Talk:Charlie (Hogfather)

The addition here sounds like a Roundworld reference, among other things. --Old Dickens 00:25, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Hmm. A Hitler referent that would make sense on the Discworld. As for "little Hitler", in terms of petty, officious, self-important, et c, we've now got Smeems the Candle-Knave. The nearest to the Big Hitler, though, has been Big Fido, Chief Barker of the Guild of Dogs, and he's something else that never really became public knowledge, except for a couple of perplexed Watch reports about oddly behaved dogs. --AgProv 09:55, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Don't take too much offence, Dickens old fellow. I wasn't intending to relegate or dismiss your edit. It just made more sense to me to have it with the other Roundworld references, as Italian has never really been spoken on the Disc in the novels. I cannot imagine the Brindisians as warlike... --Knmatt 20:49, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps they might go with a Great Leader who gets the coaches and the trollybuses running on time. (After all, the Brindisian words Il Duce are also cognate with the word for the person who "leads" or "conducts" the coach).

And being an easy-going people, they'd amiably put up with all the embarrassing stuff about the Brindisians being a once-great people with a Manifest Destiny to be at least a regional superpower. They'd even put up with the slogan Obiddire! Credire! Combattere! being plastered everywhere. But actual war is where they'd fall down, I suspect, rather like the qualities assigned (somewhat unfairly) to the Italian Army in WW2. A Discworld Italy with all the knobs turned up to eleven would naturally incorporate a very ineffectual Army with an embarrasing tendency to surrender at the slightest provocation. I do stress this is an unfair - but widely held - perception of Italian military prowess and I will point out that elsewhere on the Web, I've written an essay defending Italy's reputation in war[1] (Scroll down to section on Italy). For Discworld purposes, however, Brindisi is probably stuck with Italy's reputation for being the least effectual major power that fought in WW2. --AgProv 09:32, 10 February 2010 (UTC)