“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?” ― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
I am high-key in love with the fact that Sir Terry, who wrote that line about a man not being dead, will quite likely be the first person whose name actually never stops being spoken, and it will always be accompanied with GNU, even if people forget what that part means
In case people do t know what it means, it comes from his books, where there is what is called the Clacks - a series of towers that send messages very fast by means of marks. It’s like the love child of the semaphore and the telegraph.
Encoded messages visible from one tower to the next, with header codes that are instructions of what to do with the message. Keep it going until a certain location, spread it to all locations, send it all the way down the line and stop it at then end, send it down and back.
It has a part called the Overhead, which is mostly internal messages that never leave the towers. And the creator of the tower, when his son dies due to an accident on one, puts his son’s name in the Overhead with specific headers, G and N and U:
G: send the message on
N: do not log the message
U: turn the message around at the end of the line and send it back again
www.gnuterrypratchett.com
A man is not dead while his name is still spoken. GNU Terry Pratchett.
