A dashing wizard
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From Jesse Sheidlower:
I hereby offer to supervise an MA thesis focused entirely on this one passage.
#linguistics
— Jesse Sheidlower (@jessesword.com) July 17, 2025 at 2:02 PM
The cited passage is from Terry Prachett's 1987 novel Mort.
Here's the context:
Three men had appeared behind him, as though extruded from the stonework. They had the heavy, stolid look of those thugs whose appearance in any narrative means that it’s time for the hero to be menaced a bit, although not too much, because it’s also obvious that they’re going to be horribly surprised.
They were leering. They were good at it.
One of them had drawn a knife, which he waved in little circles in the air. He advanced slowly towards Mort, while the other two hung back to provide immoral support.
“Give us the money,” he rasped.
After some back-and-forth:
“I think we kill you and take a chance on the money,” he said. “We don’t want this sort of thing to spread.”
The other two drew their knives.
Mort swallowed. “This could be unwise,” he said.
“Why?”
“Well, I won’t like it, for one.”
“You’re not supposed to like it, you’re supposed to—die,” said the thief, advancing.
“I don’t think I’m due to die,” said Mort, backing away. “I’m sure I would have been told.”
“Yeah,” said the thief, who was getting fed up with this. “Yeah, well, you have been, haven’t you? Great steaming elephant turds!”
Mort had just stepped backwards again. Through a wall.
The leading thief glared at the solid stone that had swallowed Mort, and then threw down his knife.
“Well, —- me,” he said. “A —-ing wizard. I hate —-ing wizards!”
“You shouldn’t —- them, then,” muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes.
The third member of the trio, who was a little slow of thinking, said, “Here, he walked through the wall!”
One quasi-linguistic note, for anyone who takes Jesse up on his offer: I presume that the image in Jesse's skeet comes from a printed book, because the Kindle version (inappropriately) eliminates the spaces corresponding to the boundaries of the bleeped words:
That's a typographical convention that annoys me when it eliminates spaces next to punctuational dashes. In Jesse's image, there are spaces on both sides of all of the dashes, except after the ones preceding "ing". That also strikes me as inappropriate to context — in the text reproduced above, I've added spaces around each bleeped word, but not between the intra-word letter-bleeping dashes.
Another linguistic question is how the readers of the Audible audiobook version render the dashes. However, I'm not willing to spend $23.24 to learn the answer (or even the special Audible-member price of $10.49), since my master's thesis days are long past.
In related news, there's a new-ish edition of The F-Word ….
Victor Mair said,
July 18, 2025 @ 5:10 am
The —-s in Jesse's skeet make me think of a potential fifth panel for this SMBC comic: "Recursive summarization" (7/14/25).
David Morris said,
July 18, 2025 @ 6:42 am
The1980 movie Fame sees one of the students perform at an open mike stand-up comedy venue. The first time he does very well. The second time he does very badly. One of his friends suggests going for a pizza. He says something to the effect of "I died out there and you're talking about fucking *pizza*?". His friend says "No, I'm talking about *eating* pizza".
Philip Taylor said,
July 18, 2025 @ 8:10 am
"the Kindle version (inappropriately) eliminates the spaces corresponding to the boundaries of the bleeped words" — whilst the web version, at least as rendered here in Firefox, ligates the first three dashes to form an em-dash, leading to « "Well, —- me,” he said. ».
Roscoe said,
July 18, 2025 @ 9:12 am
Paraphrased from Isaac Asimov’s “Treasury of Humor”:
A man comes home chuckling. His wife asks him why. He says, “I just heard the dirtiest limerick ever!” She says, " Let me hear it." He says, “No, I can’t. It’s just too dirty.” She says, “O.K., tell you what. You substitute a dash for anything you think I’m too delicate to hear, and I’ll figure it out on my own.” He says,
“Dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash,
Dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash,
Dash-dash-dash-dash-dash,
Dash-dash-dash-dash-dash,
Dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash-fuck.”
David Marjanović said,
July 18, 2025 @ 9:21 am
Worse, it replaces all the dashes by hyphens. – – – – Kindle to – – – –!!!
Roscoe said,
July 18, 2025 @ 10:02 am
Mel Brooks as the Piss Boy in “History of the World, Part I”: “But, dot dot dot, you don’t understand!”
