I wonder if there's a cultural component to this line - a trait of British English is that sometimes an understatement is deliberately used to create a jarring sensation that strengthens what you're trying to say. To me, this reads as Vimes emphasising, rather than playing down, Sybil's feeling of threat.

Off the top of my head, another example would be someone laying out the terrible consequences of a suggest plan ('You'd be impaled, crushed, and totally incinerated!) and finishing with something like "which would not be a pleasant way to end the evening." The deliberate understatement is supposed to draw attention to and underline the bad stuff. It can obviously also be played for laughs (in a gallows-humour kind of way) but it isn't always a joke.

Without that context, the line is icky. I don't think you're being extra sensitive, particularly given the "sex pests" thing. Urgh.

Orchids! <a href="https://youtu.be/JEU3IgtgSPM?t=29"
(can't seem to get the video to embed, sorry)
Orchids!
More orchids!

Hope those pics work - they're both from the annual Orchid festival at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew (London), which is really close to where I live. If you like gardens and you're in London, Kew is fantastic - can't recommend highly enough! They always have something on, and the massive greenhouse of orchids from the Festival came straight into my mind when reading this chapter. :)

I do see what you mean, though I was thinking of different skin colours in different villages along the way - after all, this is a book all about travel. I'm still not seeing a plausible explanation for the lack of POC across such a broad section of the Disc.

The wider point I was trying to make (and clearly not expressing very well) is that Pratchett invented the Disc and set its ground rules. There are a large number of ways he could have set it up so that the main and supporting casts would be diverse. This is a fantasy world, after all.

Forgive me, but why? The Discworld is a fantasy creation. He could just assume that the settlers of those small villages started out with varied skin colours.

Part of the reason we're having this conversation is that for a number of people here it breaks suspension of disbelief to assume that everyone is white - in villages, in castles, on riverboats, in somewhere clearly intended to be NotSpain.

To me, that's what needs a plausible explanation - and it doesn't get one.

"That said, we're back to "just because someone wasn't trying to stomp on your foot, doesn't mean it hurts any less if they do"."

Quoted for truth. Pratchett could have chosen to include more POC on the Discworld. He could have done so because it's a fantasy world and real life rules didn't apply. He could have done so even though real life rules applied, because there are plenty of records of POC across Europe at any time you choose to name, and because he deliberately invokes several cultures where you'd expect to see lots of different skin colours.

Instead he left it vague, most of the time, letting us all fill in the gaps in our own way (though primary characters all tend to be white). This comment about Nanny has sweeping implications for the whole of the Disc, though, which completely undermines the whole 'leaving it vague' strategy. For me it also undermines the worldbuilding because it sounds implausible, but I imagine that for some it literally writes them out of the story which is far worse.

I think it does come down to what you see in the story - and how you imagine a normal European crowd to look, to some extent. As a Londoner, I expect to see plenty of POC, so not seeing them seems wrong. The more we go back and forth the more I realise that Pratchett doesn't really specify and we're both just describing our interpretations.

Loving the apology otter! Though I think this part of the discussion was more of a disagreement than a row - and, you know, we're both white so we're both kind of talking of something that's a bit outside our ken. So I'm not offended, even though I see things differently, but I'm not going to assume that nobody else is or isn't.

To be honest, the question of who Nanny met is kind of secondary to the far nastier cockerel joke (which is nasty to read, whether Pratchett meant to write it in there or not).

Future Discworld spoilers: Nyfb, nf lbh fnl, gurer'f n ybg bs eryrinag fghss jr unira'g pbirerq lrg. V'q fnl zbfg bs gur cybg bs Wvatb fgnaqf ntnvafg gur vqrn gung gurer'f ab enpvfz ba gur Qvfp - juvpu gb zr pbasvezf gur uhapu gung Cengpurgg whfg unqa'g ernyyl gubhtug zhpu nobhg vg lrg ng guvf cbvag naq jnf unaqjnivat fb nf abg gb ratntr jvgu vg lrg.

