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EspañolMINOR DISCWORLD CONCEPTS
This article details 'minor Discworld concepts': concepts and ideas from the ''Discworld'' of novels by Terry Pratchett which only appear in the background, or are not well fleshed out.
An anorankh is a pseudo-mystical symbol, consisting of an ankh wearing an anorak. It stems from a discussion on alt.fan.pratchett, a newsgroup for fans of British author Terry Pratchett, creator of the highly popular ''Discworld'' series of humorous fantasy novels. One user mistakenly used the word "anorak" to refer to the ancient Egyptian symbol of life, the "ankh". A series of puns ensued which was eventually joined by Pratchett himself, who commissioned the first Holy Anorankh from Clarecraft, the company responsible for creating the series of official Discworld figurines. Clarecraft eventually made two designs commercially available, one silver and one pewter. Both designs are generally worn as necklaces or earrings, and they have since become an unofficial symbol of Pratchett-fandom.
In Maskerade, Granny Weatherwax remarks that a girl named Colette is wearing "fascinatin' earrings." This is a reference to a fan that Terry met at a convention; being impressed with her Anorankh earrings, he offered her a cameo in his next novel.
An image of the Holy Anorankh design is available here.
The L-Space Web's A.F.P (alt.fan.pratchett) Timeline
Martin Walser's ''anorak'' post
A rare type of crime, or rather, the opposite of crime. An anti-crime, as defined in ''Reaper Man'', must:
Even on the Discworld, or more likely, especially on the Discworld, anti-crime has never really caught on.
The inhospitable Koom Valley was home to an ancient battle between dwarfs and trolls that both species came to use as an excuse for their mutual enmity. It was said to be the only known battle in which both sides ambushed the other, and acted as inspiration for the development of the game of Thud.
Later engagements have led to a total of sixteen battles of Koom Valley (seventeen counting a "fracas" in Vilinus Pass), only three of which took place in the valley itself. This is in part due to the battle being a convenient patch for rips in time often used by the History Monks, although the ''History of Thud'' suggests that something about the valley itself encourages violence (this ''might'' be related to the Summoning Dark). Over time, as Vimes notes in ''Thud!'' the Battle of Koom Valley ceased to be tied to any one location, and tended to appear anywhere and everywhere as a justification for any conflicts whatsoever between dwarfs and trolls.
Koom Valley's story is eventually revealed in the novel ''Thud!'': The intention was to sign a treaty, but heavy fog came down, and when it lifted some took the sudden sighting of their mortal enemies for an ambush and tried to attack. Both sides fell on their own to keep this from happening, and fought until a flash flood washed them all away. The only word to come from the valley was exactly the wrong one.
This led to the continuation of the enmity until the efforts of Commander Vimes of the Ankh Morpork City Watch revealed the truth thousands of years later, in the process uncovering the last resting place of B'hrian Bloodaxe, the first Low King. He was playing an early form of Thud with Diamond, king of Trolls.
The name "Koom" is a reference to the Welsh word ''cwm'', which is pronounced "koom" and means "valley". Thus "Koom Valley" means "Valley Valley." Pratchett has an admitted fondness for tautological place-names, such as "Cheetwood", which literally means "Woodwood," and Torpenhow Hill, which means "Hillhillhill Hill."
Boffo is described by Pratchett as "the power of expectations"; the strength one gains from behaving exactly as someone expects you to. Boffo is introduced by the witch Eumenides Treason in ''Wintersmith'' as a means by which she ensures people take her seriously. It gets its name from the Boffo Novelty and Joke Shop, no. 4, Tenth Egg Street, Ankh-Morpork, from which Miss Treason purchases most of her interior decorating supplies. It is possible that the shop is run by a clown called Boffo, a minor character in Men At Arms. Frequently purchased items include fake skulls, fake spiders' webs and her hat (Wicked Witch #3- "A must for scary parties"). No witch actually has spiders' webs in her cottage or keeps skulls for any reason, but people ''expect'' witches to do so and Miss Treason obliges them, the better to ensure that when people come calling they don't see what is really there (a tired, blind 111-year-old woman), but what they expect (a venerable, terrifying 113-year-old witch). She also ensures that many of the rumours about her (that she has a demon in her cellar, that she eats spiders, that she has a clockwork heart) are kept current and circulating, to ensure the presence of "Boffo thinking" among her clients. As a concept, Boffo is hardly unique to the Discworld; Rolex watches, Armani suits and the crowns of kings are all, in their own ways, Boffo, only more expensive.
