The closer a language is to yours, the easier it is to understand, the further it is from you, the harder it is to understand. But there's a sort of uncanny valley right in the middle that makes a language sound silly.
I'm an English speaker. German sounds similar, I can even find cognates sometimes. Mandarin Chinese sounds completely alien, but I can understand that it is a language.
But Dutch, Dutch sounds hilarious. Dutch sounds like a clown version of English. I wonder why that is.
I've heard Spanish speakers say similar things about Portuguese, which makes me think there's some sort of linguistic Silly Zone.
The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin. They both looked down at the crumpled shape of the Overlord, His Unholy Majesty, in his obsidian armor.
His final spasms had been mesmerizingly acrobatic. The fall down the steps leading up to his iron throne had pretzelled his body quite impressively, both arms folded behind his back and one leg bent at a jaunty angle.
The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin.
"Shit," said the goblin.
"Shit," said the orc.
"We're likely to get blamed for this," the goblin said. She walked over to the head of the glittering mangled heap and started pulling the helmet off.
"It's not our fault," the orc said. "It's hard to help someone choking when they wear two-hundred pounds of spiked armor at all times."
"Yeah, well," the goblin grunted. The helmet came free, and the bald head of the Overlord bounced on the stone with a hollow, coconut noise. "You know how it is in this bloody country - thieves get their heads cut off so they can't think about thieving, and all that." She fished in the Overlord's mouth with a finger and pulled out the obstructing olive on the end of her claw.
She popped it into her mouth and chewed. "What do you reckon they do for a regicide?" she said.
"We should run," the orc said. She had started bouncing her leg. "I hear that there's some places in the Alliance where they just kill you and let you stay dead. That's got to be nicer than what'll happen if we stay here."
The goblin started to nod - and then her gaze fell on the helmet.
It looked like a pineapple designed by a deranged blacksmith. It was all thorns and spikes and hard edges, as though the maker had been very determined to not let pigeons roost on it. The only bits that weren't solid iron were eyeholes. Nobody had ever seen the Overlord's face.
She held up the helmet and squinted from it to the orc. One of the thorns had been bent badly in the fall.
Nobody had ever seen the Overlord's face...
"Right," she muttered. "Right. Could work - or."
The orc had a sudden vision of the immediate future. "No," she said.
"I mean you're about his height-"
"No."
"It would just be for a-"
"Absolutely not."
"Just hear me out," the goblin said. "Outside of this room are two-thousand men and orcs and goblins who are absolutely gonzo about this man, and there's a whole country of them outside of the castle, and at any moment someone's going to walk in that door and see one dead tit in black armor and two unbelievably dead idiots next to him.
"Or." She tossed the helmet up like a basketball to the orc, who fumbled and tried to find somewhere to hold it that wasn't a knife's edge. "We chuck him out the window now, walk out the door in the armor, and ditch the armor as soon as nobody sees us."
The orc had started bouncing her leg again. "They'll know something's up the second I walk out of the room."
"No worries," said the goblin. "Leave that to me."
---
It had been a very strange year for the Empire.
Change had rolled across the land as slow and inevitable as a glacier. Roads and bridges carved the gray, blasted wildlands, and a number of social reforms had made the country a place where you could be miserable, yes, but miserable in comfort and safety, and that was an improvement.
Barely anyone got boiled alive in molten metal, and even if the disgusted sun never rose to light the Empire, at least you had a roof over your head to protect yourself from the acid rain.
"Your empire flourishes, Your Unholy Majesty," the magician said over her wine glass. She looked down from the tower's balcony over the gleaming stone battlements. Some work had been done to line the castle and surrounding city with sizzling, crackling alchemical lights at night. The whole thing glowed like something dangerously radioactive.
The suit of armor waved a languid, glittering gauntlet over to the goblin, who bowed.
"His Abominable Gloriousness Thanks You," the goblin recited. "The Prosperity Of His Empire Can Only Be Achieved Through The Prosperity Of His People."
