The Annotated Pratchett File, v7a

Feet Of Clay

+ [title] Feet of Clay

The original working title for this book was Words in the Head.

“Feet of Clay” is a biblical reference. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had a dream in which he saw a statue whose head was made of gold, but lower down the statue the materials got progressively more base, until the feet were “part of iron, part of clay”; the statue was shattered and destroyed by being struck on the feet, its weakest point. Hence, colloquially, the expression “feet of clay” has come to mean that someone regarded as an idol has a hidden weakness.

+ [frontispiece] The mottoes and crests are mostly explained in the book,

but for completeness they are:

Edward St John de Nobbes: “capite omnia”—“take it all”

Gerhardt Sock (butcher): “futurus meus est in visceris”—“my future is in the entrails”

Vetinari: “si non confectus non reficiat”—“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” (a saying popularised by Lyndon B Johnson, though possibly older)

Assassins Guild: “nil mortifice sine lucre”—“no killing without payment”

Rudolph Potts (baker): “quod subigo farinam”—“because I knead the dough”

Thieves’ Guild: “acutus id verberat”—“sharp’s the word”

Vimes family: “protego et servio”—“I protect and serve”. In the centre of the crest is the number 177, which—we learnt in Men at Arms -- is Vimes’ own badge number.

+ [p. 7] “WE HEAR YOU WANT A GOLEM.”

The font used by the golems in the UK editions is clearly designed to look like Hebrew lettering. For some reason, the font used in the American editions is not.

The golem itself is a creature from Jewish mythology, a man made of clay and animated by Kabbalistic magic. The one thing it cannot do is speak, because only God can grant the power of speech. There is a brief summary of the legend at <http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/6960/golem.htm>

+ [p. 8] “Yeah, right, but you hear stories ... Going mad and making too many things, and that.”

One episode in the life of the golem of Prague—the best known of the mythical creatures—tells that the golem was ordered to fetch water, but never told to stop, thus causing a flood. This is very similar to (and may be borrowed from) the classic children’s story The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Der Zauberlehrling, a German poem by Goethe), also used in

Disney’s classic animated film Fantasia. A spell used to animate a broom to speed housework gets out of control, leading to a frightening procession of hundreds of brooms bringing water from the well. The French composer Paul Dukas based the music on Goethe’s poem. A more direct reference appears on p. 99, and elsewhere as a sort of running joke.

+ [p. 17] “[...], he says Mrs Colon wants him to buy a farm, [...]”

‘Buy the farm’ is military slang for ‘die’

+ [p. 17] “[...] I am sure I have told you about the Cable Street

Particulars, [...]”

See the annotation for p. 247 of Maskerade.

+ [p. 19] “I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES.”

It is said (after Benjamin Franklin) that in life only two things are certain: Death and taxes. However, the line before this kicks off a running gag that demonstrates than this is really one certainty too many.

+ [p. 22] “Cheery, eh? Good to see the old naming traditions kept up.”

‘Cheery’ would fit in very well with the names of the Seven Dwarfs in the Disney Snow White film. Grumpy, Dopey, Sleepy, Bashful, Happy, Doc and Sneezy.

+ [p. 23] “I want someone who can look at the ashtray and tell me what

kind of cigars I smoke.”

One of the first things Sherlock Holmes tells Watson, when they first meet, is that he has written a treatise on this subject. This contrasts oddly with Vimes’ distrust of ‘clues’ in general (see the annotation for p. 142).

+ [p. 24] “Where the sun doesn’t shine”

A running gag from Lords and Ladies: the place where the sun does not shine, on the Discworld, is a valley in Slice, near Lancre.

+ [p. 25] “Clinkerbell”

Tinkerbell via ‘clinker’, which is one type of mining by-product.

+ [p. 26] “Slab: Jus’ say ‘AarrghaarrghpleeassennononoUGH”

Echoes the anti-drugs campaign slogan ‘Just say no’, championed most famously by Nancy Reagan in America.

+ [p. 26] “T’Bread Wi’ T’Edge”

A long-running series of British commercials for a certain brand of bread emphasised the Yorkshire origins of the manufacturer. This slogan is in a parody of a Yorkshire accent, presumably for similar reasons.

+ [p. 30] The shield design described is the Ankh-Morpork coat of arms, not shown in the front of the book (but on the cover of Streets of Ankh-Morpork).

+ [p. 27] “[...] he’s got a loaded wolf.”

Possibly a reference to the Australian story of The Loaded Dog.

+ [p. 29] ‘Daphne’s ancestors came all the way from some islands on the other side of the Hub.’

See the annotation for p. 9/9 of The Colour Of Magic, but specifically referring to the brown owls of New Zealand, which, to a British viewpoint, are ‘some islands on the other side of the world’. Thus the morpork could be compared to the New Zealand brown owl.

