the homemade ‘moonshine’ variety.

59

The major sewer in ancient Rome, running down into the Tiber, was called the Cloaca Maxima. Anything with ‘Via’ in its name would have been a street or road. The Cloaca Maxima was actually a tunnel.

60

Loofah is a genus of tropical climbing plant bearing a fruit, the fibrous skeleton of which is used for scrubbing backs in the bath.

61

The best-known song in Walt Disney’s 1937 full length animation movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is sung by the seven dwarfs and starts:

62

Reference to the art of making shadow animals with your hands, as described in Moving Pictures: “‘Mainly my uncle did “Deformed Rabbit”, said Victor. ‘He wasn’t very good at it, you see.’”

63

Nobby is imitating Eddie Murphy. Terry explains:

“Almost a trademark of the basic Murphy character in a tight spot is to whip out any badge or piece of paper that looks vaguely official and simply gabble official-sounding jargon, which sounds as if he’s making it up as he goes along but nevertheless browbeats people into doing what he wants. As in:

‘I’m special agent Axel Foley of the Special… Division… Secret… Anti-Drugs… Secret… Undercover… Taskforce, that’s who I am, and I want to know right now who’s in charge here, right now!’

Cpl Nobbs uses this technique to get into the Armoury in M@A.”

64

This is straight from The Terminator. Arnold says to the gun shop owner: “Have you got a phase plasma rifle in the 40 watt range?” and the shopkeeper responds: “Hey, just what you see, pal”.

65

‘meteor’ refers back to Sgt Colon’s use of the French word ‘métier’ a few pages back…

66

These two trolls first appeared as actors in Moving Pictures.

As far as their names go, Flint is obvious, but I had to look up Morraine: Webster spells it with one ‘r’, and defines it as “the debris of rocks, gravel, etc. left by a melting glacier”.

An email correspondent subsequently pointed out to me that Webster’s definition is lacking, because (a) the spelling with two r’s is valid, and (b) morraine is unstratified debris only. If it were stratified it would be called esker or kame, which are of course fluvioglacial products rather than just glacial.

67

From the old saying: “It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness”.

68

Monty Python’s ‘Dinsdale’ sketch:

Vercotti: I’ve seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than see Doug. Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug.

Interviewer: What did he do?

Vercotti: He used sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire.

Presenter: By a combination of violence and sarcasm the Piranha brothers, by February 1966, controlled London and the South East.

69

Very obvious, but still: it is the conventional stereotype that both under-sized males as well as black males are ‘better-endowed’ than white males. Hence the joke: ‘What is fifteen inches long and white?’ Answer: ‘Nothing’.

70

Another Grimaldi reference. See the annotation for p. 143/108.

71

Clowns’ faces are trademarked and cannot be copied by any other clown (unlike clothes or a specific act). If you are a clown, you can send a photograph of your face to the Clown and Character Registry, where the face is then painted on a goose egg (a tradition dating back to the 1500s) and stored.

72

All through the 1960s and 1970s, TV commercials for Pal (“Prolongs Active Life”) dog food used to claim that it contained “nourishing marrowbone jelly”, and showed an oozing bone to prove it.

73

Slogan of the US National Rifle Association.

74

More troll names. For Bauxite see the annotation for p. 49/37. Bluejohn is another one I had to look up, and again I was saved by Brewer’s, because Webster’s doesn’t have it. Blue John is “A petrifaction of blue fluor-spar, found in the Blue John mine of Treak Cliff, Derbyshire; and so called to distinguish it from the Black Jack, an ore of zinc. Called John from John Kirk, a miner, who first noticed it.”.

Brewer’s may not have the final word on this, however. A correspondent tells me that Blue John is actually derived from a rock called ‘Bleu-Jaune’ (blue-yellow) because of its mixed colouring. This rock was originally named in French either because it was first found shortly after the Norman invasion or because the buyers were primarily French.

75

“Every French soldier carries in his cartridge-pouch the baton of a marshal of France.” Said originally by Napoleon, though of course he would have pronounced it as “Tout soldat francais porte dans sa giberne le baton de mere’chal de France.”

