Feet of Clay

1

He subsequently got dead-drunk and was shanghaied aboard a merchantman bound for strange and foreign parts, where he met lots of young ladies who didn’t wear many clothes. He eventually died from stepping on a tiger. A good deed goes around the world.

2

That is to say, the sort you can use to give something three extra legs and then blow it up.

3

Town hall.

4

Because Ankh-Morpork doesn’t have a town hall.

5

Yeast bowl.

6

Commander Vimes, on the other hand, was all for giving criminals a short, sharp shock. It really depended on how tightly they could be tied to the lightning rod. ^{*}

* “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.

7

Constable Visit was an Omnian,^{*} whose country’s traditional approach to evangelism was to put unbelievers to torture and the sword. Things had become a lot more civilized these days but Omnians still had a strenuous and indefatigable approach to spreading the Word, and had merely changed the nature of the weapons. Constable Visit spent his days off in company with his co-religionist Smite-The-Unbeliever-With-Cunning-Arguments, ringing doorbells and causing people to hide behind the furniture everywhere in the city.

* 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.

8

Detritus was particularly good when it came to asking questions. He had three basic ones. They were the direct (‘Did you do it?’), the persistent (‘Are you sure it wasn’t you what done it?’) and the subtle (‘It was you what done it, wasn’t it?’). Although they were not the most cunning questions ever devised, Detritus’s talent was to go on patiently asking them for hours on end, until he got the right answer, which was generally something like: ‘Yes! Yes! I did it! I did it! Now please tell me what it was I did!’

9

It is a pervasive and beguiling myth that the people who design instruments of death end up being killed by them.^{*} There is almost no foundation in fact. Colonel Shrapnel wasn’t blown up, M. Guillotin died with his head on, Colonel Gatling wasn’t shot. If it hadn’t been for the murder of cosh and blackjack maker Sir William Blunt-Instrument in an alleyway, the rumour would never have got started.

* 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.

10

‘Welcome, Corporal Smallbottom! This is Constable Angua … Angua, show Smallbottom how well you’re learning dwarfish …’

11

The Ankh-Morpork view of crime and punishment was that the penalty for the first offence should prevent the possibility of a second offence.

12

This always happens in any police chase anywhere. A heavily laden lorry will always pull out of a side alley in front of the pursuit.

If vehicles aren’t involved, then it’ll be a man with a rack of garments. Or two men with a large sheet of glass.

There’s probably some kind of secret society behind all this.

13

And for the most part were unconcerned about matters of height. There’s a dwarfish saying: ‘All trees are felled at ground-level’ — although this is said to be an excessively bowdlerized translation for a saw which more literally means, ‘When his hands are higher than your head, his groin is level with your teeth.’

14

These terms are often synonymous.

15

As they were euphemistically named. People said, ‘They call themselves seamstresses — hem, hem!’

16

Because of the huge obtrusive mass of his forehead, Rogers the bulls’ view of the universe was from two eyes each with their own non-overlapping hemispherical view of the world. Since there were two separate visions, Rogers had reasoned, that meant there must be two bulls (bulls not having been bred for much deductive reasoning). Most bulls believe this, which is why they always keep turning their head this way and that when they look at you. They do this because both of them want to see.