Also a huge fan of Good Omens. I liked the half-page footnote explaining our monetary system. In case anyone thinks this is Neil or PTerry exagerating for comic effect, nothing in that note is made up (in fact I think they left a couple of coins out!) and people really did bitch about how awkward the change to the decimal system was!

I don't recognise the $name$ syntax of your labels, but if it was Perl the problem would be that you've used non-interpolating ' ' quotes rather than interpolating " " quotes.

I don't think 'git' has any specificity left, if it ever did. It is quite strongly insulting, though, which is probably why you thought it was sexual. The best sense I can come up is that it has overtones that the person is antisocial, perhaps selfish, miserly, curmudgeonly. As I say, quite a strong insult, which one would have to be careful about using in jest.

Many of these epithets bear no real connection to their origins. The etymology of 'bloody', for example seems to be completely obscure (it's not 'by our lady', for example). Even so, twenty years ago 'bloody' was a very bad thing to say in polite company, although it's lost much of its cachet since then. Likewise no-one really knows what the 'two fingers' gesture means. (Index finger and middle finger raised and separated, palm towards you. Deliver like 'the bird'. Do not confuse with 'V for Victory' or 'peace', with the palm facing away and the hand static or waving.) Everyone assumes it's sexual, although it probably isn't. Delivered correctly it can be about the strongest insult you can give, although it seems to have fallen into disuse.

Heh... I did my own Engrish in other words. Wouldn't be the first time :).

Even though I haven't read the book in years I still remember the footnote about english money. You guys switched to decimal in, what, the early 70s? Bodes ill for Blair's efforts on the euro! :)

I read Pratchett as often as I can, but hadn't read any of Gaiman's stuff until last month. American Gods was quite a good read, but I thought I could see a bit of Pratchett influence in his "anthropomorphic personification" idea. But it's hard for me to judge, as I haven't read anything else by Gaiman. Yet. :)

The tags are movable type tags. It's a good system, especially for what it cost, but it has some funky syntax (and limited boolean capability, which makes me bonkers). I'd left out the < and >, which are required to "close" the tag. It should look right now.