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> The Auditors of Reality are particularly interesting. They are the Discworld edition of what I’ve called the Great Bureaucrat archetype elsewhere. Their ideol

> The Auditors of Reality are particularly interesting. They are the Discworld edition of what I’ve called the Great Bureaucrat archetype elsewhere. Their ideology is something like the Wokism of Discworld, a deadening, stifling, faceless force of intersectional lifelessness. what Man this dude sure has a definition of “woke” that is completely alien to the roots of that term. > I read one Pratchett novel (Thief of Time I think) in college, but I’m glad I didn’t properly get into it till my mid-forties. These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young. I read through the lot around 2017-19, during the first Trump admin, when I was in my early forties. what Dude they are comic fantasy, yes Pratchett has Things to Say about the world in them, more and more as the series goes on, but I picked up Equal Rites soon after it came out when I was eighteen and the series was a constant delight through my college years and beyond. Yes there are things in Discworld that will zoom right by a kid and only land when you come back to it as an adult. That’s part of why they’re good books. There’s things like that in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Cycle (Book of Three, Black Cauldron, etc) that hit me like a ton of bricks when I pick up those little books forty years after I first read them as a kid and completely missed those parts. Stories can speak to multiple ages on multiple levels.

jfengel 2y ago
That is how "woke" is used now. Any resemblance to the original use is completely lost. It is merely "things I don't like". And it has become a convenient shibboleth: anyone using the word that way has nothing of value to say to me on any topic.
- tacitusarc 2y ago
  Perhaps ironically, that’s not actually what shibboleth means.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    "A common or longstanding belief, custom, or catchphrase associated with a particular group, especially one with little current meaning or truth." (Wiktionary). If you mean to restrict it to the Biblical usage of pronunciation, it generalized past that centuries ago.
  - olddustytrail 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 2y ago
      Please don't be a jerk on HN, no matter how limited someone's English is or you feel it is. Posts like this only make things worse, whether you're right or not. We've had to ask you this before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40979518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40979518). If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
      - olddustytrail 2y ago
        Do you honestly think I was the jerk in that conversation, rather than the person saying someone was using a word incorrectly when they weren't? I don't think I've knowingly punched down. Edit: anyway noted. I'll try to be more American (in the old sense; I'm not sure being Trumpian would work well here!)
        tomhoward 2y ago
        Good on you for being willing to try improving. HN doesn’t really distinguish between “punching down” and “punching up”, and prefers to avoid “punching” at all. The guiding principle to keep top of mind is “intellectual curiosity”. There’s a place for an intellectually curious discussion about the history and present day meaning of the word “shibboleth”, and the way you commented brings that to a screeching halt. And even if someone else seems to be acting like a bit of a jerk in the comments, it doesn’t make it OK to do it too. But as you say, you’ll try to do better which is great.
dcminter 2y ago
> I picked up Equal Rites soon after it came out when I was eighteen I read Colour of Magic when I was 13 I think. It might have been a year or two later; a friend's mother had heard the Radio 4 "Woman's Hour" reading of Equal Rites and recommended them to me as she knew I liked Douglas Adams. Adams and Pratchett had this in common - they had sufficient layers of jokes in them that they could appeal to both me in my early teens, and a friend's mother in her 40s (roughly). I missed a huge number of gags on the first read through. I like to re-read familiar books, though, and I used to get a few more each time through. Until I read the APF there were still a bunch of historical gags or similar that I was missing by a country mile! I'm sure there are plenty more that have still gone over my head. I honestly think that Pratchett was a better writer than Wodehouse, even though that's practically heresy for a Brit.
Macha 2y ago
> Wokism of Discworld That comment also raised some eyebrows when I read it. Discworld is pretty "woke". The female dwarves are a bunch of LGBT analogues, a huge chunk of the watch series is about racism, Night Watch and Jingo are both pretty anti-populism.
floren 2y ago
The Discworld books are great but yeah, they're very much at the level of say a bright 15 year old. I've been reading them since I was that age, and I always find plenty to enjoy, but I think they're really at their best for teens.
- notahacker 2y ago
  tbh you probably get more out of some of them in your mid teens, especially the ones which really aren't trying to make serious points (the first two especially) and the ones that were explicitly written as YA fiction. The sophisticated bits are references, not stuff you won't understand until you've been married and the social commentary isn't exactly hard to digest. (Or maybe it is if you wait until your 40s and conclude that the Auditors are 'woke'!) Pratchett wrote good kids books earlier in his career too

jfengel 2y ago

That is how "woke" is used now. Any resemblance to the original use is completely lost. It is merely "things I don't like". And it has become a convenient shibboleth: anyone using the word that way has nothing of value to say to me on any topic.

tacitusarc 2y ago
Perhaps ironically, that’s not actually what shibboleth means.
- jfengel 2y ago
  "A common or longstanding belief, custom, or catchphrase associated with a particular group, especially one with little current meaning or truth." (Wiktionary). If you mean to restrict it to the Biblical usage of pronunciation, it generalized past that centuries ago.
- olddustytrail 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 2y ago
    Please don't be a jerk on HN, no matter how limited someone's English is or you feel it is. Posts like this only make things worse, whether you're right or not. We've had to ask you this before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40979518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40979518). If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    - olddustytrail 2y ago
      Do you honestly think I was the jerk in that conversation, rather than the person saying someone was using a word incorrectly when they weren't? I don't think I've knowingly punched down. Edit: anyway noted. I'll try to be more American (in the old sense; I'm not sure being Trumpian would work well here!)
      - tomhoward 2y ago
        Good on you for being willing to try improving. HN doesn’t really distinguish between “punching down” and “punching up”, and prefers to avoid “punching” at all. The guiding principle to keep top of mind is “intellectual curiosity”. There’s a place for an intellectually curious discussion about the history and present day meaning of the word “shibboleth”, and the way you commented brings that to a screeching halt. And even if someone else seems to be acting like a bit of a jerk in the comments, it doesn’t make it OK to do it too. But as you say, you’ll try to do better which is great.

dcminter 2y ago

> I picked up Equal Rites soon after it came out when I was eighteen I read Colour of Magic when I was 13 I think. It might have been a year or two later; a friend's mother had heard the Radio 4 "Woman's Hour" reading of Equal Rites and recommended them to me as she knew I liked Douglas Adams. Adams and Pratchett had this in common - they had sufficient layers of jokes in them that they could appeal to both me in my early teens, and a friend's mother in her 40s (roughly). I missed a huge number of gags on the first read through. I like to re-read familiar books, though, and I used to get a few more each time through. Until I read the APF there were still a bunch of historical gags or similar that I was missing by a country mile! I'm sure there are plenty more that have still gone over my head. I honestly think that Pratchett was a better writer than Wodehouse, even though that's practically heresy for a Brit.

Macha 2y ago

> Wokism of Discworld That comment also raised some eyebrows when I read it. Discworld is pretty "woke". The female dwarves are a bunch of LGBT analogues, a huge chunk of the watch series is about racism, Night Watch and Jingo are both pretty anti-populism.

floren 2y ago

The Discworld books are great but yeah, they're very much at the level of say a bright 15 year old. I've been reading them since I was that age, and I always find plenty to enjoy, but I think they're really at their best for teens.

notahacker 2y ago
tbh you probably get more out of some of them in your mid teens, especially the ones which really aren't trying to make serious points (the first two especially) and the ones that were explicitly written as YA fiction. The sophisticated bits are references, not stuff you won't understand until you've been married and the social commentary isn't exactly hard to digest. (Or maybe it is if you wait until your 40s and conclude that the Auditors are 'woke'!) Pratchett wrote good kids books earlier in his career too