Of Sherbet Lemons and Figgins: communication tools of two writers during apocalyptic times.
Neil Gaiman commented that when he and Sir Terry Pratchett were writing Good Omens, they would often need short hand ways to communicate with each other.
Terry would come up with terms for things that usually there were no terms for -in ways to write comedy. One of those terms was a Figgin.
And that was the term that he had originally started using in Discworld. And essentially a Figgin is a joke that becomes a running joke that will pay off in some way toward the end.
A Figgin was actually distinguished from something that Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett started using in Good Omens called sherbet lemons.
And Terry Pratchett called them sherbet lemons because there is a point in the book where Adam Young falls asleep after eating sherbet lemons and he is determined to get rid of nuclear power because he was reading the magazines that Anathema had given him saying that nuclear power was bad and the next thing that happens is that a nuclear power station discovers that a reactor has gone missing.
But mysteriously the room is still emitting power, and when they go and investigate, they find at the bottom of the plant, a sherbet lemon.
So Terry Pratchett would start using sherbet lemons as little things that he would just throw into the text to make someone smile. They would be in the text as moments of humor.
It’s just a small thing that you throw in as opposed to a Figgin- which you would initially think was a sherbet lemon but then it would pay off.
