Terry Pratchett - Carpe Jugulum

Igor had two thumbs on his right hand. If something was useful, he always said, you may as well add another.

The Feegles speak a version of Scots. In theory this is closely related to English, and an English speaker can usually understand Scots with a bit of effort, but this very thick dialect is largely incomprehensible to most English speakers. Terry himself warns against trying to decode all of their sayings — the important thing is the impression you get, not the exact words — but some of them are straightforward enough.

Of the ‘battle cries’, ‘Bigjobs!’ is the catchphrase of Mek-Quake, one of the ‘ABC Warriors’ in the cult comic 2000 AD ; ‘Dere c’n onlie be whin t’ousand!’ seems to be based on the tagline of the film Highlander : ‘There can be only one!’; and ‘Nac mac Feegle wha hae!’ echoes Robert Burns’s ‘Scots wha hae’ — although this makes little sense on its own…

There are many vampire movies in which this trick works remarkably well: in Son of Dracula (1943), Count ‘Alucard’ travels to the southern USA to marry a disturbed woman who wants to be immortal; in Dracula’s Last Rites (1979), vampire Dr A. Lucard runs a mortuary, which keeps him well-stocked with fresh bodies. The same trick occurs in Dracula: the Series (1990), and the films Dr Terror’s Galaxy of Horrors (1966) and Dracula: the Dirty Old Man (1969).

Various Disney heroines have done this: Snow White was the first, but Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty perpetrated similar offences. In the film Mary Poppins , Julie Andrews sings in harmony with her own reflection (‘A Spoonful of Sugar’) and does indeed go on to sing with other creatures. ‘Mr Blue Bird’ comes into the song ‘Zippedy Doo-Dah’, from the Disney film Song of the South , although there may be some older reference.

Possibly the Lancrastrian version of ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’, which can also be used for egg-timing purposes.

Ivy is an evergreen plant that continues growing even on dead trees; hence it is sometimes a symbol of immortality, persistence of life.

Paternoster (Latin for ‘Our Father’) generally refers to the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, as said by Roman Catholics until the 1960s.

A reference to the old Eastern European practice of covering a dead friends’ eyes with coins.

In the Greek version of this custom, a single coin or obulus was put under the tongue of a deceased person. This was done so that the departed loved one would have some change handy to pay Charon with (the grumpy old ferryman who transported departed souls over the river Styx towards the afterlife — but only if they paid him first).

The Eastern European version has a similar background.

A traditional stunt act in Yorkshire, only with ferrets rather than weasels.

In the Anglican church, a priest is known as ‘Reverend’, a dean is ‘Very Reverend’, a bishop is ‘Right Reverend’, an archbishop ‘Most Reverend’.

Oats’s name may be a reference to Titus Oates, a 17th-century English clergyman who in 1678 alleged that Jesuits were planning to assassinate Charles II and place his Roman Catholic brother James, Duke of York (later James II), on the throne. In the subsequent wave of anti-Catholic hysteria, Oates was gratefully rewarded, and about 35 innocent people were executed. In 1685, after James acceded to the throne, Oates was convicted of perjury, flogged, and imprisoned. He was released and given a pension after James was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

All the same, it seems that arrangements have moved on since Lords and Ladies , in which the mail was left hanging in a sack in the town for people to collect in their own time.

The name is Terry’s tribute to Steve Earle, a large, ‘new country’ singer who recorded a song called ‘Copperhead Road’. A copperhead is a poisonous snake native to parts of the eastern and southern USA.

Some vampire stories include a prohibition against crossing running water. Although it’s worth mentioning that this only ever prevented them from crossing streams under their own propulsion — they could still be carried across it, e.g. in a coach.

St Augustine, in his Confessions , pointed to the attention-seeking behaviour of babies as evidence that even the most innocent are selfish, because of original sin.

‘If “foo” sneezes, “bar” catches a cold’ has become a cliché in economics. “foo” and “bar” may be pretty much any combination of America, Japan, Europe and Asia.

The East Asian economies of South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and others that grew outstandingly fast throughout the 1980s and 90s are sometimes collectively called the ‘Tiger Economies’.

The usual tune is ‘Shave and a haircut, two pence’.

‘Shave and a haircut, two bits’ is a classic rock ’n’ roll rhythm (used in just about everything Bo Diddley did, for instance). It was most recently reintroduced to the public as a punchline to a joke in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit .

The Christian fast of Lent, originally a period of abstaining from all ‘rich food’, commemorates Christ’s time spent fasting in the wilderness, during which Satan tempted him with bread. See Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-14. For the full story of Brutha, read Small Gods .

The earliest occurrence of this non-word that anyone has yet reported is in Asterix the Legionary , when Obelix catches sight of the beautiful Fabella. Terry says: “You’ve got me there… I thought I’d just strung together some letters!”

But there’s something about this set of letters, because Ptraci says the same thing in Pyramids , and in Feet of Clay , in her sleep, Sybil says ‘wsfgl’. There’s also Astfgl, the ‘villain’ of Eric . More significantly, if you search for “wstfgl” on the Web, you’ll find it cropping up in all sorts of apparently unrelated stories in a similar context — the noise people make when they’re either asleep or lost for words.

We may be witnessing the birth of a new word.

This line, with the dramatic pause before the word ‘wine’, appears in many different movie versions of Dracula , starting with Bela Lugosi’s 1931 classic version, down to the Francis Ford Coppola 1992 remake Bram Stoker’s Dracula .

The line itself does not occur in the book, but originated in the Hamilton Deane stage-play Dracula , which was hugely successful in New York in the 1920s.

At least one of the early Frankenstein films (which are clearly the main inspiration for Igor) involves the servant being sent to steal the brain of a famous scientist from a medical lab, but he drops that one and substitutes one labelled ‘Abnormal’, which is then transplanted into the monster.

Bram Stoker borrowed the name ‘Dracula’ from Vlad Dracula, ‘the Impaler’, 1431–1476, prince of Wallachia. This Vlad was as brutal and psychopathic a ruler as you could ever hope to avoid, but there is no historical evidence that he either drank blood or dabbled in sorcery.