Guards! Guards! (Terry David John Pratchett) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

8

The motto of the Night Watch, “FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC”, is dog Latin for “Make my day, punk”.

“Go ahead, make my day” is a well-known Clint ‘Dirty Harry’ Eastwood quote. The ‘punk’ comes from another famous Dirty Harry scene (see the annotation 32)

Notice also that the translation Terry supplies (“To protect and to serve”) is actually the motto of the Los Angeles Police Force.

My source tells me that Hollywood writers and directors, notorious for the accuracy of their movies and TV shows, tend to have all police cars bear this motto. In a sort of reverse formation, this has caused some individual police forces across the USA to adopt it, so that by now the motto has become fairly wide-spread.