Literature / Going Postal

Neither rain nor snow nor glo m of ni t can stay these mes engers abo t their duty.

"Run before you walk! Fly before you crawl! Keep moving forward! You think we should try to get a decent mail service in the city. I think we should try to send letters anywhere in the world! Because if we fail, I'd rather fail really hugely. All or nothing, Mr. Groat!"

— Moist Von Lipwig

The 33rd Discworld book, Going Postal centers around Moist von Lipwig, a new main character for the Discworld. A self-admitted con man, the book opens with Lipwig (under the pseudonym Albert Spangler) awaiting execution, because he finally got caught. Albert Spangler is hanged, buried, and gets a nice little paragraph in the Tanty Bugle.

Moist von Lipwig, however, wakes up in Lord Vetinari's office, receives a pleasant speech about the nature of angels, and is "offered" a job as the new Postmaster in charge of the mostly-defunct Ankh-Morpork Post Office. True to form, the first thing he does once he's loose is to run as far away as he can. The next morning, he wakes up when the golem Vetinari set as his parole officer crashes through the door, bodily picks him up along with the horse he acquired, and carries them both back to Ankh-Morpork.

Despite the complete incompetence of the existing Post staff,^note (Stanley Howler, a slightly deranged boy obsessed with pins, and Tolliver Groat, an old man who believes very strongly in his homemade medicines and despite his advanced age holds the rank of Junior Postman when Moist first meets him because none of the previous Postmasters lasted long enough to promote him) Moist manages to begin rebuilding the Post Office via the application of a liberal helping of Refuge in Audacity. It helps that the Grand Trunk clacks system ^note a semaphore tower chain which allows messages to be transmitted great distances very quickly is under new management, a gang of voracious corporate backstabbers who are running it into the ground. Moist's rivalry with Reacher Gilt, the leader of the corporate moneygrubbers, and his budding romance with Adora Belle Dearheart ^note a cynical, chain-smoking young woman who has been known to drive her spike-heeled shoes through people's feet when provoked provide a bit of backdrop as Moist essentially invents a new system of currency,^note by introducing stamps, which people start to use instead of coins single-handedly restores the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, rescues a cat (and two men) from a burning building, summons divine intervention, and exposes the crooked dealings of Gilt and his accomplices to the world.

Did we mention that Moist is a really big believer in Refuge in Audacity? And that he saved a cat?

An adaptation aired on Sky One on May 30 2010.

Preceded by Monstrous Regiment, followed by Thud!. The next book in the Moist von Lipwig series is Making Money.

Not to be confused with Going Postal, which is a trope.

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This book provides examples of:

• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • At the end of the initiation trial that the old postmen run for Moist, they sic several massive dogs upon him, whom he recognizes from their bark as Lipwigzer dogs — which his grandfather raised. He handles the challenge with perfect confidence by using the commands that all purebred Lipwigzers are trained with... only to learn afterwards that they were not Lipwigzers at all, but Ankh-Morpork junkyard dogs with no training whatsoever who only obeyed out of sheer bafflement.
  • The Mail Sorting Machine in the Post Office's cellars includes a circular wheel whose diameter-to-circumference ratio - that is, Pi - is exactly three, not 3.141 et cetera. This is, of course, impossible, but nobody seems to have told Mr. Johnson that.
• Actual Pacifist: Moist never, ever used violence in his criminal career. Weapons make him nervous. Though Mr. Pump deconstructs his assumption that this made him not such a bad person by pointing out that his actions had devastating effects on people despite his not physically harming anyone.
• Addiction Displacement: Stanley is completely obsessed with collecting pins, to the point where even the owner of a pin store considers him to be weird. He eventually drops his pin obsession and starts up stamp collecting.
• Aerith and Bob: The main characters in this book are Moist von Lipwig, Adora Belle Dearheart, Reacher Gilt, Tolliver Groat, Pump 19 (also known as Mr Pump) and... Stanley.
• Against My Religion: Moist has a fear of his undisguised face appearing in the paper and thus claims that any photography of him is this trope. When pressed, he adlibs that he doesn't actually believe being photographed will remove a piece of his soul, but he doesn't think you should treat religion like a "buffet".
• Alien Geometries: The Sorting Engine, designed by "Bloody Stupid" Johnson to have a wheel with a pi equal to exactly three, which bends reality to the point that it occasionally puts out letters from the past, the future, or even from alternate realities (ones where the check really was in the post, for example).
• All-Natural Snake Oil: The logic, such as it is, behind Tolliver Groat's homemade medicines, which are made from all-natural ingredients such as sulphur, saltpetre, charcoal, arsenic, and dead voles. Amazingly, the doctor who examined him found him to be in remarkably good health—possibly indestructible. He was just absolutely disgusting (since he doesn't believe in bathing). And his hairpiece tried to make a break for it. They also had to surgically remove his pants, which were then field-detonated.
• Arc Words:
  • "You should've been there! You should've seen it!"
  • “Let me tell you about angels…”
• As the Good Book Says...: The undelivered letters (almost) quote John 1:1 to Moist: "In the beginning there was a Word…"
• Asymmetric Multiplayer: Discussed. Thud has one player controlling a few slow but powerful trolls and the other controlling multiple fast but independently weak dwarfs (which Thud later established also have combo abilities). Vetinari and Gilt size each other up (and foreshadow much of the plot) by talking about their preferred sides. Crispin Horsefry also demonstrates his profound ignorance by saying "the dwarfs always win," something which a subsequent novel would reveal as the mark of an amateur player with a limited understanding of the game.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment:
  • Vetinari does this to the Grand Trunk board members.
    Vetinari: Commander Vimes, I think it would be iniquitous to detain these men here any longer.
    (pause, wherein the board members obtain the greatest of all treasures, which is hope)
    Vetinari: To the cells with them, commander.
  • When the wizard expert on the Post Office tells Moist that the two Post Office chandeliers have ended up in the Assassin's Guild and one in the Opera House, Moist wisely decides to hold off on getting them back, as it might be dangerous. The wizard expert agrees, since some of those sopranos have a kick like a mule.
• Bar Brawl: Highly organized, with a scoring system and tactics that seem to be based on a combination of rugby and professional wrestling. People expect things of bar brawls after all.
  "Look, Bob, what part of this don't you understand, eh? It's a matter of style, okay? A proper brawl doesn't just happen. You don't just pile in, not any more. Now, Oyster Dave here — put your helmet back on, Dave — will be the enemy in front and Basalt who, as we know, don't need a helmet, he'll be the enemy coming up behind you. Okay, it's well past knuckles time, let's say Gravy there has done his thing with the Bench Swipe, there's a bit of knifeplay, we've done the whole Chandelier Swing number, blah blah blah, then Second Chair — that's you, Bob — you step smartly between their Number Five man and a Bottler, swing the chair back over your head like this — sorry, Pointy — and then swing it right back on to Number Five, bang, crash, and there's a cushy six points in your pocket. If they're playing a dwarf at Number Five then a chair won't even slow him down but don't fret, hang on to the bits that stay in your hand, pause one moment as he comes at you and then belt him across both ears. They hate that, as Stronginthearm here will tell you. Another three points. It's probably going to be freestyle after that but I want all of you, including Mucky Mick and Crispo, to try for a Double Andrew when it gets down to the fist-fighting again. Remember? You back into each other, turn round to give the other guy a thumping, cue moment of humorous recognition, then link left arms, swing round and see to the other fellow's attacker, foot or fist, it's your choice. Fifteen points right there if you get it to flow just right. Oh, and remember we'll have an Igor standing by, so if your arm gets taken off do pick it up and hit the other bugger with it — it gets a laugh and twenty points. On that subject, do remember what I said about getting everything tattooed with your name, all right? Igors do their best, but you'll be on your feet much quicker if you make life easier for him and, what's more, it's your feet you'll be on. Okay, positions everyone, let's run through it again..."
• The Barnum: Reacher Gilt. Moist has elements of this as well, though he does feel some guilt over his actions when directly confronted with the harm he's caused.
• Batman Gambit: Moist tricks Gilt into engineering his own downfall with a gaudy and entirely nonmagical broom.
