most pixies and gnomes weren't the least interested in dressing up in little pointy hats with bells on when there were other far more interesting things to do. All that tinkly… wee stuff was for the old folks back home in the forest… when a tiny man hit Ankh-Morpork he preferred to get drunk, kick some serious ankle, and search for tiny women. In fact the CEH now had to spend so much time explaining to people that they hadn't got enough rights that they barely had any time left to fight for them.
14
Often they lived to a timescale to suit themselves. Many of the senior ones, of course, lived entirely in the past, but several were like the Professor of Anthropics, who had invented an entire temporal system based on the belief that all the other ones were a mere illusion.
Many people are aware of the Weak and Strong Anthropic Principles. The Weak One says, basically, that it was jolly amazing of the universe to be constructed in such a way that humans could evolve to a point where they make a living in, for example, universities, while the Strong One says that, on the contrary, the whole point of the universe was that humans should not only work in universities but also write for huge sums books with words like ‘Cosmic’ and ‘Chaos’ in the titles.*) The UU Professor of Anthropics had developed the Special and Inevitable Anthropic Principle, which was that the entire reason for the existence of the universe was the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics. But this was only a formal statement of the theory which absolutely everyone, with only some minor details of a ‘Fill in name here’ nature, secretly believes to be true.
*) And they are correct. The universe clearly operates for the benefit of humanity. This can be readily seen from the convenient way the sun comes up in the morning, when people are ready to start the day.
15
The ceremony still carries on, of course. If you left off traditions because you didn't know why they started you'd be no better than a foreigner.
16
Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago- sago.
17
Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.
18
It's amazing how good governments are, given their track record in almost every other field, at hushing up things like alien encounters.
One reason may be that the aliens themselves are too embarrassed to talk about it.
It's not known why most of the space-going races of the universe want to undertake rummaging in Earthling underwear as a prelude to formal contact. But representatives of several hundred races have taken to hanging out, unsuspected by one another, in rural corners of the planet and, as a result of this, keep on abducting other would- be abductees. Some have been in fact abducted while waiting to carry out an abduction on a couple of other aliens trying to abduct the aliens who were, as a result of misunderstood instructions, trying to form cattle into circles and mutilate crops.
The planet Earth is now banned to all alien races until they can compare notes and find out how many, if any, real humans they have actually got. It is gloomily suspected that there is only one who is big, hairy and has very large feet.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
19
‘The red rosy hen greets the dawn of the day’. In fact the hen is not the bird traditionally associated with heralding a new sunrise, but Mrs Huggs, while collecting many old folk songs for posterity, has taken care to rewrite them where necessary to avoid, as she put it, ‘offending those of a refined disposition with unwarranted coarseness’. Much to her surprise, people often couldn't spot the unwarranted coarseness until it had been pointed out to them.
Sometimes a chicken is nothing but a bird.
20
He'd have to admit that the answer would be ‘five and a bit’, but at least he could come up with it.
21
It had been Ma Lilywhite's dying wish, although she hadn't known it at the time. Her last words to her son were ‘You try and get to the horses, I'll try to hold 'em off on the stairs, and if anything happens to me, take care of the dummy!’
22
They generally know in time to have their best robe cleaned, do some serious damage to the wine cellar and