+ [p. 30] “Croissant Rouge Pursuivant”

The names of the heralds are adapted from terms used in English heraldry. ‘Pursuivant’ is simply the title for an assistant herald. English pursuivants include the Rouge Croix (cf. Terry’s Croissant Rouge) and Bluemantle (Terry gives us the ‘Pardessus Chatain’ or ‘Brown Overcoat’).

Senior to the pursuivants are the kings of arms, although none really corresponds to ‘Dragon’. This has been linked with ‘Dracula’—the most famous vampire of all—which is itself a title meaning ‘little dragon’. It also harks back to Guards! Guards!, in which a dragon actually became king of Ankh-Morpork, albeit briefly.

+ [p. 35] “There are plenty of kosher butchers down in Long Hogmeat.”

Kosher butchering involves a special method of bleeding the animal, which would ensure that there was plenty of spare blood around. The name ‘Long Hogmeat’, however, is a bit more disturbing: apart from the question of how ‘hogmeat’ could be kosher, it also sounds suspiciously like ‘long pig’, which is pidgin for ‘human flesh’. (See also the annotation for p. 239/180 of Soul Music.

+ [p. 36] “Commander of the City Watch in 1688”

1688 AD in England was the date of the ‘Glorious [bloodless] Revolution’ when the Catholic James II was deposed in favour of the Protestant Willem van Oranje, Stadholder of the Netherlands. He married Mary Stuart and became William III. “Old Stoneface”, on the other hand, is clearly modelled on Oliver Cromwell, who ruled the Commonwealth (Republic) of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland from 1652 to 1658, at one point refusing Parliament’s offer of the crown. Among his many reforms, he championed religious freedom and tolerance, extending even to Jews, who were welcome in England for the first time since 1290.

+ [p. 36] More Latatian.

“Excretus Est Ex Altitudine”—Shat On From a Great Height

“Depositatum De Latrina”—Chucked Down The Toilet

+ [p. 38] “The butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker.”

From an old nursery rhyme:

“Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub

And who do you think they were?

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker...”

+ [p. 41] “Commander Vimes, on the other hand, was all for giving criminals

a short, sharp shock.”

“Short sharp shock” was coined in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado as a euphemism for ‘execution’. In 1980s Britain, Tory home secretaries used the phrase to refer to the brief-but-harsh imprisonment of young offenders.

+ [p. 44] “Delphine Angua von Uberwald,’ read the Dragon aloud.”

Uberwald (on The Discworld Mapp spelled with an umlaut over the U) is ‘Over/beyond the forest’ in German. In Latin, that’s “Transylvania”—a part of Romania traditionally associated with the undead (most prominently, Count Dracula).

+ [p. 45] “Men said things like ‘peace in our time’ or ‘an empire that

will last a thousand years,’ [...]”

“peace in our time”—Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister, in 1938.

“an empire that will last a thousand years”—Adolf Hitler, on the Third Reich.

+ [p. 46] “Constable Visit was an Omnian, [...]”

Read Small Gods for much more information about Omnia. Brutha seems to have taken a religion devoted to violent conquest and turned it into something closely akin to modern evangelical Christianity.

+ [p. 54] “Oh, well, if you prefer, I can recognize handwriting,’ said

the imp proudly.”

The original Apple Newton was the first PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) capable of doing this, and was even supposed to improve its recognition of the individual owner’s writing with practice. In practice, it didn’t work too well. Hence the joke:

Q. How many Newton users does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

+ [p. 55] “Lord Vetinari had always said that punctuality was the

politeness of princes.”

In our world, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations attributes this saying to Louis XVIII.

+ [p. 55] “It is a pervasive and beguiling myth that the people who design

instruments of death end up being killed by them.”

This myth may have been started by William Makepeace Thackery, who asked in his novel The Adventures of Philip on His Way Through the World:

“Was not good Dr Guillotin executed by his own neat invention?”. As Terry notes, he was not.

+ [p. 56] “Can you paint a picture of his eye, Sydney?’ [...] ‘As big

as you can.”

This idea has been used in many detective stories, but most famously in Blade Runner, where the main character is able to blow up a reflection in a photograph far beyond plausible limits.

+ [p. 63] “[...], or dribble some in their ear while they slept.”

A curious method of administering poison, most famously mentioned in Hamlet.

+ [p. 64] “Crushed diamonds used to be in vogue for hundreds of years,

despite the fact that they never worked.”

Crushed glass would theoretically work as a means of killing someone, because it forms jagged edges, but in practice the pieces are always either too big to go unnoticed or too small to have any effect. Aqua fortis is nitric acid, a very fast-acting poison if ingested... Cantharides is Spanish Fly, better known as an aphrodisiac, but quite poisonous in large doses.