• Battleaxe Nurse: The matron Moist encounters when trying to get Groat out of hospital. She even says she refuses to release him and Moist has to point out that patients are not "released" from hospital, they are "discharged." Even Dr. Lawn's method of dealing with the nursing staff is to give them chocolate and run in the opposite direction.
• Battle of Wits: As Moist is a conman and dislikes physically fighting someone, he fights his battles with his mind and manipulates others. Recognizing Reacher Gilt as a dangerous conman means he must up his game if he wants to survive.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Moist pulls off one or two during the course of the book.
• Better with Non-Human Company: Adora Belle Dearheart, who likes golems rather more than she likes humans.
• Bewitched Amphibians: One of the bankers threatens to sue Unseen University in the heat of the moment. Archchancellor Ridcully's reply?
  Ridcully: Oh, please sue the University! We've got a pond full of people who tried to sue the University!
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: The Board just won't use the word "embezzlement" and continually refer to it with bland euphemisms and double-meanings, much to Reacher Gilt's amusement, as his thoughts are word-for-word this trope.
• Blatant Lies:
  • After just narrowly avoiding one of Stanley's Little Moments, Moist sees Mr. Pump standing behind Stanley, his fist raised, clearly prepared to bash his brains out in Moist's defense. Mr. Pump insists he was just wanting to ask Moist a question. Fortunately, Stanley is oblivious enough to believe this.
  • Not wanting the Watch to pry into his dispute with Reacher Gilt or into his own background, Moist tells them — in a bright, over-innocent voice — that, my goodness, he thought the corpse of Mr. Gryle the banshee was just "a big pigeon", even though Captain Carrot has already told him it was a banshee. Seeing the Watch werewolf wink at him as it pads away seals the deal.
• Bond One-Liner: Parodied; After killing a would-be assassin with the mail sorter, the narration observes that this would have been a perfect time to say something clever like "That's what I call 'sorted'!" But since Moist isn't the heroic type, he just gets noisily sick instead.
• Bookends: At the end of the book, Vetinari offers a job to Reacher Gilt, just like he offered one to Moist von Lipwig at the start of the book. Though Gilt ends up taking Vetinari's offer to "walk right out that door, and I won't bother you again" and unlike Moist he didn't stop to check for the bottomless pit first.
• Boxed Crook: Moist is a confidence artist forced into a government job, because his cunning criminal mind is exactly what Vetinari needs to both sell people on the idea of the post office and take down Reacher Gilt.
• Bread Milk Eggs Squick: While discussing the City Watch's "diversity" with Moist, Mr. Groat drops this gem.
  Mr. Groat: The Watch's got loads of dwarfs and trolls and a golem – a free golem, savin' your presence, Mr. Pump – and a couple of gnomes and a zombie… even a Nobbs.
• Brick Joke:
  • A truly astounding one following a tiny moment in Men at Arms written eleven years earlier, regarding the Post Office motto as displayed on the facade of the building. One of the first things Moist does is find out where the missing letters went to.
  • The notion of collectors paying for used hangman's rope had previously appeared in The Last Continent, as one of Fair Go Dibbler's money-making scams.^note  This was an actual thing that happened after public executions.
• Brotherhood of Funny Hats: The Order of the Post, a secret society of postmen. Moist has joined several of these groups before (he even created a few himself), and assumes that their initiation test won't be anything dangerous, only to realise they're taking it very seriously.
  Moist: [thinking] A secret society of postmen. I mean, why?
• Butlerspace: Igors again. Reacher Gilt's Igor does this several times, and Reacher puts a bear trap behind him as a test. The Igor, however, being no stranger to "masters of an inquiring mind", gets around it.
• Call-Back:
  • All the way to Maskerade: In that book, Granny Weatherwax asks Walter Plinge "If your house was on fire, what would you take out?" and he answers "The fire." When the Post Office is on fire, golems from all over the area come and do precisely that.
  • In Carpe Jugulum, a troll carves a stamp for passports out of half a potato. Here, Moist points out that any kid could forge a stamp with half a potato.
  • Moist comes across what may be Carrot's first letter home from Guards! Guards! (although the Discworld Companion entry for William de Worde points out that all letters home from young dwarfs seeking their fortune in Ankh-Morpork sound much the same).
  • The greengrocer Mr. Parker, who Moist helps reunite with his lost love by delivering an overdue letter, mentions having spent some time in the Klatchian Foreign Legion, though he can’t remember the name at first and calls it a “place where you go to forget”. This gag was used repeatedly in Soul Music where the members of the Legion find they can’t remember where they are, their own names, or even the names of basic items.
• Chalk Outline: One of the previous postmasters spied into the sorting machine, and several outlines of his remains were all over the sorting office.
• Character Development: Moist starts the book as an unrepentant Con Artist who doesn't particularly care about the Post Office and views himself as a Lovable Rogue. By the end of the book, he's come to appreciate not only the Post Office, but also the Clacks; even when Mr. Pump tells him he won't be following him anymore and Moist realizes he has a solid chance of getting away free, he decides to remain.
• Character Filibuster: As is somewhat-common in the later Discworld novels, there are a few to be found.
  • Mr. Pump goes on a minor one when he tears down Moist's self-image of being a Lovable Rogue, pointing out exactly how many people he's harmed or outright gotten killed without ever needing to touch or even meet them.
  • Vetinari has one, reflecting on the nature of freedom and whether it's all it's cracked up to be. At least he has an excuse - who's going to tell Vetinari to stop monologuing?
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Early on, Moist notes how people assume someone with a firm handshake and a steady gaze is honest, and how easy those are to fake. When Moist meets Reacher Gilt, he sees right through Gilt's facade by recognizing the man as having the firm handshake and steady gaze of a Consummate Liar who's practiced for years.
  • The dilapidated wizard's tower between Ankh-Morpork and Sto Lat. Unremarkable enough that it hasn't been described on that road in any book before or since, making its mention partway through the book significant.
  • There is a small scene involving the clacks tower 181 where a young girl named Alice is learning the trade, receiving and sending messages at an expert rate. One message comes in with no original sender listed and she is told about the concept of those who died on the towers sending final messages back home. Moist exposes Gilt's corrupt business by forging one such message. Vetinari uses this piece of clacks lore to declare the message trustworthy and its accusations worth investigating.
  • Stanley's obsession with pins, which gives Moist the idea of using many pins on sheets of paper to create easily-cut stamps.
  • The... unpleasant results of climbing onto the Mail Sorting Machine. Mr. Gryle learns this the hard way.
• The Chosen One: Subverted, in that the neglected Mail is so desperate that they'll Choose anyone who happens to be available.
• Con Man:
  • The way Albert Spangler, and several other aliases of Moist von Lipwig, made his living, which comes in handy when Moist runs rings around people.
  • Reacher Gilt takes it to another level; Moist compares the con he's running with the Grand Trunk to Three Card Monty played with entire banks. By the time the Board realizes they're actually the marks and the City has legally arrested them, he's fled town after skimming most of the money and reducing their banks into "a shell of paper".
• Contempt Crossfire: Gilt and Vetinari pause in their hatred of each other after Upper-Class Twit Horsefry (one of the clacks executives) demonstrates his crass ignorance of Thud (used to demonstrate that Smart People Play Chess):
  "Gilt and Vetinari shared a look. It said: While I loathe you and every aspect of your personal philosophy to a depth unplumbable by any line, I'll credit you at least with not being Crispin Horsefry."
• Continuity Nod:
  • The von Lipwig family are active in the (highly schismatic) Potato Church, implying that Mr Tulip may actually have been remembering his religion accurately.
  • Under the above mentioned "glo m of ni t" lettering on the post office is graffiti that says not to ask about, among other things, Mrs. Cake, who appeared in Reaper Man. (The post office sign and the rest were also pointed out by Vimes to Carrot in Men at Arms.)
  • Mr. Pony's suspicions about University students tampering with the clacks system could be a nod to The Science of Discworld II, in which Hex gets hooked up to the network and begins using it to send messages without paying for them.
  • Possibly a coincidence, but when they examine B.S. Johnson's machine, the wizards declare that destroying it could destroy the entire universe in one go. After the post master takes a wrench to it, the wizards come back and declare the universe was destroyed in one go, but popped right back into existence immediately afterwards before anyone could notice. Looks like Lobsang had his eye on the situation.