Introduced in The Truth, dark light is described by Otto Chriek as being the original form of light that all other forms of light came from. Otto was experimenting with dark light in order to take "obscurographs", iconographs using dark light given off by the Uberwaldean Land Eel (see Olm) instead of normal light given off by salamanders. There were a few unintended side effects of using dark light. The first stemming from the fact that dark light is detached from time resulting in iconographs that not only show the present but the past and even the future. Dark light is also said to be "seen by the dark eyes of the mind". This results in any one exposed to dark light to feel like they've had an icicle hammered into their head. Iconographs taken with dark light apparently show either dark part of the subject's psyche (such as Mr. Pin's past murders) or hidden motivations (such as William De Worde's urge ''not'' to be like his father), though there may be other effects not revealed in the book.
The Multiverse has seen the evolution of Rhyming slang in many times and places. What most examples of the genre have in common is the element of rhyme. There is, however, one exception.
Dimwell arrhythmic rhyming slang (DARS) has so far (2007) appeared only in Going Postal, where it is spoken by Tolliver Groat, the elderly Junior Postman. On first introduction to him, the new Postmaster, Moist von Lipwig is disconcerted by Tolliver's denial of his toupée, when he asserts, "It's all mine, you know, not a prunes." Explanation reveals that in DARS, "syrup of prunes" means wig.
There are only a few examples of DARS in Going Postal, and we are not vouchsafed the specific meaning and derivation in each case. Some are:
★ cup-and-plate - no definition but "He's a bit cup-and-plate in the head" implies it means "not quite right"
★ syrup of prunes - wig
A small short-crust pasty containing raisins, according to the ''Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words''. (''Guards! Guards!'') Noted, in addition to the amusing confusion derived from sounding like some sort of euphemism, for its role in the end of Mad Lord Snapcase (Havelock Vetinari's predecessor as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork) who was hung up by his figgin following a revolt. (''Interesting Times''). It is possible the meaning has changed over the years, but then, there may really be a ''horrifying'' aspect to being hung next to a piece of pastry.
Having nothing to do with religious art, 'iconography' is the Disc's eqivalent of photography.
Unlike a normal camera, the iconograph contains a tiny imp who quickly paints the pictures (also called iconographs) of the subject at hand. If it is too dim for the imps to see, salamanders can be used as a flashgun. The iconograph is first seen in ''The Colour of Magic'' owned by Twoflower, the Discworld's first tourist. Although not explicitly stated in the books, they were presumably first used in the Agatean Empire, but have since become very popular in Ankh-Morpork.
In ''Moving Pictures'', iconographic technology is used to make films, however this has been discontinued. In ''Men At Arms'', the iconograph imp is referred to as a brownie, a pun referring to the Brownie camera. In ''The Fifth Elephant'', the Ankh-Morpork City Watch traffic division, under Sergeant Fred Colon, uses iconographs and stopwatches to record cart drivers who speed over bridges. This book also features an iconograph the size of a cigarette packet, with a tiny nano-imp, used by spies. In ''The Truth'', Otto Chriek is the iconographer for the newspaper ''The Ankh-Morpork Times'', and invents methods of printing iconographs in colour. In ''Monstrous Regiment'', Chriek can transmit iconographs thousands of miles through the Clacks semaphore system.
''See also: Discworld Gods: Imps''
Described in ''Thud!''. This is a condition that may be experienced by a woman who is so beautiful, so alluring, that, as Angua describes it, any man with half a brain isn't even going to think about asking her out, because it's obvious she's too grand for the likes of him. This leads her to believe that the problem is at her end, and that there must be something wrong with her. This persists until she meets a man who does not have half a brain (i.e. is too stupid to realize she'll likely reject him, or is so used to rejection that it doesn't bother him, or has some other flaw that stems from an even ''more'' major flaw), and he does in fact ask her out, and she is so grateful that she says yes; it is implied that problems ensue because she is, as it were, going to a fancy, lavish restaurant and only ordering a bread roll and maybe a small salad. The concept is used in reference to Tawneee, who is the quintessential example of this with Nobby, although the strange part is that she actually ''likes'' him.
