Book:Men at Arms/Annotations
Men at Arms Annotations
The recruitment song (p313/238) seems familiar.
- To what, pray? --Knmatt 20:45, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
I think it has an echo of the traditional Irish song "The Recruiting Sergeant", which dates (at least in the form used by the Pogues) from 1916. The original song starts something like
As I was walking down the road
A feelin' fine and dandy-oh,
A recruiting sergeant came up to me
And said "You'll look fine in khaki-oh"...
and ends
Come rain or hail or wind or snow,
I'm not going out to Flanders-oh,
There's fighting in Dublin to be done,
Let your sergeants and your commanders go!
Let English men fight English wars,
Cos near every time you start them all,
And wishing the sergeant a very good night,
There and then we parted right!
The Ankh-Morpork version lacks the republican sentiment, the principled refusal to enlist, and indeed the scan and rhyme and rhythm of the original, and reduces the arguments to "enlist or you get your goohulog heads kicked in". According to my old English Lit teacher, this is a fine example of "bathetis"....--AgProv 22:11, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
- According to the APF v9.0[1], it is based off a song called Ratcliffe Highway.--AutisticMajor 03:47, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
p.182 (Harper Fiction mass market paperback): Superconductivity! Dunno if this should be an annotation (maybe it's mentioned in one of the Science of Discworld books), but Roundworld superconductivity does not work that way. Superconductivity is a method by which the electrical resistance for some substance is reduced to approximately zero. Silicon is a semiconductor, and while many good superconductors are also semiconductors, silicon is not a superconductor. It requires high levels of impurity to get silicon to become a superconductor at a fraction of a degree from absolute zero, and the warmest superconductor is still a mercury barium ceramic at -138 Celsius. It's also not the sort of thing that gets better as you get colder. It's either full-on superconductor or normal conductivity. The mechanism isn't clear, but the last theory I remember, phonons, requires perfect coherence, and any non-coherent electrons will ruin the effect.superlusertc 2010 November 13, 11:21 (UTC)
Cuddy's tuition of Detritus in basic mathematics is very reminiscent of musical comedian Tom Lehrer's exposition of the New Math in base eight...[2] Detritus is being taught to count in Base eight form, using twos, fours and eights.