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I know it’s not the right thing to say to a lady, miss, but you are sweating like a pig!" "My mother always said that horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies merely glow…" "Is that so? Well, miss, you are glowing like a pig!
Terry Pratchett
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote humorously highlights the absurdity of traditional gender norms regarding sweating.

In this humorous exchange, Terry Pratchett plays with societal expectations about how men and women should express discomfort or exertion. The first speaker acknowledges that while it may not be polite to comment on a woman's appearance, he nonetheless makes a comedic remark about her sweating, subverting the conventional notion of femininity by bluntly comparing it to that of a pig, prompting laughter and reflection on gender stereotypes.

Themes

HumorSweatGenderStereotypesAbsurdity

In practice

Example use cases

Using this quote at a comedy show to lighten the mood.

More from Terry Pratchett

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.
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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.
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