'Knurdness' is the opposite of being drunk; not sober, but as far from sober as drunkenness, except in the opposite direction. It strips away all the illusion, all the comforting pink fog in which people normally spend their lives, and lets them see and think clearly for the first time ever. This, needless to say, is a very traumatic experience though it sometimes leads to important discoveries. Those seeking to treat drunkenness by having the sufferer drink Klatchian coffee should take care, lest they send him too far the other way - through sobriety and out the other side.
Also, Samuel Vimes, one of the Discworld's most notable characters, is sometimes referred to as being constantly knurd and two drinks short of actual sobriety, which at least partially accounts for his depressive nature and tendency towards alcoholism—he started out looking for a cure to knurdness.
It is also noted in the instance where Vimes gets knurd, that most people who ever get knurd make sure never to get knurd again.
Knurd written in reverse spells "drunk".
The colour of magic, also often called the ''eighth colour''. Octarine is strongly indicative of magic and can only be seen by wizards and cats, who sometimes describe it as resembling a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple (note that in conventional human colour vision, colour opponency prevents the perception of reddish-greenish or yellowish-bluish colours, and it would therefore be impossible to perceive a colour as "greenish-yellow purple"; if greenish-yellow and purple lights or pigments were mixed, a shade of grey would result). The colour octarine appears as black or invisible to ordinary people.
The normal human visual system works by the presence of cones and rods in the eye. The ability of wizards to see octarine is explained by the additional presence of octagons.
A common conception of the colour is the colour of an incandescent filament when viewed through black-light film, a fluorescent white or ultrablue.
Both quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle have appeared in the Discworld in some form or another; however, neither concept even remotely resembles their counterparts from Earth.
The Uncertainty Principle seems to be simply a "scientific" or "professional" way of saying "I don't know"; Death uses it in ''The Fifth Elephant'' as an excuse to appear when people are ''possibly'' going to die, apparently in addition to their actual deaths, even though he himself isn't clear what it is. All attempts to explain it outright, such as in ''The Last Hero'', appear to be misunderstood versions of Schrödinger's cat. A slightly more accurate version has been used to explain the peculiar habits of the puzuma, and the unreliability of teleportation magic without assistance from Hex. A related concept is the Theory of Thaumic Imponderability, which says it is impossible to tell exactly what a given spell will do, until it's too late.
Quantum, on the other hand, isn't explained at all; in fact, it serves much the same function as "magic" does on Earth, as described in ''The Discworld Companion'', "a sort of get-out-of-half-understood-explanation-free card" — essentially, an explanation that does not, in fact, explain anything. It should be noted that just "magic" by itself would not be appropriate as such a non-explanation on the Discworld, since magic is a more or less fully-understood phenomenon (as in ''The Last Hero'', when Leonard of Quirm attempts to explain weightlessness in a spaceship as "er ... magic" and Rincewind asks, "What ''kind'' of magic?"). Another explanation of Quantum is given in Pyramids as "add another nought" (in regards to accounting).
It is implied in the books that Ponder Stibbons may have a better understanding of both concepts, but has given up trying to explain them to anyone.
In addition to the more common annual plants, biennial plants and perennial plants, Discworld harbors a small number of re-annual plants. These are plants which, due to a rare 4-dimensional twist in their genetic structure, flower and grow before their seed germinates. This is usually only possible in areas with considerable amounts of background magic. Farmers who grow re-annual plants are usually very careful about dates of sowing, lest they cause devastating temporal paradoxes (such as dying of starvation because the food one lived off months ago was never grown). ''The Discworld Almanak'' also mentions how a garden implement carelessly strewn among re-annuals months later can cause serious damage today, indicating that they can move items they are in contact with through time, as well.
When re-annual plant products undergo fermentation, the product is time-reversed alcohol, a rare substance much sought by fortune-tellers and the like, as ingesting it allows some ability to foretell the future, which from the point of view of the plant is the past. Time-reversed alcohol produces inebriation in the normal way, but the hangover is thrust backwards in time to several hours before the actual ingestion of the alcohol. This is known as a hangunder, and is usually very strong since one feels so dreadful one imbibes large amounts of alcohol to get over it.
The only revealed re-annual plants are the vul nut vine, which is remarkable in that it can begin to flower as much as eight years before being sown; and re-annual grapes, which are harvested a year in advance of being sown.
