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

'Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things' (copyright T & L Pratchett 1980)
Can't quite put my own observations into succinct words on the matter at the moment but I'm sure YOU have some to contribute...

Haven't time to think.

Except to say, isn't he brilliant !!!!!!!!

Charlie Chaplin.

Well known for having come in second place in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike competition.

"Never judge a man till you have walked a mile in his shoes, after that who cares what you think of him as he is a mile away and you've got his shoes."

'Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things'

That sounds like a Granny Weatherwax quote somehow, is it?


Worryingly at the moment, the wave of replica guns on the streets of the UK look at least as much like the real things as the real things do. Someone is going to get shot soon (with real police bullets) for waving one of these fake guns about too enthusiatically.

I wouldn't be at all surprised, considering the police shot a man carrying a table leg a few years ago because they thought it was a gun.

I assume the table leg was trying to look like a gun?

I suspect that it looked like a table leg. I will try and find a link to the story somewhere. It should be on the BBC site somewhere, as there was an uproar recently when the officers involved won their appeal against an unlawful killing inquest verdict.

Here's a report on the appeal outcome.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4539693.stm

10/10 for the Granny Weatherwax identification A 'granny' who knows something about behavioural psychology...

But the copywrite says 1980, but the first Weatherwax novel wasn't until 1987.

Well the quote came from 'Wyrd Sisters' (1988)and the copyright in the front is given as 1980 for Terry Pratchett and 1988 for Lyn Pratchett.
He may have borrowed the words from the same place that he borrowed all the other words - the dictionary. (is that copyrighted?)

Here, if PTerry is borrowing words from the dictionary and writing at his usual prolific rate, then there soon won't be any words left for other writers to use!!!!!!

Oh, unless he gives them back when he's finished, that is.

Yes - and its a good thing that Barbara Cartland has 'departed' because she was using a load of dictionary words without any thought for the rest of us wanting any of them. As long as she got her book a month out of the dictionary the rest of us who might have wanted those words, just had to go and buy her books. And they even had loads of ........ in them (dots, I mean) She monopolised all of them as well. Tut.!

Surely we're using up words here on h2g2 at a horrific rate. We've made more than 7,000,000 postings over the last six years. I know there'll be duplicates - at least 30% of the words used are probably "badger", but the dictionary must be seriously depleted.

That's why they keep making new editions of dictionaries, so they can make new words.

It probably relates to mimicry in animals as well.

Yes, good point, Xanatic. It's called Batesian mimicry I think. Usual example given is of a non-poisonous butterfly which looks pretty much exactly like an unrelated species which happens to be a bit poisonous to birds. The hope is that birds will eat enough of the poisonous ones, get repeatedly sick and will eventually decide to avoid the whole lot of them thereafter (both poisonous and non poisonous).

Then of course there is Dr Who's TARDIS which (on the outside at least) cleverly looks completely and exactly in the tiniest detail like something that doesn't look like that anymore.

There's a TARDIS parked across the road from Earl's Court tube station (Earl's Court Road exit).