Philip Taylor said,
July 18, 2025 @ 2:21 pm
Well, so does Blue Sky, or so it would seem David. Clicking on the image causes a larger version thereof to be displayed, below which appears a machine-readable version that itself reads :
which "What Unicode character is this ?" transcribes as (first few elements only)
Rick Rubenstein said,
July 19, 2025 @ 3:10 am
Not the worst typographical horror visited upon Pratchett; the first U.S. editions of his Discworld books rendered Death's dialog in all caps, rather than the correct small caps. It's remarkable what a difference in tone that made. Small-caps Death was an absolutely exquisite choice by Pratchett; I can only assume he was pretty unhappy about the change/blunder.
Philip Taylor said,
July 19, 2025 @ 5:07 am
I now see that <three consecutive <HYPHEN-MINUS>s -> <EM-DASH> would appear to result from this site’s underlying infrastructure rather than from anything else, since it also occurs in my immediately preceding comment whereas the several instances of four consecutive <HYPHEN-MINUS>s render as intended at https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wkqqjzk4wynimmb4o44gdvw2/post/3lu6jbvlai22w when the image is expanded by clicking (the <HYPHEN-MINUS>s appear in the transcribed text at the bottom of the page after image expansion).
Edith said,
July 19, 2025 @ 6:09 am
"I never worry about that –ing stuff.”
That's Mr Tulip, a Discworld character, who must be its most dashing villain – pretty much every utterance of his contains "–ing"
Mr Tulip again, in pedantic lanuage mode: "It's not a –ing harpsichord, it's a –ing virginal," growled Mr. Tulip. "One –ing string to a note instead of two! So called because it was an instrument for –ing young ladies!"
stephen said,
July 19, 2025 @ 3:43 pm
I remember something in a British novel, somebody was expressing, strong, emotion maybe annoyance, and he said the
words, “dash it.” I don’t remember anything else about the book,
Was this an instance of self-censorship or did the word dash have some other meaning? I am using voice input on this iPad, and when I say the word dash it actually makes the dash mark instead of writing the word dash.
Philip Taylor said,
July 19, 2025 @ 3:52 pm
"Dash it" was a pretty standard upper-class British euphemism for "D@mn it" when the use of euphemisms was rather more common than it is today. One of my maternal uncles always said "ruddy" where "bloody" was his underlying meaning.
Philip Taylor said,
July 19, 2025 @ 3:53 pm
"Dash it" was a pretty standard upper-class British euphemism for "D@mn it" when the use of euphemisms was rather more common than it is today. One of my maternal uncles always said "ruddy" where "bloody" was his underlying meaning.
ajay said,
July 21, 2025 @ 7:15 am
Mr Tulip again, in pedantic lanuage mode: "It's not a –ing harpsichord, it's a –ing virginal," growled Mr. Tulip. "One –ing string to a note instead of two! So called because it was an instrument for –ing young ladies!"
To which someone else replied, if I remember, "Good heavens, was it really? I thought it was just a sort of small piano."
I wonder if "dash it" was actually a reference to the row of dashes, or if it was "dash" as in "break apart" – "he shall dash them in pieces as a potter's vessel" – which would be a good forceful wish for something that annoyed you.
Philip Taylor said,
July 21, 2025 @ 9:38 am
I don't think so, Ajay (that "dash it" was either a reference to a row of dashes or referred to "dash" as in "break apart", that is) — if you ask Google Ngrams about the phrase "dashed if I know", usage of which peaked at around 1930 (but which is making a remarkable comeback,if the graph is to be believed), I think that it is clear that "dash" is a simply euphemism for "d@mn", as I suggested above.
ajay said,
July 21, 2025 @ 10:43 am
Oh, I agree absolutely that it was a euphemism for "damn it". I'm just wondering whether the use of "dash" specifically as the euphemism for "damn" (rather than any other monosyllable such as "hedge" or "quack") was
a) because of the line of dashes
or
b) because of the "break apart" meaning
or, I suppose,
c) because it's a random word that happens to sound a bit like "damn", cf "frick" or "ruddy" or indeed "drat".
ajay said,
July 21, 2025 @ 10:48 am
A lot of the references to Roman gods in Shakespeare's non-Roman plays, IIRC, are because you weren't allowed to say "God" on stage, so you get Christian characters saying things like "Jove knows I love, But who? Lips do not move, No tongue may tell".