A small industry springing up on the area around Ankh-Morpork based on the concepts of phrenology and physiognomy. However, retrophrenologists, rather than measuring a person's head and predicting their personality traits, seek to give customers whatever traits they desire to have by moulding their heads directly. What actually happens is that the customer is hit with a selection of different sized mallets, a treatment that can be said in complete honesty not to hurt a 'bit'. The efficacy of such treatments is unknown, but at least it provides employment and keeps the money in circulation.
An alcoholic beverage drunk in very small cups some months apart (or served to strangers in pint mugs, as a sort of initiation test).
It was first introduced in ''Mort'' which tells us:
It is a parody of scrumpy and is made with apples. Well, mainly apples. Good scumble apples include the Lancre Blackheart, the Golden Disagreeable and the Green Billet. In ''Mort'' it was drunk on the Sto Plains, but in later books it is associated with Lancre, where it is distilled by Nanny Ogg (whose particular variant is known as "Suicider").
When scumble is mixed with dwarfish beer, it creates a highly intoxicating cocktail known as "Fluff".
'Slood' is something that could be discovered by intelligent civilizations, such as fire or water, but that humans on Earth have been too unintelligent to find. It is first described in ''The Last Continent''. One of Rincewind's many accumulated positions is Reader in Slood Dynamics. It is said to be much easier to discover than fire, and only slightly harder to discover than water.
''see also: Discworld magic, Fictional particles, and Thaumaturgy.''
The 'Thaum' is a measuring unit used in quantifying magic. It equals the amount of mystical energy required to conjure up one small white pigeon, or three normal-sized billiard balls. It can, of course, be measured with a thaumometer, and regular SI-modifiers apply (e.g. millithaum, kilothaum).
A thaumometer looks like a black cube with a dial on one side. A standard one is good for up to a million thaums - if there is more magic than that around, measuring it is not going to do any good.
An alternate measurement is the "Prime." It measures the amount of mystical energy required to move one pound of lead one foot. An attempt to put magic measurement into a logical framework, it never really caught on, as wizards are natural traditionalists.
Confusingly, the thaum also appears to be a particle; the magical equivalent of the atom. "Splitting the thaum" revealed that it was in fact composed of numerous sub-particles, called resons ("thingies") which came in five "flavours", up, down, sideways, sex appeal, and peppermint (see quarks). Note that since even before this discovery magical fields of less than one thaum were reported (The Light Fantastic), the particle known as the thaum must represent less magic than one thaum on the measuring scale.
The term thaum is based on the Greek term ''thauma'' (marvel), which is often used as a prefix meaning "magical" on the Discworld. It also suggests the non-SI unit of energy therm.
A fruit that grows in Howondaland. It is highly prized by some; the colour (earwax) and smell (like a sick anteater) make most people feel ill. It is also covered in spikes.
It is particularly sought after by top chefs in several Ankh-Morpork restaurants. Their food, famously and expensively, contains no trace whatsoever of the fruit.
Its name may be based on the poisonous wahoo fruit, although the description is similar to the durian.
Ankh-Morpork is known as the Big Wahoonie, although the fruit does not smell ''that'' bad.
A parody of the real world sauce of the same name. The Discworld version was invented by an uncle of Mustrum Ridcully, and its ingredients include grated wahoonie, asafoetida, scumble, sulphur and saltpetre. It is a highly unstable substance and believed to be responsible (when combined with a charcoal biscuit and an after-dinner pipe) for the elder Ridcully's explosive death. (See Black powder for why the combination might be problematic.) A presumably different uncle of Ridcully's used to swear by (or rather, swear at) Wow-Wow Sauce as a hangover cure; according to Ridcully, "He seemed very peaceful when they came to lay him out". Ridcully also advised that Wow-Wow Sauce must never be consumed when sweat is condensing on the bottle (a reference to the danger posed by dynamite that has begun to sweat its nitroglycerin).
★ Pratchett, Terry (1993). ''Men At Arms''. Gollancz.
★ Pratchett, Terry (2000). ''The Truth''. Gollancz
★ List of fictional books within the Discworld series
★ Fauna of the Discworld
★ Discworld & Pratchett Wiki
Anorankh
An anorankh is a pseudo-mystical symbol, consisting of an ankh wearing an anorak. It stems from a discussion on alt.fan.pratchett, a newsgroup for fans of British author Terry Pratchett, creator of the highly popular ''Discworld'' series of humorous fantasy novels. One user mistakenly used the word "anorak" to refer to the ancient Egyptian symbol of life, the "ankh". A series of puns ensued which was eventually joined by Pratchett himself, who commissioned the first Holy Anorankh from Clarecraft, the company responsible for creating the series of official Discworld figurines. Clarecraft eventually made two designs commercially available, one silver and one pewter. Both designs are generally worn as necklaces or earrings, and they have since become an unofficial symbol of Pratchett-fandom.
