Reaper Man

1

In this case, three better places. The front gates of Nos 31, 7, and 34 Elm Street, Ankh-Morpork.^{*}

* Minor inconsistency: we are told the conversation between the pines lasts seventeen years, so when the old one finally gets chopped down, its age should have been 31751 years, not still 31734.

2

At least, until the day they suddenly pick up a paperknife and carve their way out through Cost Accounting and into forensic history.

3

The post of Senior Wrangler was an unusual one, as was the name itself. In some centres of learning, the Senior Wrangler is a leading philosopher; in others, he’s merely someone who looks after horses. The Senior Wrangler at Unseen University was a philosopher who looked like a horse, thus neatly encapsulating all definitions.

4

It is true that the undead cannot cross running water. However, the naturally turbid river Ankh, already heavy with the mud of the plains, does not, after having passed through the city (pop. 1, 000,000) necessarily qualify under the term ‘running’ or, for that matter, ‘water’.

5

Although not common on the Discworld there are, indeed, such things as anti-crimes, in accordance with the fundamental law that everything in the multiverse has an opposite. They are, obviously, rare. Merely giving someone something is not the opposite of robbery; to be an anti-crime, it has to be done in such a way as to cause outrage and/or humiliation to the victim. So there is breaking-and-decorating, proffering-with-embarrassment (as in most retirement presentations) and whitemailing (as in threatening to reveal to his enemies a mobster’s secret donations, for example, to charity). Anti-crimes have never really caught on.

6

i. e., everywhere outside the Shades.

7

Rains of fish, for example, were so common in the little landlocked village of Pine Dressers that it had a flourishing smoking, canning and kipper-filleting industry. And in the mountain regions of Syrrit many sheep, left out in the fields all night, would be found in the morning to be facing the other way, without the apparent intervention of any human agency.

8

Someone who will put certainly salt and probably pepper on any meal you put in front of them whatever it is and regardless of how much it’s got on it already and regardless of how it tastes. Behavioural psychiatrists working for fast-food outlets around the universe have saved billions of whatever the local currency is by noting the autocondimenting phenomenon and advising their employers to leave seasoning out in the first place. This is really true.

9

Many songs have been written about the bustling metropolis,^{*} the most famous of course being: ‘Ankh-Morpork! Ankh-Morpork! So good they named it Ankh-Morpork!’, but others have included ‘Carry Me Away From Old Ankh-Morpork’, ‘I Fear I’m Going Back to Anhk-Morpork’ and the old favourite, ‘Ankh-Morpork Malady.’

* Ok, let’s see.

‘Ankh-Morpork! Ankh-Morpork! So good they named it Ankh-Morpork!’ comes from ‘New York, New York‘, ‘Carry Me Away From Old Ankh-Morpork‘ is ‘Carry Me Back To Old Virginia‘, and ‘Ankh-Morpork Malady‘ may be ‘Broadway melody‘.

‘I Fear I’m Going Back to Ankh-Morpork‘ has not been traced to a particular song title, but general opinion holds that it is a spoof of the Bee Gees song ‘Massachussetts‘, which starts out “Feel I’m goin‘ back to Massachussetts”.

10

It would say, for example, that you would shortly undergo a painful bowel movement.

11

Mrs Cake was aware that some religions had priestesses. What Mrs Cake thought about the ordination of women was unprintable. The religions with priestesses in Ankh-Morpork tended to attract a large crowd of plain-clothes priests from other denominations who were looking for a few hours’ respite somewhere where they wouldn’t encounter Mrs Cake.

12

A song which, in various languages, is common on every known world in the multiverse. It is always sung by the same people, viz., the people who, when they grow up, will be the people who the next generation sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ at.

13

The only building on the campus less than a thousand years old. The senior wizards have never bothered much about what the younger, skinnier and more bespectacled wizards get up to in there, treating their endless requests for funding for thaumic particle accelerators and radiation shielding as one treats pleas for more pocket money, and listening with amusement to their breathless accounts of the search for the elementary particles of magic itself. This may one day turn out to be a major error on the part of the senior wizards, especially if they do let the younger wizards build whatever that blasted thing is they keep wanting to build in the squash court.^{*}

The senior wizards know that the proper purpose of magic is to form a social pyramid with the wizards on top of it, eating big dinners, but in fact the HEM building has helped provide one of the rarest foods in the universe — antipasta. Ordinary pasta is prepared some hours before being eaten. Antipasta is created some hours after the meal, whereupon it then exists backwards in time, and if properly prepared should arrive on the taste buds at exactly the same moment, thus creating a true taste explosion. It costs five thousand dollars a forkful, or a little more if you include the cost of cleaning the tomato sauce off the walls afterwards.

* This is a reference to the fact that the first nuclear reactor, built by Enrico Fermi, was indeed erected under a squash court.

Irrelevant, but interesting, is that for a long time Russian physicists, misled by a poor translation, believed that Fermi’s work was done in a ‘pumpkin field‘.

14

People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water’s fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory.

15

Vermine are small black-and-white rodents found in the Ramtop Mountains. They are ancestors of the lemming, which as is well known throws itself over cliffs and drowns in lakes on a regular basis. Vermine used to do that, too. The point is, though, that dead animals don’t breed, and over the millennia more and more vermine were descendants of those vermine who, when faced with a cliff edge, squeaked the rodent equivalent of Blow that for a Game of Soldiers. Vermine now abseil down cliffs, and build small boats to cross lakes. When their rush leads them to the seashore they sit around avoiding one another’s gaze for a while, and then leave early to get home before the rush.

16

The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

17

It is traditional, when loading wire trolleys, to put the most fragile items at the bottom.

18

It is generally thought, on those worlds where the mall lifeform has seeded, that people take the wire baskets away and leave them in strange and isolated places, so that squads of young men have to be employed to gather them together and wheel them back. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. In reality the men are hunters, stalking their rattling prey across the landscape, trapping them, breaking their spirit, taming them and herding them to a life of slavery. Possibly.

19

The most enthusiastic of these was the small but persistent and incredibly successful Casanunder the Dwarf, a name mentioned with respect and awe wherever stepladder owners are gathered together.

20

‘Lost Jewelled Temple Roof Repair Fund! Only 6,000 gold pieces to go!! Please Give Generously!! Thankyou!!!’