  • The chapter between 7 and 9 is numbered 7a.
  • There's a very good chance the little old man idly sweeping the floor in the temple of Offler is Lu-Tze from Small Gods and Thief of Time.
  • Moist is quite shaken up to learn that the Watch has a werewolf in their ranks, and Angua makes a few appearances, although she's never referred to by name. Several other members of the City Watch make short appearances, including Vimes and Carrot, and Nobbs is mentioned.
  • The elderly greengrocer to whom Moist delivers a letter is a veteran of the Klatchian Foreign Legion, and has the same memory problems about this as the garrison from Soul Music.
  • Mr. Pony's description of how a clacks tower's mechanism was sabotaged involves a swage armature jumping off an elliptical bearing. This is exactly the outcome that occurred when Death sabotaged the combination harvester in Reaper Man.
• Cool Old Guy: Subverted with "Grandad", the tower-master of clacks tower 181, who supposedly "had been everywhere and knew everything", watching over all the younger staff, including the thirteen-year old girl prodigy, Princess. It's easy to miss the offhand mention that, despite his nickname, he's only twenty-six.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Board of the Grand Trunk.
• Couldn't Find a Lighter: Watching outside the burning post office, Adora Belle Dearheart catches a burning piece of paper that flutters past and uses it to light a cigarette.
• Could Say It, But...: The Bond One Liners Moist could have said are mentioned, but not used, which actually meant that Pratchett got to include more than one.
• Creature of Habit: Tiddles the ancient cat is so set in his ways, moving the furniture into his daily path through the Post Office will leave him pathetically butting his head against the obstacle. Certainly a little thing like the building being on fire won't change his routine.
• Creepy Changing Painting: Due to the imp-based technology used to print the stamps, around one in five has a small deviation from the original image. For instance, the one depicting the Tower of Art has a man throwing himself from the tower.
• Critical Staffing Shortage: It is revealed that the Royal Post Office in Ankh-Morpork, formerly a city institution employing thousands, has atrophied with the years to a point where only two remain - an elderly eccentric and a young man who could be described as a little bit strange. The job of the new manager is to get it up and running again - with a staff of only two men, a cat, and ideally his parole officer.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: A strictly non-combat example. Mr. Groat is an extremely quirky old man with an ambiguously-sapient toupee, but he proves to be very valuable to Moist when it comes to reinvigorating the post office. Despite his eccentricities, he not only does well when Moist makes him interim postmaster, but proposes several ideas that wind up being very valuable to the fledgling Ankh-Morporkian postal service.
• Cutlery Escape Aid: Moist von Lipwig manages to conceal a spoon in his cell, which he uses to gradually chip away at the ancient mortar around one of the blocks in the wall. He finishes on the night before he's due to be hanged, only to find a freshly mortared block right behind it, with a shiny new spoon in the gap. Lord Vetinari regards false hope as a healthy prisoner activity; there are plenty of other classic prison escapes in the cell, none of which work.
• Death Means Humanity: It's a mark of Moist von Lipwig's Character Development that he mourns the death of the Golem Anghammarad, as he initially sees them as nothing more than objects. Unknown to him, Death takes Anghammarad to the afterlife, same as any living creature.
• Death Trap: When Vetinari is meeting his new Boxed Crook Moist von Lipwig, he tells Moist that if he doesn't like the offer he can simply walk out that door. When Moist goes to check, the door has nothing behind it - and that includes a floor.
• Death Faked for You: Vetinari gives Moist a fresh start, but only if he's willing to do a little job.
• Death from Above: A favored tactic of wild banshees like Mr. Gryle.
• December–December Romance: Moist delivers an old letter, which results in a pair of childhood sweethearts, now both elderly and widowed, hooking up again.
• Deconstruction:
  • Of the Lovable Rogue character type. Mr. Pump points out the ways in which even nonviolent criminals who feel they have standards can cause suffering and evil all over the world:
    Moist: I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr. Pump. I may be... all those things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!
    Pump: No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded, And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr. Lipwig. You Have Ruined Business And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Did Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Food From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr. Lipwig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.
• Defrosting Ice Queen/Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Adora Belle Dearheart. Or "Spike", as Moist affectionately calls her.
• Delayed Reaction: An implied one. Princess, the thirteen year old working a clacks tower, notices that Grandad, the oldest worker (at twenty-six years old), is always there when she's working with one of the younger, male workers, and that one day she will put two and two together.
• Determinator:
  • All golems fall into this, as they will obey their orders and continue working at a single job for thousands of years or until those orders are rescinded. Mr Pump is chosen as Moist's parole officer for this very reason. Pump walks all day and all night to a far-off town, just to catch Moist, then carries both Moist and his horse back to Ankh Morpork, without stopping to rest. Vetinari states that Pump will do the same, no matter where Moist runs, even if Moist flees overseas, as the "abyssal plane" won't hinder a golem at all.
  • Anghammarad in particular. He's nineteen thousand years old and is waiting for all of history to repeat itself over millions of years just so he can deliver a message for an empire that was destroyed over a millennium ago.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?:
  • Vetinari, true to form, takes him at his word and asks his secretary for a broom.
    Moist: If you stick a broom up my arse, I could probably sweep the floor, too.
  • There's another more serious one where Moist accidentally blurts out the typical lines to the end of Adora Dearheart's enraptured description of when her family owned the Grand Trunk. It's a rather somber reminder of how the book presents the double-edged sword of being so taken with something.
    Moist: You should have seen it! You should have been there!
  • Moist seems to have a problem with this; when he reads the letter Gilt had published in the Times (full of corporate doublespeak and Meaningless Meaningful Words), he discovers that he's been cursing at length the whole time in front of his employees. This apparently included a few words so vulgar that they don't even exist in our language, and to his horror, he finds his very proper secretary glaring at him...until it's clarified he's talking about Gilt.
    'Oh.' Miss Maccalariat hesitated, and then remembered herself. 'Er, in that case . . . perhaps a teensy bit quieter, then?'
    'Certainly, Miss Maccalariat,' said Moist obediently.
    'And perhaps not the K-word?'
    'No, Miss Maccalariat.'
    'And also not the L-word, the T-word, both of the S-words, the V-word and the Y-word.'
    'Just as you say, Miss Maccalariat.'
    '“Murdering conniving bastard of a weasel” was acceptable, however.'
    'I shall remember that, Miss Maccalariat.'
• Dine and Dash: Moist has some unspecified plan for doing this when he takes Adora to the ritziest restaurant in Ankh-Morpork. In the end, they do escape paying the bill, but ironically thanks to the villain of the novel rather than anything Moist intentionally does.
• Disturbing Statistic: Mr. Pump calculates the damage Moist has done to peoples' lives with his cons. In total, he's effectively killed 2.338 people. It merges with "The Reason You Suck" Speech since Moist thinks of his cons as never having hurt anyone — or at least no one who didn't deserve it.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: For many British readers, what Gilt does to the Grand Trunk had a great deal of resonance with what happened to Britain's railways after they were privatised in the 1990s. Especially since the real-world Grand Trunk was a British-owned Canadian railway company.
• The Dragon: Gryle to Gilt.
• Dramatic Pause: One is required to pause before saying ... The Woodpecker.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Vetinari is repeatedly seen playing Thud! throughout the book.
• Elder Employee:
  • Junior Postman Groat is, in fact, the oldest employee still serving at the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, but the Post Office has been without a Postmaster for so long that there was nobody to promote him.
  • Also are the other, even older postmen who induct Moist as Postmaster General, and later still Anghammarad, a golem several thousand years old whose last job was delivering a message to an island that sank into the sea (and is waiting for it to come back up, carving the message into a new clay tablet when the old one crumbles) and who gets given the rank of Extremely Senior Postman.
• Emergency Stash: Moist keeps various tools of the trade — forgery supplies, make-up and a change of clothes, lockpicks, even safehouses — stashed all over the city. He also has amassed 150 thousand dollars in assorted currencies over the course of his career as a con man. He later digs it up, claims that it's a gift from the gods and uses it to rebuild the Post Office.