In Maskerade, Granny Weatherwax remarks that a girl named Colette is wearing "fascinatin' earrings." This is a reference to a fan that Terry met at a convention; being impressed with her Anorankh earrings, he offered her a cameo in his next novel.
An image of the Holy Anorankh design is available here.
The L-Space Web's A.F.P (alt.fan.pratchett) Timeline
Martin Walser's ''anorak'' post
Anti-crime
A rare type of crime, or rather, the opposite of crime. An anti-crime, as defined in ''Reaper Man'', must:
... be done in such a way that it causes outrage and/or humiliation to the victim. Merely giving someone something is not enough. Examples of this type include breaking-and-decorating, proffering-with-intent, and whitemailing (for example threatening to reveal a mobster's donations to charity).
Even on the Discworld, or more likely, especially on the Discworld, anti-crime has never really caught on.
Battle of Koom Valley
The inhospitable Koom Valley was home to an ancient battle between dwarfs and trolls that both species came to use as an excuse for their mutual enmity. It was said to be the only known battle in which both sides ambushed the other, and acted as inspiration for the development of the game of Thud.
Later engagements have led to a total of sixteen battles of Koom Valley (seventeen counting a "fracas" in Vilinus Pass), only three of which took place in the valley itself. This is in part due to the battle being a convenient patch for rips in time often used by the History Monks, although the ''History of Thud'' suggests that something about the valley itself encourages violence (this ''might'' be related to the Summoning Dark). Over time, as Vimes notes in ''Thud!'' the Battle of Koom Valley ceased to be tied to any one location, and tended to appear anywhere and everywhere as a justification for any conflicts whatsoever between dwarfs and trolls.
Koom Valley's story is eventually revealed in the novel ''Thud!'': The intention was to sign a treaty, but heavy fog came down, and when it lifted some took the sudden sighting of their mortal enemies for an ambush and tried to attack. Both sides fell on their own to keep this from happening, and fought until a flash flood washed them all away. The only word to come from the valley was exactly the wrong one.
This led to the continuation of the enmity until the efforts of Commander Vimes of the Ankh Morpork City Watch revealed the truth thousands of years later, in the process uncovering the last resting place of B'hrian Bloodaxe, the first Low King. He was playing an early form of Thud with Diamond, king of Trolls.
The name "Koom" is a reference to the Welsh word ''cwm'', which is pronounced "koom" and means "valley". Thus "Koom Valley" means "Valley Valley." Pratchett has an admitted fondness for tautological place-names, such as "Cheetwood", which literally means "Woodwood," and Torpenhow Hill, which means "Hillhillhill Hill."
Boffo
Boffo is described by Pratchett as "the power of expectations"; the strength one gains from behaving exactly as someone expects you to. Boffo is introduced by the witch Eumenides Treason in ''Wintersmith'' as a means by which she ensures people take her seriously. It gets its name from the Boffo Novelty and Joke Shop, no. 4, Tenth Egg Street, Ankh-Morpork, from which Miss Treason purchases most of her interior decorating supplies. It is possible that the shop is run by a clown called Boffo, a minor character in Men At Arms. Frequently purchased items include fake skulls, fake spiders' webs and her hat (Wicked Witch #3- "A must for scary parties"). No witch actually has spiders' webs in her cottage or keeps skulls for any reason, but people ''expect'' witches to do so and Miss Treason obliges them, the better to ensure that when people come calling they don't see what is really there (a tired, blind 111-year-old woman), but what they expect (a venerable, terrifying 113-year-old witch). She also ensures that many of the rumours about her (that she has a demon in her cellar, that she eats spiders, that she has a clockwork heart) are kept current and circulating, to ensure the presence of "Boffo thinking" among her clients. As a concept, Boffo is hardly unique to the Discworld; Rolex watches, Armani suits and the crowns of kings are all, in their own ways, Boffo, only more expensive.
