h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I love Terry Pratchett. The first book of his I read was The Last Continent and I love how he mirrors things in this world with things on the Disc. Ideas like the fifth elephant and the five horsemen of the apocalypse (the fifth left before they became famous) are just brilliant! I particularly love the wizards, death and the watch. There is a really fab Discworld figurine I've seen of death wearing an apron and holding a frying pan full of eggs...Fantastic!

Has anyone read The Science of Discworld or The Globe? I'm reading them both at the moment and I'm very impressed. I didn't expect to get on with them particularly well since I'm not great with science, but I found them wonderfully lucid and digestable.

Yep, I've read both From what I've heard, some people find it difficult having alternate chapters of fact and fiction, but I personally think Pratchett/Stewart/Cohen make a great job of it. And they're all great people, if you ever get to meet them!

Oh, I like the alternating chapters. Why would that be a problem? surely people could just read through the fiction then the science if it was bothersome to them. Personally I wouldn't want to, I love the way the fiction and non fiction inform each other to create another layer of meaning.

I agree completely! I think some people got a bit frustrated that only half of it was 'story' though, and felt that the science bits sort of got in the way. But for that style of book, you couldn't ask for a better set of writers.

They did a fabulous job, it can't have been easy to get the balance right in the science sections. Humour and hard science are not the most natural bedfellows, but they made it enjoyable to read without losing any depth of meaning. A remarkable achievment. I left it so long to read the Science of Discworld because I was greatly afeared that it would be just plain bad, pandering to the fan's need to know more about the fictional world or the practice of writing, in the mode of the many Star Trek manuals and books. Clearly I should have known better.

With science textbooks getting more and more expensive, rarely seen or gutted of content by creationists one can envisage the scene where, to paraphrase:

"In some of the more relaxed quadrants of the educational establishment, these books came to supplant the older and more traditional texts as the standard repository of all knowledge."

They could do a lot worse.

I don't know about supplanting but certainly supplementing. Way back in my first year of uni I studied linguistics, and one of the set texts was Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue. His work on linguistics is even better than his travel writing and it was an excellent lead into the subject, much as Scence of Discworld is great lead into science.

Your textbooks are being tampered with by creationists, does that mean you're American? I don't think that has happened in UK schools, we just have section 28 to deal with.

Why is it that a large portion of American society feels the need to tamper with everthing on the grounds of what generally seems to be gross selfishness on their part. Now I know this is a rash generalization, but there you go, take a pill and get over it! (Or of you are American "Get Therapy!".

Oh! and by the way "Herb" is pronounced with an "H" it is not, nor will it ever be correct to call them "Erbs" as the Yanks do!
It is not a "bathroom", it is a toilet! I do not urinate in my bathroom sink, nor do I defficate in my bath, and unless you do, do not say "going to the bathroom"

I can go on with this for ages, but I have probably said more than enough. I do not like the warping of English that occurs in the US of A!

MadHamish
(Using my soapbox in the strangest of places!)

You're not shy about the yank bashing are you. But saying bathroom instead of toilet isn't necesarily an americanism. I think that has more to do with class, the middle classes of any nationality being more likely to use polite euphamisms. And since toilets are usually in bathrooms saying thay you are going to the bathroom isn't really innacurate either.

There are some 'Americanisms' that I find ineligant or irritating, but there are phrases and words which I feel the same way about in Brittish English. I don't think Amerenglish is neccesarily worse than the 'mother tongue', just different. And many people who complain about it would do well to remember that a great number of the words they are complaining about are Brittish in origin, having been taken over by colonists and preserved while they were lost over here.

Besides which I find purity of language argumants silly. Language is, and should be, flexible, changing constantly with use. Words drop out and enter into use all the time, they change meaning too, and to try to set language in stone would not only be impossible to achieve but a mistake if it were achievable.

It is true that a large number of American words are entering into use in Britain. But that has always happened. During every one of the many invasions and occupations of Britain the language faced radical changes and that is what has made it such a wonderful language in the first place. That is the reason that we have the largest vocabulary of any language currently used. Americanisms are just continuing the trend, and by a less warlike method.

Erm what relevance does Yank-bashing have in here anyway?

I could point out many things tht I find irritating about the USA... (the fact that it's apparently the Americans that won the war [take your pick] and not the Allies) but we have to remember that America is 'our' (meaning Britain's) baby... as is Austrailia...!