• Employee of the Month: Spoofed, along with the We Care trope, at one point in the book:
  "They had even instated an 'Employee of the Month' program to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care."
• Eternal Recurrence: This appears to be an article of faith with the golems, or at least the oldest golem, Anghammarad. He failed in his mission to deliver a message several thousand years ago. Being immortal and nigh-indestructible, he resolves to wait for the universe to reboot and do it right the second time around.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Deconstructed; despite being an unashamed Con Man and criminal Moist believes himself to not be a particularly bad person because he has certain standards (never killing people, only pulling his cons on those who 'deserve' it, and so forth). During his "The Reason You Suck" Speech, however, Mr. Pump brutally informs him that his standards didn't stop him from ruining innocent lives, hastening deaths (he didn't need to actually hold the blade or even be aware they existed to kill people) and generally making the world a worse place; just because he didn't consider himself to be a particularly evil person doesn't mean that his actions weren't harmful and evil in their way, whether he was aware of it or not. It's especially visible when it turns out Adora Belle used to work for a bank that Moist had swindled, and his internal monologue is full of despairing protest that "this is not fair" (for him) and that "you're not supposed to meet these people afterwards"—thinking he is better than other criminals is only possible as long as he keeps a serious layer of denial.
  • And then played straight with the "Not a hammer" line.
  • And Vetinari and Gilt share a moment of this regarding blithering idiot Horsefry.
• Even Nerds Have Standards: Stanley is so obsessed with pins that even the other pin collectors in the city think he's "a bit weird about pins". To put it in perspective, the person who says this owns a hobby shop that deals exclusively in pins, and has a tattoo which reads "Death or Pins!"
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: During the epilogue, Vetinari gives Reacher Gilt the same "angel" speech that he gave Moist at the beginning of the book and that Reacher's reaction is one of "increased puzzlement". It's implied he is simply too crooked to understand the concept of redemption, underlining how he and Moist are very different after all.
• Evil Counterpart: Reacher Gilt, to Moist von Lipwig. Vetinari knows this. This may be the reason why he tries to recruit Moist von Lipwig. And may also be the reason why he tries to recruit Reacher Gilt...and also why Reacher Gilt fails the test that Moist had passed.
• Evil Plan:
  • Gilt wants to corner the communications market by keeping the Post Office closed. This is actually just a side goal for his real plan, which is to drive the Trunk into the ground, embezzling all the way, and then make a killing from the eventual sale.
  • Played with in typical Pratchett style with Moist's own plan for defeating Gilt as Moist admits it is an Evil Plan too, just he is going to use it in the cause of good. And given that they're Evil Counterparts they could have switched places.
• Exact Words: The offer that Vetinari makes to certain people regarding employment options.
  Vetinari: ...behind you there is a door. If at any time in this interview you feel you wish to leave, you have only to step through it and you will never hear from me again.
• Exposition of Immortality: The golem Anghammarad, built over 20,000 years ago and still functioning, remembers times, events, places, and languages that nothing else on the Disc does.
• Eyes Never Lie: Although supernatural entities in other books play this straight (as the eyes of even gods can't be cloaked with illusion magic), this is subverted and lampshaded when it comes to ordinary dishonest humans. A "firm handshake and a steady gaze" are the most basic tools in Moist's kit to the point where he does it instinctively. Both men he gives the treatment to confidently say that he's clearly an honest man. On the other hand, getting this from Reacher Gilt is what makes Moist recognize him as a con artist on a level he could only dream of.
• The Face: Moist for the Post Office staff. It's what Vetinari hired him for. Stanley's thought to be weird even by other pin collectors, and Groat doesn't have the skills either, but Moist knows how to connect with people, motivate them, and how to promote something.
• Face Death with Dignity: Once Moist finally accepts that no, he's not going to receive a miraculous last-second reprieve from the gallows, he becomes surprisingly calm and actually manages some dignified, memorable last words. Fortunately for him, he received a post-death reprieve instead.
• Fantastic Nuke: In a Continuity Nod to earlier accounts of the Mage Wars, such as Sourcery:
  That's why [magic] was left to wizards, who knew how to handle it safely. Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards—not "not doing magic" because they couldn't do magic, but not doing magic when they could do and didn't. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn't been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again.
• Fantastical Social Services: The first of the subseries about Ankh-Morpork's industrialisation, starting with Moist's impressment into revitalising the postal service.
• Fat Idiot: A first impression of Crispin Horsefry, one of the owners of the Grand Trunk, is that he is if not fat then definitely well on the way there, or that he is a mix of an incredibly stupid piglet with a very anxious little dog. While unfair, this impression is in no way wrong.
• First-Episode Resurrection: The story begins with Moist Von Lipwig, in his identity as Albert Spangler, being executed by hanging. After his execution, Moist wakes up and is surprised to learn that Lord Vetinari colluded with the hangman to make him Only Mostly Dead. So, while Albert Spangler is still legally deceased, Moist gets a second chance on life.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Reacher Gilt is amused by Igor's story of how an ex-employer died by thoughtlessly stepping into his own spike-lined pit. Presumably he ceased to find this so amusing by the end of the book, at least for a fraction of a second.
  • A long-ranged example: When he's wondering how Moist is going to win the great transcontinental race, Vetinari asks him if he might dig up some extremely fast magical horse buried nearby. Moist says of course not. But in the next Discworld book featuring Moist von Lipwig, this exact thing happens.
• Forged Message:
  • Moist von Lipwig secures an immediate reservation for himself and his girlfriend at the poshest and most expensive restaurant in Ankh-Morpork by forging a letter from financier Reacher Gilt. Gilt, a master con-man himself, recognises a worthy opponent by graciously offering to pay their bill...
  • For his plan to win the clacks race, Moist has the Smoking Gnu forge a message from those who died working under the harsh conditions of the Trunk, proclaiming how and why they died while implicating the Board and Reacher Gilt in their deaths.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: This book introduced a new protagonist who proved very popular with fandom (somewhat revitalising the series) as well as being built around a serious point about privatisation—previous Discworld novels sometimes have serious points to make but they always took a back seat to the humour and never dominated the whole book (with the arguable exception of Equal Rites, Small Gods, Jingo, and Night Watch). In addition, there is a style change to the layout of the novel, with Pratchett including chapters for the first time in the main series since The Light Fantastic (partly in response to a critic who mocked his work for lacking chapters).
• Framing the Guilty Party: Moist enables Vetinari to investigate the Grand Trunk by forging a message from "the dead" that blames the Trunk's Board for fraud, embezzlement, and murder, and then using the Smoking Gnu's expertise to hack the message in place of the Trunk's code, so that the fake message will be read in front of Vetinari and the Watch.
• Freud Was Right: As Adora Belle looks over Moist's ideas for stamp pictures, she notes that the stamp with the highest value has a picture of the tallest building in the city.
  Miss Dearheart: Oh, the Tower of Art... How like a man.
• Genius Loci: Professor Pelc notes to Moist that the same way the University's library distorts time and space on a massive scale due to the accumulation of words, so did the Post Office the instant they started accumulating the mail, creating a different phenomenon called a gevaisa - a "tomb of living words", while Mr Pump refers to it slightly differently as a "tomb of unheard words". Pelc notes that the hallucinations and distortions inside the Post Office should gradually decrease as the mail is delivered, though given the sheer tonnage of the undelivered mail, Moist is highly skeptical of this.
• Genre Savvy: Moist Von Lipwig knows very well how things are supposed to go... and plays the part of the hero, because he is a con artist, and taking advantage of what people expect to see is his major skill. So when he hears that the cat is stuck in the burning building after getting everyone else out safely, he knows that there's only one choice. If he wants to continue this story, he must run back in to save the cat "because that's what the hero does".
• Graceful Loser: Gilt, eventually, when he realises that Moist has absolutely destroyed him. He leaves once it becomes clear that everything's going wrong, vanishing (only to eventually be caught by Mr Pump). Before he does, though, he sends Moist his pirate-like parrot, as recognition that he's been beaten by the better conman.
• Gonky Femme: They put a golem into a dress and rename it "Gladys", in order to make it proper for "her" to clean the ladies' bathroom. The golem promptly starts to act very stereotypically girly, which actually makes a degree of sense, given that it's essentially a matter of programming.
