Jingo
by Terry Pratchett · first published 1996
12mentions
3recommended by
9HN commenters
2009–2026first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
It isn't much of an island that rises up one moonless night from the depths of the Circle Sea -- just a few square miles of silt and some old ruins. Unfortunately, the historically disputed lump of land called Leshp is once again floating directly between Ankh-Morpork and the city of Al-Khali on the coast of Klatch -- which is spark enough to ignite that glorious internationalpastime called "war." Pressed into patriotic service, Commander Sam Vimes thinks he should be leading his loyal watchmen, female watchdwarf, and lady werewolf into battle against local malefactors rather than against unco
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The Smoking Gnu! Pratchett was genuinely interested CS and crammed an unusually high amount of modern tech references into his books. The imp-powered PDA devices from Jingo still bring tears to my eyes.
on “Lessons from France's first cyber-attack, nearly two centuries ago” ↗A friend of mine has been completely obsessed with the Discworld books. I just borrowed "Jingo" and was impressed with how mature it was.(Mature in the ideas presented. The humor is absurd and appropriately silly) Pratchett isn't quite as great as Douglas Adams but is certainly close enough.
on “What are you reading?” ↗…society in his time they are indeed classics) but not something I'd say is always pleasurable reading - he feels like Pratchett without the humour, Pratchett had the rage (you can't read say Small Gods or Jingo and not sense the rage) but was warmer about the human experience. That said we are specifically talking about English majors here - I wouldn't expect an average member of any English speaking country…
on “College English majors can't read” ↗…Boggis. > 'The problem with mercenaries,' said the Patrician, 'is that they need to be paid to start fighting. And, unless you are very lucky, you end up paying them even more to stop -' (from the book Jingo by Sir Terry Pratchett).
on “Drug cartel ‘narco-antennas’ make life dangerous for Mexico’s repairmen” ↗I mean Terry Pratchett (very popular English language author) wrote a book literally called Jingo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingo_(novel) It's not a word you'd hear every day but it's a word I'd bet on the majority of genuinely literate people to understand.
on “JingOS: Linux Distro Inspired by the iPad” ↗…adjective TTR below a defined threshold, occurring approximately ten years before Pratchett’s formal diagnosis. The diagnosis was announced in 2007, meaning the shift occurred in 1997. 1997 was after Jingo and before Carpe Jugulum and The Last Continent, and 2007 was after Making Money and before Unseen Academicals. The Last Continent is the first identified in the paper as below the cutoff for adjectives…
on “Detecting Dementia Using Lexical Analysis: Terry Pratchett's Discworld” ↗> The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it. - Terry Pratchett, Jingo
on “Too many people have peed in the pool” ↗…of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.” -Terry Pratchett, "Jingo"
on “The smug style in American liberalism [2016 repost time]” ↗…to me that he avoids politics, but then compares this new setting to Discworld. I have always experienced Terry Pratchett's writing as deeply political, from the books with overt political messages (Jingo, Equal Rites) to the more subtle (Everything else).
on “The Martian author Andy Weir on his new novel Artemis and why he avoids politics” ↗I'm a Brit, pushing 40. I'm educated to degree level (1st class, FWIW), and very well read (including the venerable Pratchett, though I don't think I have read Jingo yet). I think I heard the word "jingoism" for the first time ever around 5 years ago. It is not a word one hears very often, and it certainly didn't come to mind from "JingOS". If you often read high-brow…
on “JingOS: Linux Distro Inspired by the iPad” ↗…briefly curious – about the sharp barbed thing that was coming very quickly towards them. > The Curious Squid were extremely curious. Unfortunately, they weren't very good at making connections. -- Jingo by Terry Pratchett
on “Whistleblower tells Congress US is concealing 'multi-decade' UFO capture program” ↗…the things that were true in which no one else believed. There are many such substitions, ranging from ‘It’ll get better if you don’t pick at it’ all the way up to ‘Sometimes things just happen.’ -- Jingo by Terry Pratchett
on “A Comprehensive Analysis of Package Hallucinations by Code Generating LLMs” ↗