The Wisdom of Terry Pratchett (Part III)

These are from “Guards! Guards!” One of my all-time favorites.

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The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

And it be well for a knowlessman that he not be here, for he would be taken from his place and his gaskin slit, his moules shown to the four winds, his welchet torn asunder with many hooks and his figgin placed upon a spike!

A figgin is defined in the Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words as “a small short-crust pasty containing raisins.” The Dictionary would have been invaluable for the Supreme Grand Master when he thought up the Society’s oaths, since it also included welchet (“a type of waistcoat worn by certain clock-makers”), a gaskin (“a shy, gray-brown bird of the coot family”), and moules (“a game of skill and dexterity, involving tortoises”).

One of the remarkable innovations introduced by the Patrician was to make the Thieves’ Guild responsible for theft, with annual budgets, forward planning and, above all, rigid jobs protection. Thus, in return for an agreed average level of crime per annum, the thieves themselves saw to it that unauthorized crime was met with the full force of injustice, which was generally a stick with nails in.

Splatter: Like a bouncer, but allowed to use more force.

It was said the Patrician would tolerate absolutely anything apart from anything that threatened the city..and mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white ace who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh’s crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn the Words.

The Guild of Fire Fighters had been outlawed by the Patrician the previous year after many complaints. The point was that, if you bought a contract from the Guild, your house would be protected against fire. Unfortunately, the general Ankh-Morpork ethos quickly came to the fore and fire fighters would tend to go to prospective clients’ houses in groups, making loud comments like “Very inflammable looking place, this” and “Probably go up like a firework with just one carelessly-dropped match, know what I mean?”

The phrase “Set a thief to catch a thief” had by this time (after strong representations from the Thieves’ Guild) replaced a much older and quintessentially Ankh-Morporkian proverb, which was “Set a deep hole with spring-loaded sides, tripwires, whirling knife-blades driven by water power, broken glass and scorpions, to catch a thief.”

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1)Silence 2)Books must be returned no later than the last date shown and 3)Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn’t really need to practice anymore because they had got so good at it. City law said that only condemned criminals should be used, but that was all right because in most of the religions, refusing to volunteer for sacrifice was an offense punishable by death.

That’s really all, folks.