• Groin Attack:
  • Sustained over time from a bareback ride, but the aftermath is subtly played for laughs, what with Moist taking correspondence from within a tub of ice.
  • It's also hinted at in the bar scene, where Adora pins down a drunken lech's foot with one of her high heels, then points out to the man that she's sitting across from him, she has another shoe in waiting, that "in pounds per square inch, it's like being stepped on by a very pointy elephant", and thanks to unwanted childhood ballet lessons, she can kick like a mule. The man gets the hint and leaves.
• Ground by Gears: Mr. Gryle is quite thoroughly done in by an experimental mail-sorting engine, thanks to a central flywheel so poorly designed that it rotates through its own space-time frame. Alien Geometries plus an off-balanced banshee equals a [Gloop] and a sticky smear.
• Hat of Authority: The wingéd gold hat that comes with being Postmaster. It also came with some winged sandals and a(n also winged) fig-leaf thong, which Moist wisely passes up.
• Heel Realization: Moist, following Mr. Pump's "The Reason You Suck" Speech and a long look in the mirror.
• Hellish Horse: Boris, an extremely ornery stallion that hasn't been broken yet and which the stable master provides for Moist. It was meant to be a bluff, but Moist called it and used Boris anyway.
• Heroic Fire Rescue: After rescuing everyone else who was in the burning building, Moist has to run back in to rescue the stupid cat.
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • Towards the end, Moist fears that he is no better than Reacher Gilt. However—unbeknownst to Moist—the ending reveals that the Patrician caught Gilt, offered him the same chance for rehabilitation, and Gilt...refused.
    Vetinari: You have to admire a man who really believes in freedom of choice. Sadly, he did not believe in angels.
  • Moist discovers that it is very important to him that he isn't just like Reacher. How much unlike Reacher he actually is depends on your point of view. The Golems see it as only a matter of degree, but that doesn't stop them from thinking he can make Adora Belle Dearheart happy.
• Honesty Is the Best Policy: A desperate Moist goes to Adora, the only person in the city who will realize he's being entirely serious when he says he's unable to think of any way to actually win the race with the Grand Trunk, and fully confesses to the role he played in the loss of her earlier job. While irritated, she keeps her promise to keep level-headed and actually gives Moist a possibility that winds up being critical in his plan.
• Hope Spot:
  • Vetinari believes that the greatest of all treasures is hope; providing people with hope is healthy. Not, you understand, any actually chance of success, just the hope of success. Sometimes he does it just to twist the knife, as when he asks Vimes to escort some people out... and into some cells.
  • And this is part of Moist's conning stock in trade. He makes people want to believe that what he's selling is real.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Mr. Pump. When Moist, angered by Mr. Pump's "The Reason You Suck" Speech, orders the golem to screw his own head off, Pump plays back a message from Vetinari that he cannot be ordered to destroy himself. And warns him not to try it again.
• I Die Free:
  • Anghammarad. In his death, he finds himself free of all orders, commands, and duties. He can simply sit and do nothing if it is his choice...and he chooses to do just that, sitting on the sand in the black desert.
  • Later, Reacher Gilt takes this trope to its logical conclusion by choosing death over a government job. Vetinari comments afterwards that he admires a man who believes so strongly in freedom.
• Ignored Expert: Pony has been telling the Board about what effect their cuts to maintenance are going to have from the very beginning. He was savvy enough to cover himself from the inevitable fallout by documenting everything. Played with in that the Board actually agreed to his proposed overhaul of the system once problems started piling up; the main issue is that Gilt, acting as the middle man, stole most of the money (it's in his interest to make the business fail) and then smoothly convinces Pony that "budget cuts" (i.e. the stolen money) took away his budget and to accept the pittance that Gilt left.
• Imagine Spot: Moist has a couple:
  • The night before the Clacks-vs-Post Office race, he dreams of the Clacks towers burning as the operators blindly forward the "Woodpecker" killer message, even detailing how many towers fall before anyone realises what is going on, which he snaps out of with the realisation that the plan is too dangerous and would allow Gilt to win by declaring the message had been tampered with.
  • When Moist realises Adora Belle has fallen in love with him, he imagines, in the space of a paragraph, fleeing the city and going back to his old life as a con artist, but discovering the joy is gone and his skills are failing him, and eventually dying in some forsaken slum of an inn, before he snaps back to reality.
• Immortality Through Memory: Workers on the Clacks towers circulate the names of their dead throughout the network without end so they can live on in the Clacks.
  Grandad: His name is in the code, in the wind in the rigging and the shutters. Haven't you heard the saying "A man's not dead while his name is still spoken?"
• Incredibly Obvious Tail: Used to great effect by Vetinari. If you see his spy, it's a spy he wants you to see.
• Indy Ploy: Almost anything Moist does.
• I Never Said It Was Poison:
  • Crispin Horsefry positively runs full-tilt into these on a regular basis. During the meeting between Vetinari and the Grand Trunk executives, he protests the slightest hint of any wrongdoing by insisting what they have done is perfectly legal, and even drops this colossal clanger:
    Vetinari: And, indeed, some rumours about the death of young Mr. Dearheart last month.
    Horsefry: There is no proof that we had anything to do with the boy's murder!
    Vetinari: Ah, so you too have heard people saying he was murdered? These rumours just fly around, don't they...
  • Reacher Gilt makes a similar revealing remark when he asks Moist how Mr. Groat was recovering after the attack. Only a few people know there was an attack.
• Instant Expert: Subverted; Moist has carefully honed the skill of very rapidly learning just enough about a topic to fake being an expert to non-experts and pass as a less-knowledgeable enthusiast to experts who don't ask too many questions.
• In Which a Trope Is Described: The chapter headings use the Victorian-style synopsis in this vein. Apparently Pratchett adopted them not only because they're thematically appropriate, but as a Take That! to a reviewer who accused him of being unable to write in chapters.
• Ironic Name: Adora Belle Dearheart is anything but adorable. Her late brother (affectionately) called her "Killer". Her love interest, Moist von Lipwig, calls her "Spike". Mind you, she's a wonderful person, just not a very likable one (in contrast to Moist, who is, at least pre-character development, not a good person, but incredibly likable).
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Moist explains to Miss Maccalariat that this is the main reason they use honorifics like "Mister" with the golems. Discussed: Miss Dearheart, who works with golems for a living, suggests that the golems don't actually care about being called "it", because they aren't human. She also implies that humans just call them "Mister" to feel good about themselves, irrespective of what the golems may actually prefer.
• Just Smile and Nod: A clacks worker tries to explain the technicals to Moist. Occasionally, as technical polysyllabic words fly past him, he catches one or two he recognizes. Like "the".
• Kansas City Shuffle:
  • Moist tricks Gilt into thinking he was planning to use a flying broomstick to cheat at the race, and Gilt leaps to prevent it. Not only was the real plan unrelated, but the concession Gilt made to get flying banned made it pretty much impossible to counter.
  • The Board thinks that Gilt is a shady corporate raider who helped them steal the Trunk for a share of the profits. This blinds them to his skimming money, deliberately running the company into the ground so he can make even more money selling it, and using the connection to steal from their other business interests as well.
• Lampshade Hanging: Prominently, Ridcully's attempt to remember a particular wizard — "Thingummy, got a funny name." Like that'll help narrow it down...
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Gilt, having to explain his pun on "prophet" and "profit":
  Gilt: Prophets, I said, not profits. Don't worry yourselves, it will look better written down.
• Liberty Over Prosperity: Reacher vs Vetinari. Reacher does whatever he can get away with regardless of the law, advertises himself as a modern-day pirate, and justifies his business practices by claiming his customers always have a choice, even if it's between him and just sending a slow letter. Vetinari gears all of his resources towards ensuring the city runs smoothly, and believes the most important aspect of freedom is to take the consequences of your actions.
• Literalist Snarking: Vetinari does this to Moist.
  Moist: If you stick a broom up my arse I could sweep the floor, too!
  Vetinari: An excellent idea. Drumknott, do we have a broom closet on this floor?
