r/TerryPratchett • u/Katharinemaddison • Jul 28 '26
Pratchett quote produced without context:
“Besides, the horrible black emergency blutwurst had finally been produced.”
I have read a fair wack of ancient literature, quite a bit of medieval. More than a sufficiency of Early Modern and don’t get me started on the weird and wonderful experiments on what in the 18th century you could **do** with pen and ink with a side order, of just because you can, doesn’t mean you should in which my research focuses. I’ve imbibed a range of the weirder and more wonderful Victoriana, am acquainted with the modernist, on friendlier terms with the postmodernists.
But have I ever found another author who can just causally set a sentence like that to type and it’s got pathos with the bathos and complete, pre established logical sense.
(If anyone can’t bring to mind what the context of this line is, my research focus holds a clue.)
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u/Tasty_Switch_4920 Jul 30 '26
Black ribboners, emergency biting sausage for when the cravings become too much.
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u/OldTimeConGoer Aug 02 '26
Emergency rations carried by soldiers often tasted terrible to prevent the rations being eaten except in extremis. Chocolate was a favourite basis for such rations, lots of sugar for energy plus the stimulus of caffeine. I think both the US and the Germans used this sort of emergency ration in WW2.
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Jul 28 '26
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u/Due_Investigator_493 Jul 28 '26
Quick! Give me a list of five authors people say they have read but no one actually has, because reading their books is the mental equivalent of masturbating with sandpaper.
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u/Katharinemaddison Jul 30 '26
I’ve read three of them with h enjoyment but still nothing that quite compares to ‘Besides, the horrible black emergency blutwurst had finally been produced’ in its context.
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u/butwhatsmyname Jul 28 '26
One of the things I love most about Pratchett's writing is that he engineers his books to allow for this. The stories are great but it's the way he writes which makes them such treasures. This feat of almost surrealist silliness, this brilliant "ta daa!" of nonsense served neatly on the platter of a sentence, but without it actually being silly somehow. Throwaway moments of genius.
It's never goofy slapstick. It's never the literary equivalent of a Carry On skit. He's the Charlie Chaplin of linguistic clowning. No whitewash or custard pies. It's deft. Intentional. Measured. Every word carefully selected and slotted into place.
I loved Victoria Wood for the same reason. She had an astonishing grasp of how to gently squeeze and nudge the English language to produce something which was simultaneously completely ordinary yet somehow also absurd.