a damp, drizzly November of the soul

For those curious it’s Sylvester McCoy

gay ppl dr who (everyone clapped)

happy pride month to Her

So I entered the books fully like the Stay back, slut meme, except regarding wordplay. I was reading with a fine-toothed comb. I was squinting at every name and testing every phoneme. Not necessarily because I don't like puns or didn't enjoy the idea of getting caught by surprise, mind you, just that I'd heard very good things about Terry Prachett's humor and I didn't want to miss any of his jokes and with wordplay stuff if you don't catch it, you'll never know it existed.

I caught a lot of stuff, and even when I didn't get some of the references (the series stretches across a lot of decades I wasn't born in) I could still at least tell when he was making them. I made it out of my grand read with a pat on the back and a certain pleasure in the knowledge that I had enough pop-culture and etymological awareness to not let Terry pull a fast one on me.

In classic Pratchett fashion, turns out I was dead wrong.

I was rereading Soul Music, because even if I'm late to the party I still enjoyed the Discworld books immensely, and I got to the scene where a bunch of schmucks with no music knowledge (or talent) are infected by the spirit of rock n' roll and descend in a horde upon a guitar shop. The owner starts off trying to sell them decent instruments, but, soon realizing his new flow of customers couldn't play a triangle and are more interested in the look of the thing anyways, he promptly starts pulling out his scrappiest, crappiest pseudo-instruments (Ankh-Morpok, amiright) and sticking a bunch of paint, glitter, and ankh-stones on them for the look of things before selling them at marked-up prices.

Ankh-stones were first mentioned in Sourcery, I think, and were used in the creation of the fake Archchancellor's hat. They get mentioned in other books on and off as a source of bedazzlement that's pretty clearly meant to be a riff on rhinestones. First time I read about them, I went "oh what a nice little bit of worldbuilding, of course some gems would get named after local stuff" and thought no more on it. But like…

Ankh-stones.

Rhinestones. Rhine-stones.

The infamously nasty River Ankh that flows(?) through Ankh-Morpok, and the River Rhine, a real river that exists.