Dark light
Introduced in The Truth, dark light is described by Otto Chriek as being the original form of light that all other forms of light came from. Otto was experimenting with dark light in order to take "obscurographs", iconographs using dark light given off by the Uberwaldean Land Eel (see Olm) instead of normal light given off by salamanders. There were a few unintended side effects of using dark light. The first stemming from the fact that dark light is detached from time resulting in iconographs that not only show the present but the past and even the future. Dark light is also said to be "seen by the dark eyes of the mind". This results in any one exposed to dark light to feel like they've had an icicle hammered into their head. Iconographs taken with dark light apparently show either dark part of the subject's psyche (such as Mr. Pin's past murders) or hidden motivations (such as William De Worde's urge ''not'' to be like his father), though there may be other effects not revealed in the book.
Dimwell Arrhythmic Rhyming Slang
The Multiverse has seen the evolution of Rhyming slang in many times and places. What most examples of the genre have in common is the element of rhyme. There is, however, one exception.
Dimwell arrhythmic rhyming slang (DARS) has so far (2007) appeared only in Going Postal, where it is spoken by Tolliver Groat, the elderly Junior Postman. On first introduction to him, the new Postmaster, Moist von Lipwig is disconcerted by Tolliver's denial of his toupée, when he asserts, "It's all mine, you know, not a prunes." Explanation reveals that in DARS, "syrup of prunes" means wig.
There are only a few examples of DARS in Going Postal, and we are not vouchsafed the specific meaning and derivation in each case. Some are:
★ cup-and-plate - no definition but "He's a bit cup-and-plate in the head" implies it means "not quite right"
★ syrup of prunes - wig
Figgin
A small short-crust pasty containing raisins, according to the ''Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words''. (''Guards! Guards!'') Noted, in addition to the amusing confusion derived from sounding like some sort of euphemism, for its role in the end of Mad Lord Snapcase (Havelock Vetinari's predecessor as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork) who was hung up by his figgin following a revolt. (''Interesting Times''). It is possible the meaning has changed over the years, but then, there may really be a ''horrifying'' aspect to being hung next to a piece of pastry.
Iconography
Having nothing to do with religious art, 'iconography' is the Disc's eqivalent of photography.
Unlike a normal camera, the iconograph contains a tiny imp who quickly paints the pictures (also called iconographs) of the subject at hand. If it is too dim for the imps to see, salamanders can be used as a flashgun. The iconograph is first seen in ''The Colour of Magic'' owned by Twoflower, the Discworld's first tourist. Although not explicitly stated in the books, they were presumably first used in the Agatean Empire, but have since become very popular in Ankh-Morpork.
In ''Moving Pictures'', iconographic technology is used to make films, however this has been discontinued. In ''Men At Arms'', the iconograph imp is referred to as a brownie, a pun referring to the Brownie camera. In ''The Fifth Elephant'', the Ankh-Morpork City Watch traffic division, under Sergeant Fred Colon, uses iconographs and stopwatches to record cart drivers who speed over bridges. This book also features an iconograph the size of a cigarette packet, with a tiny nano-imp, used by spies. In ''The Truth'', Otto Chriek is the iconographer for the newspaper ''The Ankh-Morpork Times'', and invents methods of printing iconographs in colour. In ''Monstrous Regiment'', Chriek can transmit iconographs thousands of miles through the Clacks semaphore system.
''See also: Discworld Gods: Imps''
The Jerk Syndrome
Described in ''Thud!''. This is a condition that may be experienced by a woman who is so beautiful, so alluring, that, as Angua describes it, any man with half a brain isn't even going to think about asking her out, because it's obvious she's too grand for the likes of him. This leads her to believe that the problem is at her end, and that there must be something wrong with her. This persists until she meets a man who does not have half a brain (i.e. is too stupid to realize she'll likely reject him, or is so used to rejection that it doesn't bother him, or has some other flaw that stems from an even ''more'' major flaw), and he does in fact ask her out, and she is so grateful that she says yes; it is implied that problems ensue because she is, as it were, going to a fancy, lavish restaurant and only ordering a bread roll and maybe a small salad. The concept is used in reference to Tawneee, who is the quintessential example of this with Nobby, although the strange part is that she actually ''likes'' him.
Knurd
'Knurdness' is the opposite of being drunk; not sober, but as far from sober as drunkenness, except in the opposite direction. It strips away all the illusion, all the comforting pink fog in which people normally spend their lives, and lets them see and think clearly for the first time ever. This, needless to say, is a very traumatic experience though it sometimes leads to important discoveries. Those seeking to treat drunkenness by having the sufferer drink Klatchian coffee should take care, lest they send him too far the other way - through sobriety and out the other side.
