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The English word “assassins” was originally used to denote a group of fanatical Ismailis (a Shi'ite Muslim sect) who, between 1094 and 1273, worked for the creation of a new Fatimid caliphate, murdering prominent individuals. They murdered prominent individuals; hence, “assassin” in English came to mean a politically motivated murderer.
The name derives from the Arabic “hashashin” — Marco Polo and other European chroniclers claimed that the Assassins used hashish to stimulate their fearless acts. For example, Brewer writes:
“Assassins. A band of Carmathians, collected by Hassa, subah of Nishapour, called the Old Man of the Mountains, because he made Mount Lebanon his stronghold. This band was the terror of the world for two centuries, when it was put down by Sultan Bibaris. The assassins indulged in haschisch (bang), an intoxicating drink, and from this liquor received their name.”
For more information, see also the Hawkwind song ‘Hassan I Sabbah’ on their album Quark, Strangeness and Charm.
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The name D'regs is not only a pun on ‘dregs’, but also refers to the Tuaregs, a nomadic Berber tribe in North Africa. The Tuaregs are also the desert marauders who attack Fort Zinderneuf in the movie Beau Geste (based on the book by P. C. Wren).
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“Johnny Foreigner” is a generic, disparaging term used by Britons of — well, foreigners. During the First World War, the more specific term “Johnny Turk” appeared.
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In the latter part of the 19th century, the phrase “gunboat diplomacy” was coined to describe this British method of negotiating with uppity colonials. The gunboat in question would not normally be expected to do anything, merely to “show the flag” as a reminder that, however vulnerable it might appear on land, Britannia still Ruled the Waves, and could make life very difficult for anyone who got too obstreperous.
The Mary-Jane is a reference to Henry VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose, which (most embarrassingly) sank, in calm seas, immediately after being launched from Portsmouth in 1545. The ship was recovered in the 1980s, and is now a tourist attraction.
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Theodore Roosevelt famously summarised his foreign policy as “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.”
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This echoes a famous line from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 movie Dr Strangelove, which has President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) saying: “Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.”
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A character in Dickens' Oliver Twist is called the Artful Dodger.
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Carrot has formed Ankh-Morpork's first scout troop. This salute parodies the traditional (but now discontinued) Cub Scout exchange “Dyb dyb dyb.” “Dob dob dob.”. The ‘dyb’ in the challenge supposedly stands for “do your best”, the ‘dob’ in the scouts' response for “do our best”.
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This sounds very much like the story of young Tom the chimney sweep's transformation, told in moralistic Victorian children's tale The Water Babies, written in 1863 by Charles Kingsley.
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Press-ganging was the 18th-century equivalent of conscription. A ship's captain, finding himself short-handed while in a home port, would send a gang of his men round the port, enlisting anyone they could find who looked like a sailor. Often this involved simply picking up drunks, but it was not unheard-of for men to be taken by force.
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In Arabic, “al” is the definite article, and it is joined to the word that it defines.
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The idea of treating zero as a number was one of several major contributions that Western mathematics adopted from the Arabs.
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A long-running series of British commercials for a certain brand of bread emphasised the Yorkshire origins of the manufacturer. This slogan is in a parody of a Yorkshire accent, presumably for similar reasons.
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Reg Shoe first appeared in Reaper Man as the founder of the Campaign for Dead Rights (slogans included “Undead, yes! Unperson, no!”). Possibly Vimes has forgotten that he personally ordered zombies to be recruited into the Watch, towards the end of Feet of Clay.
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Swires was the name of the gnome Rincewind and Twoflower encountered in The Light Fantastic. Given that gnome lives are described in that book as ‘nasty, brutish and short’, it seems unlikely that this is the same gnome. Possibly a relative, though.
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A popular song from the Second World War had the lyric:
Bless 'em all, bless 'em all!
Bless the long and the short and the tall!
Bless all the sergeants and double-you o-ones,
Bless all the corporals and their blinkin' sons.
The phrase was also used as the title of a stage play (filmed in 1960) by Willis Hall, describing the plight and fate of a squad of British soldiers in Burma.
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In the Good Old Days™, besieging armies would sometimes hurl the rotting corpses of dead animals over the city walls by catapult, with the aim of spreading disease and making the city uninhabitable. So in a sense, a dead dog could be a siege weapon…
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Leshp bears a resemblance to H. P. Lovecraft's similarly strange-sounding creation, R'lyeh — an ancient, now submerged island in the Pacific, inhabited by alien Things with strange architecture, which rises at very long intervals and sends people mad all over the world. For full details, see Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu.
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“It'll all be over by Christmas” was said of the First World War by armchair strategists, in August 1914. Ironically, the phrase has become a popular reassurance: more recently, President Clinton promised the American public in 1996 that US troops in Bosnia would be “home for Christmas”.
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Ahmed's catchphrase is borrowed from Signior So-So, a comic Italian character in the famous wartime radio series It's That Man Again (ITMA).
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The original Fanny Adams was an eight-year-old girl in Alton, Hampshire, whose dismembered body was discovered in 1867. About the same time, tinned mutton was first introduced in the Royal Navy, and the sailors — not noted for their sensitivity — took to calling the (rather disgusting) meat “Sweet Fanny Adams”. Hence the term came to mean something worthless, and finally to mean “nothing at all”.
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Oxford University has a ceremony called the Encaenia, which also involves lots of old men in silly costumes and a procession ending in the Sheldonian Theatre.
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The Pavlovian experiment in our world involved ringing a bell before and during the feeding of a group of dogs. After a while the dogs learned to associate the ringing of the bell with food. A part of them was essentially programmed to think that the bell was the same thing as food.