And when it all comes down to it... We're technically responsible for America as it is today... so err... I don't know where I'm going with this sorry!

Why don't you leave the poor sods alone? It's not their faults if they don't have lives.

BTW where is the USA mirrored in the Disk World?

Hey! I have a life, sometimes.

Genua is rather a clear transposition of New Orleans in Louisiana. Can't think of any others right now, but there probably are some.

Yo!

Momma!

(Whatever that means.)

I'd forgotten about that one, one of the first I read too neither! Any idea of the subtlety involved in choosing the name Genua? (I'm a XXXX man myself so I don't go a bundle on subtleties.)

I HAVE NEVER, NOR WILL I EVER TAKE BEING TOLD I HAVE NO LIFE, BY SOME JUMPED UP LITTLE COMPUTER NERD WHO HAS PROBABLY SEEN SO LITTLE SUN DUE TO ENDLESS HOURS AT THEIR "HEAP BIG MAGIC TALKY TALKY BOX" THAT THEY HAVE TURNED BLUE!

I have no problem with the evolution of a language, especially since I am Australian. We do however do one thing. If we use a word, we use it properly. If we create slang, it is a "new word" and not just taking a letter from the start of a word just to make it your own! The USA government actually have documents on changing the spelling of words in order to remove any "Brittish" infection on words. Personally I think that the USA just has to have one of everything all of it's own that no-one else can play with. In the words of a great Australian writer H.G.Nelson " I love Americans one on one......on mass however is an entirely different story"

And Yes Genua is, "Southern USA"

MadHamish
(peace, love and mung beans, baby)

I HAVE NEVER, NOR WILL I EVER TAKE BEING TOLD I HAVE NO LIFE, BY SOME JUMPED UP LITTLE COMPUTER NERD WHO HAS PROBABLY SEEN SO LITTLE SUN DUE TO ENDLESS HOURS AT THEIR "HEAP BIG MAGIC TALKY TALKY BOX" THAT THEY HAVE TURNED BLUE!

I have no problem with the evolution of a language, especially since I am Australian. We do however do one thing. If we use a word, we use it properly. If we create slang, it is a "new word" and not just taking a letter from the start of a word just to make it your own! The USA government actually have documents on changing the spelling of words in order to remove any "Brittish" infection on words. Personally I think that the USA just has to have one of everything all of it's own that no-one else can play with. In the words of a great Australian writer H.G.Nelson " I love Americans one on one......on mass however is an entirely different story"

And Yes Genua is, "Southern USA"

MadHamish
(peace, love and mung beans, baby)

I HAVE NEVER, NOR WILL I EVER TAKE BEING TOLD I HAVE NO LIFE, BY SOME JUMPED UP LITTLE COMPUTER NERD WHO HAS PROBABLY SEEN SO LITTLE SUN DUE TO ENDLESS HOURS AT THEIR "HEAP BIG MAGIC TALKY TALKY BOX" THAT THEY HAVE TURNED BLUE!

I have no problem with the evolution of a language, especially since I am Australian. We do however do one thing. If we use a word, we use it properly. If we create slang, it is a "new word" and not just taking a letter from the start of a word just to make it your own! The USA government actually have documents on changing the spelling of words in order to remove any "Brittish" infection on words. Personally I think that the USA just has to have one of everything all of it's own that no-one else can play with. In the words of a great Australian writer H.G.Nelson " I love Americans one on one......on mass however is an entirely different story"

And Yes Genua is, "Southern USA"

MadHamish
(peace, love and mung beans, baby)

And I'm not gonna be told I have no life when I'm on everyone's side and hasn't said anythng to smeg people off.... as I find irritating things about all nations... USA can't admit when they're wrong, England has Morris Dancing and Tony Bleuch, Austarilia infected us with bad, cheesy, wooden soaps and pop stars, the Scots had William Wallace, the Welsh have choirs, the Irish have that irrtating accent when it's very strong, ditto for the French...

Anyway.. Ankh-Morpork is a composit of Victorian London, New York and has the guttering system of... I can't remember.. San Francisco?

But when has Genua came across as being New Orleans? Or has Pratchett said that? in that case I'll shut up..

Fool!

How do you expect to be taken seriously when you only say it once?