"By Jove" lasted a good long time after Shakespeare, well into the 20th century.
"Great Scott" is perhaps the oddest one – the Scott in question is, probably, Winfield, or possibly Sir Walter.
Bob Ladd said,
July 21, 2025 @ 11:38 am
@ajay: Surely your explanation (c) is the most likely. In addition to "drat" and "dash" as euphemisms for "damn", there's also "darn" and "dang". Plus "heck" for "hell", "gosh" and "golly" and "goodness" for "God", "cripes" and "crikey" for "Christ", and undoubtedly others as well.
Philip Taylor said,
July 21, 2025 @ 1:58 pm
I’ve often thought, Bob (and Ajay), that when we use "Gordon Bennett !" as an interjection, few of us have any idea who Gordon Bennett was and probably think (if we think at all) that we are euphemising "God and Bennett" (Gawd ’n’ Bennett). But that begs the question "Who was Bennett ?", and are we confusing the probably non-existent "Bennett" with the turbulent priest (Thomas à) Becket ?
ajay said,
July 22, 2025 @ 3:57 am
All this is somewhat irrelevant to me as I confine myself to traditional expletives like "eheu!" and "Io Saturnalia" and "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ".
Philip Taylor said,
July 22, 2025 @ 4:28 am
How about "jumping Jehoshaphat", Ajay ? Is that one in your lexicon ?
ajay said,
July 22, 2025 @ 6:49 am
Bob: also euphemisms for God involving just omitting the word "God" (or "Lord"), such as "the dear", which I think is mostly Irish, or "the guid" which is Scots. So you'd say "the dear knows where he went" or "the Guid help us" .
Bob Ladd said,
July 22, 2025 @ 4:55 pm
Turns out Wikipedia actually has a short piece on the phrase "Gordon Bennett", as it's not clear where it comes from.
After I posted about "darn, dang" and the rest the other day, it occurred to me that French also has the same kind of thing – made-up words that sound like (mostly religious) taboo words, like "Morbleu" for "mon Dieu!" and "diantre" for "diable". The Wikipedia article on Gordon Bennett uses the term "minced oath" for such things.
Philip Taylor said,
July 24, 2025 @ 5:56 am
« The Wikipedia article on Gordon Bennett uses the term "minced oath" for such things » — if it does, Bob (and of course I am more than happy to take your word for it), then I would suggest that that is a very dated use of "oath". To my mind, oaths in the 21st century (and for some time preceding) are legal declarations, not uses of bad language. It is interesting that we have at least two words that conflate these concepts: "swear" and "oath".
ajay said,
July 24, 2025 @ 10:29 am
That is a very interesting point. We don't really say someone "let out an oath" any more, do we?
You might find this of interest: "Oaths! How do they Work" by the historian Bret Devereaux https://acoup.blog/2019/06/28/collections-oaths-how-do-they-work/
"…an oath has three key components:
First: A declaration, which may be either something about the present or past or a promise for the future.
Second: The specific powers greater than oneself who are invoked as witnesses and who will enforce the penalty if the oath is false.
Third: A curse, by the swearers, called down on themselves, should they be false…"
Note that there are actually three words here which can also mean "naughty words" in modern English – "swear", "oath", and "curse" – but none of them do!
He adds: "In Greek, it was common to transform a statement into an oath by adding something like τὸν Δία (by Zeus!). Those sorts of phrases could serve to make a compact oath – e.g. μὰ τὸν Δία! (yes, [I swear] by Zeus!) as an answer to the question is essentially swearing to the answer – grammatically speaking, the verb of swearing is necessary, but left implied. We do the same thing, (“I’ll get up this hill, by God!”). And, I should note, exactly like in English, these forms became standard exclamations…"
So there's a lot of distinctions to be made. If I say "my damn brother's drunk again" I'm just being abusive. If I say "my brother's drunk again, goddamn him" I am cursing. If I say "God, I will smack his head if he turns up drunk" I am swearing – I am calling God to witness my promise.