"If I may be so bold, I am quite pleased that you had chosen to take my counsel under consideration," said the magician. "We have accomplished many things together."
Another wave. Another bow. "The Overlord, May His Presence Swallow The Sun And Stars, Thanks You As Well."
"It was quite gratifying to see you change your mind, after so many centuries of denial." The wine was swirled. "Tell me, what was it that finally gave you cause to listen to me?"
There was the slightest hesitation. The goblin's eyes flicked to the armor, then to the magician. She puffed out her chest. "Do you question the wisdom of His Austere Lugubriousness?" she asked.
The magician looked at the goblin. She looked at the armor. She tipped her head back and drank the wine too quickly.
She looked back at the armor. "I know you're the orc, you moron," she said.
The room went deathly still. An alchemical light fizzled.
The orc pulled off the helmet, sending long, untied hair down tangling, and said: "How could you possibly-"
"Because you're both idiots!" the magician said. The goblin jumped. The orc jumped with a noise like a dropped stove. "What kind of a plan was this?! If it wasn't for me, you would have been turned into fertilizer months ago."
She closed her eyes. She took a long, dramatic breath. She set the wine glass down on the balcony rail.
"How did the Overlord die?" she asked when she seemed like she had gotten a hold over herself.
"Choked on an olive," said the goblin.
"Threw his body out the window," said the orc.
"You don't have to mention the window," said the goblin.
"Right," said the orc. "Sorry."
The magician looked out over the city, hand curled thoughtfully under her nose. "Who knows about this?"
"Just us. And, uh. You. Apparently."
"And why did you accept my counsel?"
The orc blinked. "Sorry?"
"Why did you accept my counsel?" the magician repeated.
"Well," the orc said. "Well - you seemed like you had good ideas-"
"Great ideas!" the goblin said with an edge of desperation. "Don't know why the old bastard didn't listen to you!"
"Right - right," said the orc. "And when we figured we were stuck doing this - well, it just made sense, really."
The magician seemed to absorb this. She nodded. "All right," she said, striding between the two and grabbing the crystal decanter.
"Um," said the orc. "Sorry. What happens now?"
"What happens is that you two will continue to serve as Overlord," said the magician. "You will continue to take my counsel. We will continue to reform this bloody country, and gods willing, we will turn it into the crown jewel of the world by next Midwinter."
The orc looked at the goblin. The goblin looked at the orc.
"Really?" the goblin asked.
"Oh yes," said the magician. "I've worked hard to be counsel to the Overlord, and I have no reason to stop now. And besides-"
She looked the orc up and down with a deliberate slowness, poring over every microscopic detail, eyes tracing over every jagged line, and grinned like a panther.
"You look much better in the armor than he ever did," she said. Dark robes swirled like a becleavaged thundercloud, and she strode out through the high iron doors, decanter in hand.
The goblin looked at the orc. The orc looked at the goblin.
Reading a Terry Pratchett book is literally just:
Here's a funny little joke
Here's something that you can tell is a joke but don't get and will only figure out five years later
Here's a surprisingly cool fantasy concept
Here's a unique and well written simile
Here's a lil guy
Here's something that has aged depressingly well into the modern day
Here's something that has aged remarkably queer into the modern day
Here's a character that you can barely understand what he's saying
Here is the most terrifying and deeply disturbing concept you have ever heard, casually mentioned
Here is the dumbest fucking pun you've ever heard but in the best way
Here is a quote so profound that it makes you view morality and the world in a different way
Here is a plot twist that you can't tell if it's genius or stupid
Congratulations! You've finished the book! It has fundamentally changed you as a person and you will never be the same!
Everyone gives Sherlock Holmes a hard time about being mean about Watson's writing, but honestly imagine you told your roommate "sure, you can write up an account of my work for the newspaper," thinking it would be like, about the murder, but then he publishes it and it's 90% about you, as a person, and it's a huge hit and now everyone in London knows that you hoard newspapers and do cocoaine when you're depressed. Because I think you'd be little miffed too.