Also, Samuel Vimes, one of the Discworld's most notable characters, is sometimes referred to as being constantly knurd and two drinks short of actual sobriety, which at least partially accounts for his depressive nature and tendency towards alcoholism—he started out looking for a cure to knurdness.
It is also noted in the instance where Vimes gets knurd, that most people who ever get knurd make sure never to get knurd again.
Knurd written in reverse spells "drunk".
Octarine
The colour of magic, also often called the ''eighth colour''. Octarine is strongly indicative of magic and can only be seen by wizards and cats, who sometimes describe it as resembling a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple (note that in conventional human colour vision, colour opponency prevents the perception of reddish-greenish or yellowish-bluish colours, and it would therefore be impossible to perceive a colour as "greenish-yellow purple"; if greenish-yellow and purple lights or pigments were mixed, a shade of grey would result). The colour octarine appears as black or invisible to ordinary people.
The normal human visual system works by the presence of cones and rods in the eye. The ability of wizards to see octarine is explained by the additional presence of octagons.
A common conception of the colour is the colour of an incandescent filament when viewed through black-light film, a fluorescent white or ultrablue.
Quantum
Both quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle have appeared in the Discworld in some form or another; however, neither concept even remotely resembles their counterparts from Earth.
The Uncertainty Principle seems to be simply a "scientific" or "professional" way of saying "I don't know"; Death uses it in ''The Fifth Elephant'' as an excuse to appear when people are ''possibly'' going to die, apparently in addition to their actual deaths, even though he himself isn't clear what it is. All attempts to explain it outright, such as in ''The Last Hero'', appear to be misunderstood versions of Schrödinger's cat. A slightly more accurate version has been used to explain the peculiar habits of the puzuma, and the unreliability of teleportation magic without assistance from Hex. A related concept is the Theory of Thaumic Imponderability, which says it is impossible to tell exactly what a given spell will do, until it's too late.
Quantum, on the other hand, isn't explained at all; in fact, it serves much the same function as "magic" does on Earth, as described in ''The Discworld Companion'', "a sort of get-out-of-half-understood-explanation-free card" — essentially, an explanation that does not, in fact, explain anything. It should be noted that just "magic" by itself would not be appropriate as such a non-explanation on the Discworld, since magic is a more or less fully-understood phenomenon (as in ''The Last Hero'', when Leonard of Quirm attempts to explain weightlessness in a spaceship as "er ... magic" and Rincewind asks, "What ''kind'' of magic?"). Another explanation of Quantum is given in Pyramids as "add another nought" (in regards to accounting).
It is implied in the books that Ponder Stibbons may have a better understanding of both concepts, but has given up trying to explain them to anyone.
Re-annual plant
In addition to the more common annual plants, biennial plants and perennial plants, Discworld harbors a small number of re-annual plants. These are plants which, due to a rare 4-dimensional twist in their genetic structure, flower and grow before their seed germinates. This is usually only possible in areas with considerable amounts of background magic. Farmers who grow re-annual plants are usually very careful about dates of sowing, lest they cause devastating temporal paradoxes (such as dying of starvation because the food one lived off months ago was never grown). ''The Discworld Almanak'' also mentions how a garden implement carelessly strewn among re-annuals months later can cause serious damage today, indicating that they can move items they are in contact with through time, as well.
When re-annual plant products undergo fermentation, the product is time-reversed alcohol, a rare substance much sought by fortune-tellers and the like, as ingesting it allows some ability to foretell the future, which from the point of view of the plant is the past. Time-reversed alcohol produces inebriation in the normal way, but the hangover is thrust backwards in time to several hours before the actual ingestion of the alcohol. This is known as a hangunder, and is usually very strong since one feels so dreadful one imbibes large amounts of alcohol to get over it.
The only revealed re-annual plants are the vul nut vine, which is remarkable in that it can begin to flower as much as eight years before being sown; and re-annual grapes, which are harvested a year in advance of being sown.
Retrophrenology
A small industry springing up on the area around Ankh-Morpork based on the concepts of phrenology and physiognomy. However, retrophrenologists, rather than measuring a person's head and predicting their personality traits, seek to give customers whatever traits they desire to have by moulding their heads directly. What actually happens is that the customer is hit with a selection of different sized mallets, a treatment that can be said in complete honesty not to hurt a 'bit'. The efficacy of such treatments is unknown, but at least it provides employment and keeps the money in circulation.
