Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.
Interpretation
This quote humorously critiques the modern reenactment of historical events, highlighting how it trivializes the past.
Terry Pratchett's quote reflects on the absurdity of historical reenactments, pointing out the stark contrast between the serious nature of the past and the light-hearted, often commercialized way people engage with it today. He notes that while people attempt to recreate history, they do so with a comedic twist, involving costumes, food vendors, and limited roles for women, which underscores the historical limitations they faced. This blend of humor and grim reality invites readers to contemplate the authenticity, or lack thereof, in such reenactments.
In practice
During a history class discussion about how accurately we portray the past through modern lenses.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
the ice was not only broken; it was shivered into a million fragments
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
That's what's great about standup comedy: the instant feedback. You get up on stage, you tell a joke, if it doesn't work, come back the next day with a better version of it.
My life had made me funny, and cancer wasn't going to change that.
You don't know what a rough crowd is. If all I have to do is go make people laugh, that's nothing. Let me tell you what a tough crowd is. A tough crowd is going to a morning service and you got six people there and you gotta pay your house payment. That's a tough crowd.
Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main imports are baseball players and acid rain.
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