Humans install spikes so birds will go away. Birds steal them and do this instead.
Humans are so cute. They think they can outsmart birds. They place nasty metal spikes on rooftops and ledges to prevent birds from nesting there.
It’s a classic human trick known in urban design as “evil architecture”: designing a place in a way that’s meant to deter others. Think of the city benches you see segmented by bars to stop homeless people sleeping there.
But birds are genius rebels. Not only are they undeterred by evil architecture, they actually use it to their advantage, according to a new Dutch study published in the journal Deinsea.
Crows and magpies, it turns out, are learning to rip strips of anti-bird spikes off of buildings and use them to build their nests. It’s an incredible addition to the growing body of evidence about the intelligence of birds, so wrongly maligned as stupid that “bird-brained” is still commonly used as an insult...
Magpies also use anti-bird spikes for their nests. In 2021, a hospital patient in Antwerp, Belgium, looked out the window and noticed a huge magpie’s nest in a tree in the courtyard. Biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra of Leiden-based Naturalis Biodiversity Center, one of the study’s authors, went to collect the nest and found that it was made out of 50 meters of anti-bird strips, containing no fewer than 1,500 metal spikes.
Hiemstra describes the magpie nest as “an impregnable fortress.”
Pictured: A huge magpie nest made out of 1,500 metal spikes.
Magpies are known to build roofs over their nests to prevent other birds from stealing their eggs and young. Usually, they scrounge around in nature for thorny plants or spiky branches to form the roof. But city birds don’t need to search for the perfect branch — they can just use the anti-bird spikes that humans have so kindly put at their disposal.
“The magpies appear to be using the pins exactly the same way we do: to keep other birds away from their nest,” Hiemstra said.
Another urban magpie nest, this one from Scotland, really shows off the roof-building tactic:
Pictured: A nest from Scotland shows how urban magpies are using anti-bird spikes to construct a roof meant to protect their young and eggs from predators.
Birds had already been spotted using upward-pointing anti-bird spikes as foundations for nests. In 2016, the so-called Parkdale Pigeon became Twitter-famous for refusing to give up when humans removed her first nest and installed spikes on her chosen nesting site, the top of an LCD monitor on a subway platform in Melbourne. The avian architect rebelled and built an even better home there, using the spikes as a foundation to hold her nest more securely in place.
...Hiemstra’s study is the first to show that birds, adapting to city life, are learning to seek out and use our anti-bird spikes as their nesting material. Pretty badass, right?
The genius of birds — and other animals we underestimate
It’s a well-established fact that many bird species are highly intelligent. Members of the corvid family, which includes crows and magpies, are especially renowned for their smarts. Crows can solve complex puzzles, while magpies can pass the “mirror test” — the classic test that scientists use to determine if a species is self-aware.
Studies show that some birds have evolved cognitive skills similar to our own: They have amazing memories, remembering for months the thousands of different hiding places where they’ve stashed seeds, and they use their own experiences to predict the behavior of other birds, suggesting they’ve got some theory of mind.
And, as author Jennifer Ackerman details in The Genius of Birds, birds are brilliant at using tools. Black palm cockatoos use twigs as drumsticks, tapping out a beat on a tree trunk to get a female’s attention. Jays use sticks as spears to attack other birds...
Birds have also been known to use human tools to their advantage. When carrion crows want to crack a walnut, for example, they position the nut on a busy road, wait for a passing car to crush the shell, then swoop down to collect the nut and eat it. This behavior has been recorded several times in Japanese crows.
But what’s unique about Hiemstra’s study is that it shows birds using human tools, specifically designed to thwart birds’ plans, in order to thwart our plans instead. We humans try to keep birds away with spikes, and the birds — ingenious rebels that they are — retort: Thanks, humans!
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