Scumble
An alcoholic beverage drunk in very small cups some months apart (or served to strangers in pint mugs, as a sort of initiation test).
It was first introduced in ''Mort'' which tells us:
"A lot of stories are told about scumble, and how it is made out on the damp marshes, according to ancient recipes passed down rather unsteadily from father to son. It's not true about the rats, or the snakes' heads, or the lead shot. The one about the dead sheep is a complete fabrication. We can lay to rest all the variants of the one about the trouser button. But the one about not letting it come into contact with metal is absolutely true..."
It is a parody of scrumpy and is made with apples. Well, mainly apples. Good scumble apples include the Lancre Blackheart, the Golden Disagreeable and the Green Billet. In ''Mort'' it was drunk on the Sto Plains, but in later books it is associated with Lancre, where it is distilled by Nanny Ogg (whose particular variant is known as "Suicider").
When scumble is mixed with dwarfish beer, it creates a highly intoxicating cocktail known as "Fluff".
Slood
'Slood' is something that could be discovered by intelligent civilizations, such as fire or water, but that humans on Earth have been too unintelligent to find. It is first described in ''The Last Continent''. One of Rincewind's many accumulated positions is Reader in Slood Dynamics. It is said to be much easier to discover than fire, and only slightly harder to discover than water.
Thaum
''see also: Discworld magic, Fictional particles, and Thaumaturgy.''
The 'Thaum' is a measuring unit used in quantifying magic. It equals the amount of mystical energy required to conjure up one small white pigeon, or three normal-sized billiard balls. It can, of course, be measured with a thaumometer, and regular SI-modifiers apply (e.g. millithaum, kilothaum).
A thaumometer looks like a black cube with a dial on one side. A standard one is good for up to a million thaums - if there is more magic than that around, measuring it is not going to do any good.
An alternate measurement is the "Prime." It measures the amount of mystical energy required to move one pound of lead one foot. An attempt to put magic measurement into a logical framework, it never really caught on, as wizards are natural traditionalists.
Confusingly, the thaum also appears to be a particle; the magical equivalent of the atom. "Splitting the thaum" revealed that it was in fact composed of numerous sub-particles, called resons ("thingies") which came in five "flavours", up, down, sideways, sex appeal, and peppermint (see quarks). Note that since even before this discovery magical fields of less than one thaum were reported (The Light Fantastic), the particle known as the thaum must represent less magic than one thaum on the measuring scale.
The term thaum is based on the Greek term ''thauma'' (marvel), which is often used as a prefix meaning "magical" on the Discworld. It also suggests the non-SI unit of energy therm.
Wahoonie
A fruit that grows in Howondaland. It is highly prized by some; the colour (earwax) and smell (like a sick anteater) make most people feel ill. It is also covered in spikes.
It is particularly sought after by top chefs in several Ankh-Morpork restaurants. Their food, famously and expensively, contains no trace whatsoever of the fruit.
Its name may be based on the poisonous wahoo fruit, although the description is similar to the durian.
Ankh-Morpork is known as the Big Wahoonie, although the fruit does not smell ''that'' bad.
Wow-Wow sauce
A parody of the real world sauce of the same name. The Discworld version was invented by an uncle of Mustrum Ridcully, and its ingredients include grated wahoonie, asafoetida, scumble, sulphur and saltpetre. It is a highly unstable substance and believed to be responsible (when combined with a charcoal biscuit and an after-dinner pipe) for the elder Ridcully's explosive death. (See Black powder for why the combination might be problematic.) A presumably different uncle of Ridcully's used to swear by (or rather, swear at) Wow-Wow Sauce as a hangover cure; according to Ridcully, "He seemed very peaceful when they came to lay him out". Ridcully also advised that Wow-Wow Sauce must never be consumed when sweat is condensing on the bottle (a reference to the danger posed by dynamite that has begun to sweat its nitroglycerin).
References
★ Pratchett, Terry (1993). ''Men At Arms''. Gollancz.
★ Pratchett, Terry (2000). ''The Truth''. Gollancz
See also
★ List of fictional books within the Discworld series
★ Fauna of the Discworld
External links
★ Discworld & Pratchett Wiki
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