• Loophole Abuse: Ridcully displays this in fine form as he is the agreed to neutral party to the final race between Post and Clacks. He was asked to select something for them to deliver. He picks a thick textbook with lots of colored pictures and diagrams, which requires tedious encoding to be sent on the Clacks.
• Lovable Rogue: As a Con Man, Moist only committed totally non-violent crimes. Viciously deconstructed by Pump calculating (to three decimal points) the number of people he had indirectly killed.
  Moist: What? I do not! Who told you that?
  Pump: I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People.
• Lying Finger Cross: Moist makes Adora swear to keep her cool and to avoid violence just before dropping a bomb on her. She agrees, and he confesses he's the forger whose checks cost her her earlier job. She takes a moment to reflect, and asks whether she was crossing her fingers. Unfortunately for her, Moist was very deliberately looking at her hands just to avoid this specific trope, and she swallows her wrath for a second until he explains himself.
• Malaproper: Vetinari tells Moist he's danced "the sisal two-step" instead of "the hemp fandango". He then goes on to confuse "the Agatean Wall" with "the glass ceiling" when talking to the board members. (That one is very deliberate.)
• Man Versus Machine: Snail Mail versus the Telegram, although it's more a case of upholding a competitive market than proving that Ludd Was Right.
• Meaningful Name:
  • There's some competing Epileptic Trees regarding Moist and Reacher's names. Pratchett, as a master of multilevel wordplay, probably intended more than one or even all of them.
  • Reacher Gilt:
    • Aside from the obvious meaning—he's "reaching" for your "gilt" (i.e. gold; Gilt mentions to a servant that he was a bit surprised he got away with that one). The pirate act is just flavor, but the name spells it out; see also the Stealth Pun below—there are two main competing theories. It's either a reference to Long John Silver, or a Take That! against John Galt. There is, given that it's Pratchett, known for layering his wordplay, the very real possibility that it's both.
    • In favor of Long John: the character's appearance (he deliberately looks like a Pirate), he's someone with an impressively long, er, reach, and "silver" vs. "gilt" (gold). It also fits in with the other Dickens-style names in the book.
    • In favor of John Galt: aside from his ruthlessly rules-free capitalist approach to business and the similarity of their last names, the air of mystery he cultivates around himself prompts some to ask "Who is Reacher Gilt?"
    • More obviously, given how brazen Reacher is about his crimes, his name literally proclaims his "gilt".
    • Moist turns out to have a heart of gold whereas Reacher's friendly demeanor is only gild (i.e. gold painted or plated), "gilt" being the past participle of "gild".
  • Lipwig implies a false mustache, indicating that Moist is a Master of Disguise. Another theory has it that the name Moist is intended to call to mind "Slippery Jim", the hero of The Stainless Steel Rat series, who is another Boxed Crook.
    • It could also be based on Victor Lustig, a Con Man who sold the Eiffel Tower... twice.
  • Finally, it's similar to the real German city of Leipzig, which fits with Moist's background in Überwald. Many surnames come from one's place of birth, usually those of noble descent.
  • Adora Belle Dearheart is supposed to call to mind Ada Lovelace, one of the pioneers of computing. The Smoking Gnu isn't just a punny misspelling, and the whole story calls to mind the fall of Ma Bell, and IBM's days as the Evil Empire. There are a lot of Meaningful Names in this book, even for a Pratchett work.
  • The Smoking Gnu is also a Shout-Out to The Bromeliad in which the Nome confuses the words Gun and Gnu at one point (and confuses everyone he's talking to).
  • Stanley Howler recalls Stanley Gibbons, the London stamp dealers, "howler" and "gibbons" both being kinds of primates.
  • A water pump is a machine that forces water uphill. Mr Pump is a machine that pushes Moist to be better.
• Merchant Prince: Reacher Gilt is a powerful swindler and conman who is attempting to use his wealth (assuming he actually has any...) and power to displace the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork (though see below).
• Mercury's Wings: The Spirit of the Post is a golden statue with a winged helmet, winged sandals and a winged fig leaf. Moist, as Postmaster and possible avatar, gets a gold postman's hat with real pigeon wings attached to it, and a matching pair of boots◊. (There's also some kind of elasticated arrangement, but he decides to forgo this.)
• Mock Millionaire: Reacher Gilt is arguably an example of this trope. He conducts himself in a very lavish manner, but that may be part of his masquerade. He himself believes that wealth is an illusion, and stole the Grand Trunk through embezzlement and accounting tricks. It's never clear how much actual liquidity he actually has; in the end, when he is caught by Vetinari after fleeing the city, he seems dishevelled and impoverished. That may be disguise, or just a side-effect of spending an unspecified amount of time in the hands of Vetinari's Clerks before being brought before Vetinari and, quite literally, finding himself "in for the long drop".
• Moody Mount: Moist rides one of these to another city to help save the postal system. He is given one because he asked the stable to not bring him an old decrepit horse, so the workers bring him one which has actually bitten people. Sensing a chance for flair, Moist accepts with gusto to improve his appearance to the crowd. After he arrives, the horse escapes its new handlers and is roaming the plains now.
• Morally Bankrupt Banker: Discussed; Moist believes himself to be a decent person because the only people he pulled his cons on were those who "deserved it". Mr. Pump, however, points out that many bankers, when they lose something, tend to recover their losses by taking from other people — and these morally bankrupt people aren't usually fussy about whether the people they're taking it from deserve it.
  Mr. Pump: When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve.
• Mortality Grey Area: One golem is shown to have a soul after it dies, but Death isn't sure what to do with it. The golem answers that not doing anything is the greatest freedom a golem can have, and so it stays where it is..
• Mythology Gag: In several earlier books, it is observed that using multiple exclamation marks is a sign of a deranged mind. In this book, Dave's Pin Exchange (the pin equivalent of a comic book store) styles itself as the "Home of Acuphilia!!!!!" For bonus points, five exclamation points is the exact figure mentioned for being the sign of a deranged mind.
• Names to Trust Immediately: Parodied with Adora Belle Dearheart, who grew up to a be a cynical chain-smoker with, in her own words, no sense of humour whatsoever.
• Neat Freak: Stanley Howler. You might say he's as neat as a pin.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In having the Post Office burned down, Gilt both motivates Moist to finally shake off his past, lets him get some good PR, and actually relieves him of a significant problem - namely, what to do with the enormous piles of letters, some of which don't belong to this universe, or are might-have-sent, and so could be incredibly disruptive if received by its inhabitants and quite difficult to tell apart from 'native' ones.
• Non-Indicative Name: You might be forgiven for thinking a guy named "Grandad" is a Cool Old Guy, despite being a mere twenty-six years old - the same age as Moist von Lipwig.
• Noodle Incident: Stanley's upbringing: All we know is he was raised by peas. Not on, by. (We do learn that peas are noted for their thoroughness, but that's about it.)
• Noodle Implements: Whatever it is bissonomy is, the statue of its respective grace is carrying a kettle.
• The Not-So-Harmless Punishment: Moist Von Lipwig is offered (as an alternative to being hanged, again) the job of Postmaster General. It's a job for life, just quite possibly not for long, as it's already claimed the lives of several other "volunteers." Of course, Vetinari isn't going to be so crass as to force him to take the job, and tells Moist he can walk out of the room whenever he likes. Moist takes the time to confirm his suspicions that there is a long drop beyond the door, but the choice is still there.
• Obfuscating Stupidity:
  • Vetinari does this when meeting with the Grand Trunk board, acting as if he knows nothing of how their business dealings work, and then describing a hypothetical situation that just happens to be exactly how they illegally swindled the Dearhearts and their partners out of the company. Later on he shows understanding of how the technology and culture of the Clacks works as well, knowing how the drums can be disassembled to figure out where a message originated, and about the "sending home" tradition. It's clear he understands the Trunk better than the people who own it.
  • Moist does a fair amount of this, especially when he acts as if he thinks painting some stars on a broomstick will make it capable of flight. Ridcully pulls him aside to correct this misapprehension, and it's implied he's doing it too and playing along by pretending to believe Moist could possibly be that stupid.
  • Captain Carrot, as usual. In his one scene it's obvious from anyone familiar with him that he knows Moist is full of shit about the "extra large pigeon". Like everyone, however, Moist can't tell just how much of Carrot's behavior is an act.