Note that on p. 297/226 Detritus repeats the phrase as “You got a field-marshal’s button in your knapsack”, while on p. 302/23 Cuddy creatively manages “You could have a field-marshal’s bottom in your napkin”.

76

Detritus in drill sergeant mode replays a scene from the movie An Officer and a Gentleman, in which sergeant Foley (played by Louis Gossett, Jr) has a conversation with a new recruit as follows:

77

One of the members of the legendary Swedish pop group Abba was Bjorn Ulvaeus. Obviously, by Discworld logic, if Bjorn is a typical dwarf name, so is Abba. Not to mention the ‘Bjorn Again’ pun Death makes on p. 82/62: Bjorn Again is the name of an Australian band with a repertoire that consists entirely of Abba covers.

78

A phrase originating from US forces slang during the Vietnam war, where the tour of duty was fixed so the ‘grunts’ knew exactly how long, to the day, until they were due back in ‘the world’. A short timer was one who didn’t have long to go and therefore didn’t want to put himself at undue risk — hence “I’m too short for this shit”.

Another popular reference to this expression is “I’m too old for this shit”, a catchphrase for Danny Glover’s character in the Lethal Weapon series of movies.

Terry adds:

“‘I’m too short for this shit’ is a line that has appeared in at least two grunt movies. I had intended Cuddy to use it in the sewers…”

79

Reference to the famous werewolf transformation scenes in the 1981 horror movie An American Werewolf in London.

80

A reference to the film The Third Man. Terry says:

“It may be that there is a whole generation now to whom The Third Man is just a man after the second man. And after all, it wasn’t set in Vienna, Ohio, so it probably never got shown in the US:-)”

The book contains a couple of other resonances with The Third Man. In the film, the British, French, American and Russian occupation troops in Vienna patrol the city in groups of four, one from each country, to keep an eye on each other. Carrot sends the Watch out in similar squads of a human, a dwarf and a troll. The final chase through the sewers under the city also mirrors the film.

81

The Discworld version of an old army Sgt Major yell to get the troops up in the morning: “Hands off cocks, on with socks!”.

82

The New Model Army, besides supplying the name for a Goth group, was the Parliamentarian army which turned the tide of the English Civil War, and ensured the defeat of King Charles I.

83

Lord Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib:

A cohort is not an item of clothing or armour but a division of the old Roman Army: the tenth part of a legion, 300 to 600 men.

84

Fondel = Händel.

85

Johann Sebastian Bach’s initials are ‘JSB’, which is ‘BSJ’ backwards, and Bach was of course also involved in organ music. But Terry has mentioned numerous times (not just on-line but also in The Discworld Companion) that he did not choose the name with this intention at all.

86

Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, act 5, scene 1: “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him”.

87

“I ain’t got time to bleed!” is a line from Predator, another Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie.

88

Paraphrase of a famous quip Mark Twain cabled to Associated Press after they had reported his demise.

89

The scene with Vimes’ watch mirrors the movie For a Few Dollars More. All the way through this film, the bad guy has been letting a watch chime, telling his victims to go for their gun when the chimes stop (of course he always draws first and kills them). At the end of the film his victim is Lee van Cleef, and just as the watch chimes stop, Clint Eastwood enters with another watch, chiming away, to ensure Lee gets his chance and all is well.

Terry says: “[…] when the play of Men At Arms was done a couple of months ago, [Stephen Briggs]’s people actually went to the trouble of getting a recording of the ‘right’ tune for the watch.

It was interesting to hear the laughter spread as people recognised it…”

90

In the Sidney Poitier movie In the Heat of the Night the most famous line (and indeed the name of the sequel) is Poitier saying “They call me Mister Tibbs.”

91

Is the Pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the woods?

92

From the quip (attributed to feminist Gloria Steinem): “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Note that the bicycle is not known on the Discworld to anybody but the Patrician and Leonard of Quirm. And they don’t know what it is.