Witches Abroad - Terry Pratchett [110]
*Which explains a lot about witches.
*Desiderata had sent a note via Old Mother Dismass asking to be excused on account of being dead. Second sight enables you to keep a very tight rein on your social engagements.
*Nanny Ogg didn’t know what a coquette was, although she could probably hazard a guess.
*Hence, for example, the Way of Mrs. Cosmopolite, very popular among young people who live in the hidden valleys above the snowline in the high Ramtops. Disdaining the utterances of their own saffron-clad, prayer-wheel-spinning elders, they occasionally travel all the way to No. 3 Quirm Street in flat and foggy Ankh-Morpork, to seek wisdom at the feet of Mrs. Marietta Cosmopolite, a seamstress. No one knows the reason for this, apart from the aforesaid attractiveness of distant wisdom, since they can’t understand a word she says or, more usually, screams at them. Many a bald young monk returns to his high fastness to meditate on the strange mantra vouchsafed to him, such as “Push off, you!” and “If I see one more of you little orange devils peering in at me he’ll feel the edge of my hand, all right?” and “Why are you buggers all coming around here staring at my feet?” They have even developed a special branch of martial arts based on their experiences, where they shout incomprehensibly at one another and then hit their opponent with a broom.
*Granny Weatherwax had once pressed him about this, and since there are no secrets from a witch, he’d shyly replied, “Well, ma’am, what happens is, I gets hold of ’un and smacks ’un between the eyes with hammer before ’un knows what’s ’appening, and then I whispers in his ear, I sez, ‘Cross me, you bugger, and I’ll have thy goolies on t’anvil, thou knows I can.’”
*Many of the more traditional dwarf tribes have no female pronouns, like “she” or “her.” It follows that the courtship of dwarfs is an incredibly tactful affair.
*Well, not often. Not on a daily basis, anyway. At least, not everywhere. But probably in some cold countries people say, “Hey, those eskimos! What a people! Fifty words for snow! Can you believe that? Amazing!” quite a lot.
*Of course, lots of dwarfs, trolls, native people, trappers, hunters and the merely badly lost had discovered it on an almost daily basis for thousands of years. But they weren’t explorers and didn’t count.
*Nanny Ogg sent a number of cards home to her family, not a single one of which got back before she did. This is traditional, and happens everywhere in the universe.
*Something about Nanny Ogg rubbed off on people
*The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people.
*Black Aliss wasn’t very good with words either. They had to give her quite a lot of money to go away and not make a scene.
*Whereas in Ankh-Morpork, business was often so slow that some of the more go-ahead Guild members put adverts in shop windows offering deals like “Stab two, poison one free.”
*Ronald the Third of Lancre, believed to be an extremely upleasant monarch, was remembered by posterity only in this obscure bit of rhyming slang.
*Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling “banana,” but didn’t know how you stopped.
*Always in front of you in any queue, for a start.
*Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.
*As Desiderata said, fairy godmothers tend to get heavily involved with kitchens.
*Two logs and hope.
*This is the last line of a Discworld joke lost, alas, to posterity.
About the Author
Terry Pratchett is one of the most popular living authors in the world. His first story was published when he was thirteen, and his first full-length book when he was twenty. He worked as a journalist to support the writing habit, but gave