I'm a bit iffy about this to be honest, but it's been written for about two months now so I thought I'd better put it up. Hope you all like it.
The Truth Shall Make Ye . . .
The day had been almost . . . quiet, a few suicides, a few unlicensed thefts, nothing big or worrisome, however because of this, rather than enjoying the tranquillity of the moment, Ankh-Morpork's Watch should really have been even more suspicious of what was to come. Then they might have stood a chance when the Times was delivered to Pseudepolis Yard.
""The truth shall make ye flibbertigibbet?" "Angua shouted. "Now they're just being ridiculous, I can see how it could become "The truth shall make ye frog" or even "The truth shall make ye freckly", but there is no way on the Disc that it is possible to mistake "free" for "flibbertigibbet"!"
The majority of the watchmen/women/dwarfs/trolls/other sentient beings, kept their heads down as the rant reached its peak, and then almost as one they turned their heads to see what their Captain had to say. If they'd known what he was going to say, they would probably have run screaming for the relative safety of the Shades.
"Well they're either just being silly and now are just throwing letters at the press, or they are attempting to be subtly insulting to their competition. " He answered, with his head stuck into a very interesting case report.1
"What?" Asked Angua, her voice dropping to a level where everything in the room (well everything which had both hair and necks) had the hair on the back of their necks stand up. 2
Carrot carried on blithely ignoring the warning signs, "Yes, well "flibbertigibbet" means gossip, so presumably they are saying "The truth shall make ye gossip" which is really quite interesting . . ."
The watchpersons there at the time later said that it was the first time they saw anyone being knocked out with a newspaper and what was especially impressive was that the business, puzzle and sport sections had already been taken out3.
1 The perpetrator had sneaked into an accounting office and was believed to have changed the numbers of farm livestock (specifically sheep) belonging to a client. The case was so interesting in fact that three other members of the watch had fallen asleep while reading the file, after this it had been passed onto Carrot.
2 Even the hair on the back of a fly's thorax on the nearby wall rose.
3 These parts of a newspaper are always the first to disappear, no matter if you live in a house where no one is interested in business, find sport tedious and think puzzles juvenile, they will always disappear. In fact if it wasn't for the odd half-finished crossword found or a not-so artistic representation of facial hair and glasses, drawn on an opposing team's star player's picture mid-victory dance, you could almost imagine that these sections never existed at all.