• Obviously Evil:
  • Reacher Gilt virtually advertises the true nature of his business practices by dressing similarly to a pirate, complete with an eyepatch and a cockatoo on his shoulder. Which, for bonus points, is taught to say "Twelve-and-a half-percent!". Converted to fractions that's 1/8, or a "piece of eight".
• Odd Couple: Groat and Stanley. Among other things, they have carefully divided their living quarters with tape, and Stanley makes a point to cut off the corners of paper that accidentally crosses to his side to enforce neatness.
• Odd Job Gods:
  • Anoia, goddess of Things That Get Stuck In Kitchen Drawers.
  • Also, the statues of Bissonomy and Tubso, two Virtues honored by so few people that no one even knows what they're supposed to represent anymore. (There is presumably no Genius Bonus here; these are just funny-sounding words Pratchett made up with no meaning.)
• Offerings to the Gods: Parodied with the Church of Offler, said to pay special attention to any prayers that come with sausages. It's a good deal for the priests too (depending on seniority - the most junior priest is noted to get about as much of the sausage as Offler Himself, which is to say, the smell).
• Oh, Crap!: Moist's reaction when he sees the cartoon in the Times about his new penny stamp. "Maybe Mr. Trooper can squeeze me in." For reference: The penny stamp has a profile picture of Lord Vetinari; the cartoon shows two wags discussing "licking the Patrician's backside"; Mr. Trooper is Lord Vetinari's executioner.
  • The chairmen of the board at first fall for Vetinari's Obfuscating Stupidity—after all, he was classically educated. Then they remember where that classical education comes from.
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: Vetinari and Gilt share a mutual one of these after a third character shows his profound ignorance about the game "Thud".
  "Gilt and Vetinari shared a look. It said: While I loathe you and every aspect of your personal philosophy to a depth unplumbable by any line, I’ll credit you at least with not being Crispin Horsefry."
• Only Mostly Dead: How Moist was allowed to be hanged by the neck until dead, but still alive afterward. Lord Vetinari tells him that hanging is a very exact science, that the hangman he employs is a true master who could write a book, and he was hanged "to within half an inch of his life."
• Opposites Attract: Moist von Lipwig: Conman, forced into public service, liar, and optimist with some cynic in. Adora Belle Dearheart: Golem trust chairwoman, chose her job voluntarily (more or less, after losing her last job thanks to Moist), incapable of lying (bar sarcasm), and cynic with some optimism deep inside.
• Orphaned Etymology: A rather jarring example from Pterry, who is usually very on the ball with words and their origins; when Moist first tries on the golden suit Mr Pump had made for him and looks at himself in the mirror, he comments "Wow, El Dorado or what?"
• ...Or So I Heard: Moist has to say this a few times when he realizes he's revealed more knowledge than he should have of criminal enterprise. "They're the devil to forge, I know that...well, that's what I've heard."
• Otaku: Stanley is so obsessed with pins that even the other pin collectors in the city think he's "a bit weird about pins". After Lipwig invents the postage stamp, Stanley eventually transfers this obsession into stamps and stamp collecting, devoting all his time to categorizing and detailing everything about the stamps, which leads to Moist making him head of the division.
• Out-Gambitted: Gilt is a Magnificent Bastard, no doubt about it. Unfortunately for him, he's still not as good as Vetinari.
• Our Monsters Are Different: Mr. Gryle gives the first (and probably last) good look at banshees in this setting. He's basically a predatory Winged Humanoid, very gaunt and light with wiry muscles to make flight possible, and an instinct for snapping at birds as they pass. By contrast, folkloric banshees are screaming female specters. It's noted that the scream of the banshee, according to folklore, signals that whoever hears it shall soon die an untimely death. While civilized banshees do indeed follow the folklore, even if they have a speech impediment and have to write it down, wild banshees cut out the middleman.
• Our Angels Are Different: Played with.
  • Vetinary presents himself rather cynically as the "Angel of Redemption" and offers Moist a second chance after he "died". Vetinari's definition is that this type of angel will appear at a point in a ""man's career where he has made such a foul mess of his life that he contemplates suicide and will give him the opportunity to go back at the moment it all went wrong and make the right choice."" Obviously Vetinari is not an angel but he's very much a tyrant who uses this story to forcibly recruit Moist Von Lipwig.
  • Moist is presented several times as an "Angel", aka: a Messenger, a Symbol of hope, a Representative of the gods and a Force of good. Naturally, he isn't any of those. By the end of the book, he becomes all four.
• Paranoia Fuel: In-Universe- The knowledge that his golem parole officer can kill if ordered by a suitable authority (such as the Patrician) combined with the graphic demises of previous Postmasters leads Moist to suspect that such golems were responsible for ridding the Post Office of unsatisfactory Postmasters. Groat's insistence that at least one of them died in an "industrial accident" furthers this, as golems are generally regarded as tools. It's revealed later that the deaths were caused by a completely unrelated phenomenon.
• Playful Hacker: The Pun Smoking GNU, at first.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Vetinari quietly but firmly corrects Moist every time he refers to Mr. Pump as "it," and treats the golem with respect.
  • Reacher Gilt's Igor realizes what's about to go down, and decides to get out while the getting's good. As he's about to leave, Gilt's personal cook gives him a balaclava she knitted for him as a goodbye present; in turn, and in violation of their codes of conduct, the Igor warns her that she should get out of town too.
• Police Are Useless: Worse: they're quite competent and dangerously clever. This annoys Moist, as he is used to dealing with cops in other cities, who are taking the lead from but haven't quite got a handle on Sam Vimes's style of policing. Moist spends the novel obfuscating things for them so they'll not look too closely and realize Alfred Spangler didn't quite die.
• Pony Express Rider: Moist's race against the clacks. Moist also ensures himself a little leeway in the final contest by ensuring that it truly is clacks vs. carriage, so that the Trunk cannot use their horses to ferry the message if a tower breaks down. (He notes that they could beat him without using a single tower by running a pony express.)
• Prayer Is a Last Resort: Played with and subverted. After Reacher Gilt has the Post Office burned down and Vetinari will not provide the funds needed for restoration, Moist fakes this trope, hard. With smartly-written and stamped letters to the gods in hand, Moist goes to three different temples, praying to various gods for a large sum of money to help rebuild the Post Office. After that, he fakes a vision, falls to his knees screaming and praying to "give thanks" for the phony revelation, and "discovers" the huge stash of gold and other currency that he'd buried in the fields before the book begins: his ill-gotten money from all his cons.
• Promotion, Not Punishment: Albert/Moist is captured for fraud and hanged... to within half an inch of his life. Vetinari then offers him the position of Postmaster, knowing that his specific skills are what is needed to get the Post Office up and running again.
• Pronouncing My Name for You: Even when confronted with a determined golem parole officer, Moist von Lipwig (a Meaningful Name if pronounced as spelled, since he's known for wearing false mustaches) can muster enough righteous indignation to remind said golem parole officer that his name is pronounced "Lipvig" with a V.
• Public Execution: The book opens with a faked public execution. Moist (the accused, who doesn't know it's faked) is asked to sign the rope before hand, since it will then be worth more to collectors. He's also expected to come up with some last words, that being traditional. He goes with "I commend my soul to any god that can find it.", after being told that his first choice—"I wasn't actually expecting to die."—is acceptable but not memorable.
• Pun With Pi: There is a bit of a confusion for some characters (and for the reader) as to how the curse of the Post Office was related to a pie. It turns out it was related to the number pi (Bloody Stupid Johnson built a letter-sorting machine in which the pi equaled exactly three, and mayhem ensued).
