Picturesque meant - he decided after careful observation of the scenerey that inspired Twoflower to use the word - that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown. Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, mean 'idiot'.
Interpretation
The quote humorously critiques the perspective of a tourist as someone oblivious to the true nature of their surroundings.
In this quote from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, the narrator reflects on how the words used to describe landscapes and places often mask their grim realities. The humor stems from the contrast between the idealized words like 'picturesque' and 'quaint' and the actual conditions, suggesting that tourists are often naive about the places they visit, treating them with an unrealistic sense of wonder while overlooking their true nature.
In practice
During a travel presentation, to highlight the often unrealistic views tourists have.
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.
Basketball, a game which won't be fit for people until they set the basket umbilicus-high and return the giraffes to the zoo.
Middle-age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.
Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that who cares?... He's a mile away and you've got his shoes!
Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time... I think I've forgotten this before.
I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
Golf acts as a corrective against sinful pride. I attribute the insane arrogance of the later Roman Emperors almost entirely to the fact that, never having played golf, they never knew that strange chastening humility which is engendered by a topped chip shot. If Cleopatra had been ousted in the first round of the Ladies' Singles, we should have heard a lot less of her proud imperiousness.
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