As Softly as an Anvil

30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 12

Two Words/Phrases the Make Me Laugh

1. “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”

When this prompt came up, my mind immediately went to Douglas Adams. His books are essentially comprised of phrases that make me laugh. But this one I particularly relish in because it flips so many expectations of the English language. We hardly ever define things by what they are not – otherwise known as using ‘negative definitions’ – and often for good reasons (for example, to describe a cat as ‘an animal which is not a dog’ is evidently absurd and gets us no closer to understanding what a cat is.) But as this description of a Vogon Constructor Fleet shows, it can be a legitimate, if not uncommon, device.

Our brains are induction machines, and to break this cardinal rule of our intrinsic operational functioning is genius. Not to mention that the flipping of literary and mental expectations echoes the book’s central tenant of probability; ‘…bricks don’t’ is possibly the least probable ending out of all possible endings to “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that…”. But then again, we don’t tend to come across the idea of ships hanging in the sky either.

Just to emphasise this point, flesh this out a bit further, and recommend another great book aside from Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Kathryn Schulz gives the following examples in her book ‘Being Wrong’:

Try filling in the following blank: “The giraffe had a very long ____.”

I’d bet my first-born child you answered ‘neck’ straight away. But couldn’t the giraffe also have had a very long tongue? Flight from Kenya? History of drug abuse?

The first one, maybe, but the final two are examples of possibilities we discount due to our reliance on probabilistic inductive reasoning. Douglas Adams uses this reliance to continually surprise and amuse, and it is for that reason that I think he is a really hoopy frood.

2. “Horrid.” My friend said this the other day and I burst out laughing. It’s so quaint, so archaic, so Enid Blyton! I hadn’t heard anyone use it since…well, I don’t think I’d heard anyone use it ever, bar Anne of the ‘Famous Five’, and to suddenly hear it on a hot summer’s day, beachside in quintessential Australiana, was just so incongruous.