+ [p. 65] “And that seemed about it, short of stripping the wallpaper off

the wall.”

The most obvious red herring. One of the most popular theories regarding Napoleon Bonaparte’s death is that he suffered arsenic poisoning from the green colouration in the wallpaper of the bedroom of the place in which he was being held. It has been suggested that microbes, present in the humid conditions of St Helena, could absorb the poison from the wallpaper, then be inhaled by the prisoner, giving him a small dose every day. The wallpaper is green, and the pigment involved is copper arsenite, known in Napoleon’s day as “Paris Green”.

+ [p. 68] “But... you know I’m in the Peeled Nuts, sir...”

The equivalent in England today is called the Sealed Knot.

+ [p. 70] “Vimes’s Ironheads won.”

A conflation of “Roundheads” and “Ironsides”, two names for the Parliamentarian soldiers of Oliver Cromwell, clearly the model for Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes.

+ [p. 71] “Twurp’s Peerage”

See the annotation for p. 191/138 of Lords and Ladies.

+ [p. 72] “But kill one wretched king and everyone calls you a regicide.”

There’s an old joke about Abdul, who builds roads, raises cities, conquers nations, but is forever remembered as Abdul the Goat Fucker as a result of a youthful indiscretion.

+ [p. 73] “Vimes put the disorganized organizer back in his pocket.”

Posts made to USENET have a header field labelled ‘Organization:’. Terry Pratchett’s own posts give this as ‘Disorganized’.

+ [p. 75] “... when I took you to see the Boomerang Biscuit exhibition.”

Curiously, Carrot seems to have taken Vimes to the Dwarf Bread museum before treating Angua to it.

+ [p. 77] “Ah, h’druk g’har dWatch, Sh’rt’azs!’ said Carrot.”

Littlebottom, in dwarfish, is “Sh’rt’azs”. In British slang, “shortarse” is a vaguely affectionate term for the vertically challenged.

+ [p. 81] “Igneous the troll backed away until he was up against his potter’s wheel.”

Igneous’ shop has several parallels with a shop in the Sherlock Holmes story of The Six Napoleons.

Holmes encounters a pottery/stonework shop staffed mainly by Italians, who were also hiding out from the law and various other enemies, and is eventually asked to leave by the back door to avoid bothering the staff, which is locked with a large padlock. The figurines were also being used to conceal contraband.

Terry comments: “My flabber is ghasted. I really did think I made that one up. I mean... I had the pottery already in existence from previous books, and I knew I’d want to bring it in later so I needed a pottery scene now to introduce it, and Igneous already had a rep as an ‘ask no questions’ type of merchant, and I needed somewhere clay could be stolen and the golems would have had to break in, the padlock replacing the lock they’d busted. And I knew that I’d need a way for the Watch to put pressure on Igneous; ‘hollow items’ for drugs and other contraband is a cliché, which ought to mean that his staff are somewhat outside the law. In other words the scene is quite a complex little jigsaw piece which slots into this plot and the ongoing DW saga in various places. I’ll just have to pretend I knew what I was doing...”

+ [p. 84] “It hasn’t really got a name’, said Angua, ‘but sometimes we

call it Biers.”

The perfect name for an undead bar. Puns on “beer”, which you would normally associate with a tavern, and on “bier”, which you would normally associate with being dead. Also puns on Cheers, the fictional Boston tavern in the long-running US TV comedy of the same name.

+ [p. 85] “But sometimes it’s good to go where everybody knows your

shape.”

The theme song of Cheers contains the line “sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name”. See the annotation for p. 84, and the annotation for p. 298/225 of Soul Music.

+ [p. 86] “That’s Old Man Trouble,’ said Angua. ‘If you know what’s good

for you, you don’t mind him.”

From the Gershwin song ‘I Got Rhythm’: “Old Man Trouble, I don’t mind him”.

+ [p. 89] “[...] sunglasses tester for Argus Opticians... [...]”

A very appropriate name. Argus “the all-seeing” was the name of the many-eyed watchman from Greek mythology, who was tasked by Hera to keep an eye (so to speak) on Io, a human priestess who, after her seduction by Zeus, had been transformed into a cow in an attempt to keep Hera from getting suspicious. No such luck.

+ [p. 90] “These words are from the Cenotine Book of Truth, [...]”

There have been a number of suggestions for the derivation of this name. The root “ken” in Hebrew means “honest, truthful, correct”. “Cenogenesis” is a biological term meaning the development of an individual that is notably different from its group (such as happens to Dorfl in the book). Alternatively, for the atheists, there’s the “ceno” in “cenotaph”, from the Greek “kenos”, meaning “empty”.

+ [p. 91] Magazine titles.