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Refers to the fact that, for many years, surgeons used to double as barbers, or vice versa.
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The Keystone Cops were a squad of frantically bumbling comedy policemen from the silent movie era.
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The “lone gunman” theory is still the official explanation of John F. Kennedy's assassination, despite four decades of frenzied speculation. Conspiracy theorists like to claim that Someone, Somewhere is covering up the truth, in much the same way as Vimes and Vetinari are conspiring to cover it up here.
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In 1363, in England, Edward III — then in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War with France — ordered that all men should practise archery on Sundays and holidays; this law remained technically in force for some time after the longbow was effectively obsolete as a weapon of war.
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In our world, an early attempt at an internal combustion engine used pellets of gunpowder, stuck to a strip of paper (rather like the roll of caps for a cap pistol). I understand that the attempt was just as successful as Leonard's.
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Burnt umber is a dark, cool-toned brown colour. Umber is an earth pigment containing manganese and iron oxides, used in paints, pastels and pencils. The name comes from Umbria, the region where it was originally mined and adopted as a pigment for art.
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The live film of JFK's assassination, allegedly, shows similar inconsistencies with the official account.
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The official account of JFK's assassination describes how a bullet moved in some very strange ways through his body. Conspiracy theorists disparage this as the “magic bullet theory”.
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In our world there is a magazine Guns And Ammo; this appears to be the Discworld equivalent.
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When the First World War broke out, Britons were much comforted by the fact that the supposedly unstoppable “steamroller” of the Russian army was on their side. Rumours spread that Russian troops were landing in Scotland to reinforce the British army, and these troops could be recognised by the snow on their boots. Ever since, the story has been a standard joke about the gullibility of people in wartime.
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Legend tells of Sweeney Todd, a barber in Fleet Street, London, who would rob and kill (not necessarily in that order) solitary customers, disposing of their bodies via a meat-pie shop next door. The story is celebrated in a popular Victorian melodrama, in a 1936 film, in a musical by Stephen Sondheim (1979), and in rhyming slang (“Sweeney Todd” = “Flying Squad”, an elite unit of the Metropolitan Police).
The story was the most successful of a spate of such shockers dating from the early 19th century. Sawney Bean, the Man-Eater of Midlothian was supposedly based on a real 13th-century Scottish legal case; also published about this time were two French versions, both set in Paris. All of these were claimed to be based on true stories — but then, this pretence was standard practice for novelists at the time. The “original” version of Sweeney Todd was written by Edward Lloyd under the title of The String of Pearls, published around 1840.
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Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy from the Texas Schools Book Depository, on the fifth floor.
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Mr Potato Head is a child's toy based on putting facial features on a potato. Nowadays, Mr Potato Head, produced by Hasbro Inc, has a plastic body and has achieved great fame by starring in the Toy Story films.
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In later editions of the book, this sentence was altered to ‘Snowy can barely read and write’ — presumably for consistency with the Clue about the notebook.
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The Riot Act was an old British law that allowed the authorities to use deadly force to break up crowds who were gathered for subversive purposes, such as trade unionists or Chartists. It was an unusual law in that it had to be read out to the crowd before it came into force — hence the significance of Detritus' attempt to read it — and the crowd was then supposed to be given a reasonable time to disperse. However, it was wide open to abuse, and was associated with some very nasty incidents, such as the Peterloo Massacre in 1818. It was not finally abolished in the UK until the mid-20th century, when the government decided that it would not be an acceptable way to deal with the regular riots then taking place in Northern Ireland.
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Named after the most famous archer of English mythology: Robin of Locksley, AKA Robin Hood.
In our world, there really do exist ‘reflex bows’: they are a type of bow that will curve away from the archer when unstrung.
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“Stoolie” is sometimes an abbreviation for “stoolpigeon”, a police informant. Of course, a stool is also something you might find in an Ankh-Morpork street.
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It has been pointed out — and I feel bound to inflict the thought on others — that Stoolie is technically a grassy gnoll. (And if that doesn't mean anything to you in the context of political assassinations — be thankful.)
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A reference to the shampoo ‘Wash and Go’, a trademark of Vidal Sassoon.
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Another reference to the shampoo ‘Wash and Go’, a trademark of Vidal Sassoon.
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According to legend, Dis is also the name of a city in Hell — particularly appropriate to a demon-powered organiser.
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One of the most intractable disputes in the early Christian church was over the nature of Christ — to what extent he was God or man. In 325, the Council of Nicea tried to settle the question with the Nicean Creed, but the dispute immediately re-emerged over a single word of the creed: one school said that it was “homoousios” (of one substance), the other that it should be “homoiousios” (of similar substance). The difference in the words is a single iota — the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet — and the schism (between Eastern and Western churches) continues to this day.
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“Shaving” is a method of marking cards by trimming a very, very thin slice from one edge, perceptible only if you know what to look for.
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Caliph was the title of the leader of the Muslim world, from the death of the Prophet in 632 onward; although the title has been divided and weakened since the 10th century, it was only officially abolished by the newly-formed Republic of Turkey as recently as 1924.
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Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz (1780–1831), a Prussian general who fought against Napoleon, wrote a standard textbook On War (Vom Kriege, first published 1833), in which he said that “war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means”. If you want to understand Lord Rust's mindset as expressed by someone with a working brain, read Clausewitz.
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When Jingo was being written, there was much speculation about whether “mad cow disease” had first been transmitted from sheep to cattle, and whether it could be transmitted from cattle to humans. Both ideas are now widely accepted.
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