And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.
Interpretation
This quote humorously suggests that excessive enthusiasm or punctuation may indicate a lack of seriousness or stability.
In this quote, Terry Pratchett uses humor to illustrate a whimsical perspective on the use of exclamation marks, associating them with an eccentricity that suggests a person is not quite stable. It pokes fun at how people might express exaggerated excitement, evoking the imagery of someone who is not only playful but potentially unhinged, highlighting the absurdity in over-enthusiasm.
In practice
Use this quote when discussing the use of punctuation in writing during a language class.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
You don't know what a rough crowd is. If all I have to do is go make people laugh, that's nothing. Let me tell you what a tough crowd is. A tough crowd is going to a morning service and you got six people there and you gotta pay your house payment. That's a tough crowd.
I left school and couldn't find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I've always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.
OYSTER, n. A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilization gives men the hardihood to eat without removing its entrails! The shells are sometimes given to the poor.
A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things; you'd say, 'That's what a child would do.
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
Why, dear boy, we don't send wizards to Azkaban just for blowing up their aunts.
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