It's quite likely that my perception of normal, as someone who grew up in a multicultural big city, just includes more POC than most Europeans would.

(pause to move laptop out of reach of splashing baby)

No doubt we all imagine the Discworld to be something like we're used to. Pratchett doesn't really specify much.

As a fictional world, of course, the Disc doesn't need to follow real-world historical norms - but I have to pick up on that point about travel even so, because it's such a common modern myth. Slavery was a massive movement of POC across the world, but as long as there have been people they have travelled. Perhaps not in huge numbers, but (for example) there were enough black people in Elizabeth I's London to be regarded as a distinct community by people of the day. African soldiers served on Hadrian's Wall in the north of England back in Roman times. Viking coin hoards from Scandinavia include large numbers of Arabic coins. I'd definitely recommend taking a look at medievalpoc</a href> for loads more examples.

Well, I see how you can rationalise it now you set it out like that. I repeat, to teenage alfgifu (a white girl from West London) the idea that Nanny Ogg could get so far without meeting anyone black seemed a bit strange. It implied to me that either Nanny Ogg hadn't spoken to people on the way - which was out of character for someone who we know was singing and dancing on tables with strangers at several stops - or that most of the Disc and most of Genua consisted of white people only - which was just strange.

Now that I'm more than twice the age I was back then, it's not only strange, it's really uncomfortable. I understand that it doesn't seem strange to you, but I do find your explanations a bit too convoluted to accept them comfortably.

If you're right, and if the Disc is indeed supposed to be so full of white people that it's possible to travel vast distances through many varied Earth-expy cultures and only meet the whitewashed version of each one - including Genua/New Orleans - then the Disc is a smaller and meaner place than I'd imagined. I prefer to think that the problems are in the offhand comment than in the entire worldbuilding.

Hmm. To me, meeting somebody meant exchanging words with them. And Nanny is supposed to be the kind of person who makes friends easily and chats to those around her, so I find it hard to imagine her getting this far without meeting hundreds of people along the way.

NotWhereverSleepingBeautyWas is pretty much any culture or country - it's one of the truly universal fairy tales. NotSpain is the real culprit from that list, though - Spain is one of the closest parts of Europe to Africa and has had a big POC population from as far back as we have history.

Also, we've had a NotMississippiRiverboat. How did Nanny get through that without meeting anyone black?

Pratchett isn't exactly known for skipping an opportunity to make a joke, crude or otherwise.

Nanny has just spent quite a lot of time in Genua, after travelling half way across the continent to get there. How come she's managed to get all the way to Mrs Pleasant without meeting anyone else she'd think of as black?

That line, and the footnote, look to me like Pratchett is trying to handwave away racism so that he can tell a story that he finds interesting without having to think too hard about a difficult set of issues he doesn't have any direct experience of. It's an understandable approach - racism is a massive thing and it's so easy to wrong-foot yourself on the subject - but it has the effect of dismissing a significant part of the character and experience of the people whose stories he is basing this story on. In this case, of the people of New Orleans.

Not doing the homework then leads to an unfortunate bit of blindness where (as I see it) PTerry was trying to make a straightforward cock(erel) joke just happening to use a black bird because of the reference to voudou and magical animals - and that creates the really problematic BBC joke.

I mean, I'm a white London girl, so I don't have the experience either. I'm not going to try to speak for any POC on this. But even teenage-alfgifu found this footnote difficult to swallow. Having trolls to hate magically unites humanity? That's kind of, well, not how people work. We're quite capable of ganging up on one another and on the trolls and the dwarves as well.

The thing is that, like the Greebo joke we discussed a while ago, these bits are so unnecessary. They don't get developed in any way. They undermine rather than contribute to the worldbuilding. They reference a truly toxic stereotype (I think accidentally, but the effect is the same). The book, which is already fantastic, would have been so much better without them.