Witches Abroad

1

Like finding that bloody butterfly whose flapping wings cause all these storms^{*} we’ve been having lately and getting it to stop.

* Rather literal interpretation of one of the most often-cited examples of Chaos theory, called the Butterfly effect: a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a storm because in Chaos theory results are not proportional to causes.

2

And people are wrong about urban myths. Logic and reason say that these are fictional creations, retold again and again by people who are hungry for evidence of weird coincidence, natural justice and so on. They aren’t. They keep on happening all the time, everywhere, as the stories bounce back and forth across the universe. At any one time hundreds of dead grandmothers are being whisked away on the roof-racks of stolen cars and loyal alsatians are choking on the fingers of midnight burglars. And they’re not confined to any one world. Hundreds of female Mercurian jivpts turn four tiny eyes on their rescuers and say, ‘My brood-husband will be livid — it was his travel module.’ Urban myths are alive.^{*}

* The three urban legends Terry mentions briefly in the footnote are all quite well-known, and can be found in any decent collection of such stories, but just in case not everyone is familiar with them:

The first story is about a family whose grandmother dies on vacation. In order to avoid bureaucratic hassle they decide to strap her to the roof-rack of the car, and cross the border back to their own country. During a rest-room stop, somebody steals the car, grandmother and all.

The second story is that of the people who return home after a night out, and find their dog choking to death in front of the door. They race him to the vet, who discovers that the dog is choking on a human finger he must have bitten off a burglar.

The third story is that of a man and woman having sex in the back seat of a car, when some serious accident happens and they become trapped. In order to free them from their predicament, the car has to be cut open with a torch, after which the woman supposedly comments: “My husband will be furious, it was his car”.

Much more information about these and countless other urban legends can be found in Jan Harold Brunvand’s books. If you’re on the net, you may want to check out alt.folklore.urban.

3

Considered backward, that is, by people who wear more clothes than they do.

4

Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy Seriph of Al-Ybi was once cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Ybi are renowned for being unusually short and bad-tempered.

5

Which explains a lot about witches.

6

Desiderata had sent a note via Old Mother Dismass asking to be excused on account of being dead. Second sight enables you to keep a very tight rein on your social engagements.

7

Nanny Ogg didn’t know what a coquette was, although she could probably hazard a guess.

8

Hence, for example, the Way of Mrs Cosmopolite, very popular among young people who live in the hidden valleys above the snowline in the high Ramtops. Disdaining the utterances of their own saffron-clad, prayer-wheel-spinning elders, they occasionally travel all the way to No. 3 Quirm Street in flat and foggy Ankh-Morpork, to seek wisdom at the feet of Mrs Marietta Cosmopolite, a seamstress. No-one knows the reason for this apart from the aforesaid attractiveness of distant wisdom, since they can’t understand a word she says or, more usually, screams at them. Many a bald young monk returns to his high fastness to meditate on the strange mantra vouchsafed to him, such as ‘Push off you!’ and ‘If I see one more of you little orange devils peering in at me he’ll feel the edge of my hand, all right?’ and ‘Why are you buggers all coming round here staring at my feet?’ They have even developed a special branch of martial arts based on their experiences, where they shout incomprehensibly at one another and then hit their opponent with a broom.

9

Granny Weatherwax had once pressed him about this, and since there are no secrets from a witch, he’d shyly replied, ‘Well, ma’am, what happens is, I gets hold of ’un and smacks ’un between the eyes with hammer before ’un knows what’s ’appening, and then I whispers in his ear, I sez, “Cross me, you bugger, and I’ll have thy goolies on t’anvil, thou knows I can.”’

10

Many of the more traditional dwarf tribes have no female pronouns, like ‘she’ or ‘her’. It follows that the courtship of dwarfs is an incredibly tactful affair.

11

Well, not often. Not on a daily basis, anyway. At least, not everywhere. But probably in some cold countries people say, ‘Hey, those eskimos! What a people! Fifty words for snow! Can you believe that? Amazing!’ quite a lot.

12

Of course, lots of dwarfs, trolls, native people, trappers, hunters and the merely badly lost had discovered it on an almost daily basis for thousands of years. But they weren’t explorers and didn’t count.

13

Nanny Ogg sent a number of cards home to her family, not a single one of which got back before she did. This is traditional, and happens everywhere in the universe.

14

Something about Nanny Ogg rubbed off on people.

15

The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold that the accumulation of money is a great evil and burden to the soul. They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent people.

16

Black Aliss wasn’t very good with words either. They had to give her quite a lot of money to go away and not make a scene.

17

Whereas in Ankh-Morpork, business was often so slow that some of the more go-ahead Guild members put adverts in shop windows offering deals like ‘Stab two, poison one free’.

18

Ronald the Third of Lancre, believed to be an extremely unpleasant monarch, was remembered by posterity only in this obscure bit of rhyming slang.

19

Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling ‘banana’, but didn’t know how you stopped.

20

Always in front of you in any queue, for a start.

21

Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because — what with trolls and dwarfs and so on — speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.

22

As Desiderata said, fairy godmothers tend to get heavily involved with kitchens.

23

Two logs and hope.

24

This is the last line of a Discworld joke lost, alas, to posterity.