• Reality-Breaking Paradox: The mail sorting engine in the basement of the post office was designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson, who built the wheels inside using measurements where pi equaled exactly 3 (thinking "three and a bit" was untidy). This is of course impossible, but because he's BS Johnson he did it anyway. As a result, a small bit of the universe around the engine is twisted up, causing the machine to spit out letters that have yet to be written, or should have been written and weren't, or were written in a different reality, even after it was turned off. The wizards of UU analyzed it and decided that trying to destroy it would also destroy the entire universe all in one go. A Post Office employee eventually decides to beat the thing with a crowbar until it stops spitting out letters. When called out for his actions, he explains that after he hit it the first time, he saw the wizards running away as fast as they could; thus, he figured that, unless the wizards had another universe to run to, they weren't entirely sure that destroying the sorting engine would take the universe with it.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Mr. Pump, demolishing Moist Von Lipwig's comforting vision of himself as a criminal with standards by pointing out that through his cons and scams he did not need to physically touch or even be aware of the existence of people to ruin their lives and hasten their deaths.
• Refuge in Audacity/Devil in Plain Sight:
  • Both Reacher Gilt and Moist Von Lipwig are big fans of this trope, but in different ways. Reacher Gilt is so obvious about being a scoundrel that people trust him. Moist, meanwhile, has both the wits and the sheer guts to push his luck as far as he needs to in order to sell a con. Reacher gives them something they hope isn't true, Moist gives them something they hope is true.
  • Also, one of the Smoking Gnu wears a horned helmet to be inconspicuous, because nobody who sees him in it would suspect he's trying to pass unnoticed. Moist is less impressed with that particular display of the trope.
• Requisite Royal Regalia: Morporkia is wearing one (a Vermine cape) on some of the stamp illustrations in the book (at least the hardcover versions).
• Retcon: In Reaper Man, Mr. Ixolite is described as the "last living banshee". Guess nobody told the narrative about Mr. Gryle. But to be fair, he's a wild banshee.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder:
  • When Moist wonders "What's the worst that could happen" if he goes through the Postman's Walk, Mr. Groat helpfully replies "The worst that could happen is you lose all your fingers on one hand, are crippled for life, and break half the bones in your body. Oh, and then they don't let you join."
  • When Pump displays ignorance about certain aspects of local culture, Moist asks if he's been at the bottom of a hole for a hundred years. Pump replies that actually, he's been at the bottom of a well for over two hundred years. Pump isn't his given name; it's his former job description.
• Revealing Skill: A steady handshake is famously one of the ways that people assess whether you're trustworthy or not. And Moist consequently practiced his handshake in order to fool people into giving him money. But when Moist shook Reacher Gilt's hand, he came to the chilling realisation that Reacher Gilt was a master conman who had perfected the steady handshake at a level that dwarfed Moist's efforts. The book even notes that in other circumstances, Moist would have dropped everything to become Reacher Gilt's apprentice.
• Ridiculously Average Guy: Moist notes that he is almost never noticed precisely because his face is so average and unremarkable that no one can place him even if they've seen him.
• Running Gag: Hope, the greatest of all life's treasures. Not any chance at the actual thing, that would be awful daft, just the hope.
• Second-Face Smoke: Adora, occasionally.
• Sequel Hook: A minor one in the epilogue: The Patrician offers Reacher Gilt the choice between running the Royal Mint or death. He chooses death.
• Severely Specialized Store: Dave's Pin Exchange sells pins, with the owner being very adamant that he doesn't sell nails.
• Shout-Out:
  • When the Wizards are trying to tune their Omniscope, Ridcully continually complains that they keep getting "That damn enormous flaming eye again" ... which turns out to be the magnified eye of the student they're trying to contact, inflamed due to his allergies.
  • Stanley Howler, pin-fanatic-turned-stamps-guy, is named for Stanley Gibbons, a Real Life company that sells collectible postage stamps and stamp-collecting supplies.
  • One of the signs that Reacher Gilt is a semi-Expy of John Galt is the literal stating of the question "Who is Reacher Gilt?" Well, that and his hatred of government interference in (his) free enterprise. His description during his introduction as a flashy unknown outsider who appeared out of nowhere and throws parties that is the stuff of legend brings to mind The Great Gatsby as well.
  • Descriptions of the decaying, pigeon-inhabited post office are reminiscent of scenes in Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan. In particular, the fact that Groat and Stanley never clean up the pigeon crap, because it's not specified in the regulations, is reminiscent of how Rottcodd keeps the sculptures in the Hall of the Bright Carvings dusted, yet allows the displaced dust to thickly coat the floor.
  • The three members of the Smoking Gnu are Al, Alex, and Adrian. Moist thinks that The Smoking Gnu is exactly the name he'd choose for a group whose members have names that all begin with the same letter.
  • Anghammarad says "So It Goes" after explaining that the land of Thut slid into the sea nine thousand years ago. "So it goes" is said literally every single time someone dies in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.
  • When accosted by a drunk, Adora Belle Dearheart gives a riff off Dirty Harry (Pratchett seemed very fond of this, as he'd done it before in earlier Discworld books):
    Miss Dearheart: What is sticking in your foot is a Mitzy 'Pretty Lucretia' four-inch heel, the most dangerous footwear in the world. Considered as pounds per square inch, it's like being trodden on by a very pointy elephant. Now, I know what you're thinking: you're thinking, 'Could she press it all the way through to the floor?' And, you know, I'm not sure about that myself. The sole of your boot might give me a bit of trouble, but nothing else will. ...
  • Mr Pump attracts several references to the Terminator series. When Vetinari is outlining his job as Moist's parole officer he explains that "Mr Pump does not eat. Mr Pump does not sleep. And Mr Pump, Postmaster General, does not stop." Later after Mr Pump almost crushes Stanley's skull when it looks like he's about to attack Moist with the tea kettle, Moist berates him with "You can't just go around killing people!" only for Mr Pump to ask "Why Not?"^note Although unlike in T2, Mr Pump adds "You Do."
  • Moist is under the belief that golems cannot harm a human, nor through inaction allow a human to come to harm. Which is technically true, but Vetinari has also added his own post-script - "unless ordered to do so by a duly appointed authority." He's baffled as to why anyone wouldn't do this.
  • When "Albert Spangler" is asked for his last words: "Er... it's not as bad a thing I do now... er..."
  • After getting Mr Hugo to return the stolen sign letters by intimidating him with Mr Pump, Moist reflects that it is a good idea to "Speak softly and employ a huge man with a crowbar".
  • Moist announces that he's going to Unseen University by declaring "I'm off to see the wizard."
  • Adora Dearheart tells Moist, "You know how to pray, don't you? You just put your hands together and hope"; which sounds very similar to Lauren Bacallline's famous line from To Have And Have Not, "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow."
• Shown Their Work:
  • Moist's induction into the order of Postmen is very similar to a Masonic initiation.
  • The whole Grand Trunk/Ma Bell plot impressed Real Life telecommunications engineers with its resemblance to the actual events (fortunately, though, AT&T never killed anyone... as far as we know).
  • Likewise, a number of British readers noticed the distinct resemblance to the privatisation of British Rail in the 1990s - a 'trunk line' is the main line of a railway. It also resembles the (Canadian but British owned) Grand Trunk Railway.
  • The whole concept of Moist having a race to deliver a book by clacks versus via a postal wagon is a reference to the computer science concept of the "sneakernet", the notion that for large transmissions it can be faster to physically transport a disc containing the relevant data than to transmit it via the network.
• Signs of Disrepair: The sign outside the Post Office headquarters reading "NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLO M OF NI T WILL STAY THESE MES ENGERS ABO T THEIR DUTY" are brought up again. It turns out the missing letters found their way onto a shop sign labeled HUGOS, without the apostrophe.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: Long ago, Bloody Stupid Johnson was hired to build a mail sorting machine for the post office. However, he decided to make things easier on himself by having Pi equal three. Somehow, this worked and the machine was completed, but this warped reality so the device began receiving mail that shouldn't exist, and it posed the threat of destroying the entire universe altogether. Ultimately, this led to the dissolution of the postal service until Vetinari had Moist resurrect it many years later.
• Slave to PR: A concept taken from several previous books (Witches Abroad, Jingo, Carpe Jugulum) but explained and taken to its logical breaking point. Everybody is governed by their appearances and expectatives (by the force of narrativium), from the Patrician down to bar brawlers. As explained by Moist.
  Moist: People wanted to be fooled. They really believed that you found gold nuggets lying on the ground, that this time you could find the Lady, that just for once the glass ring might be real diamond. You had to give them a show.
• Smart People Play Chess: Vetinari and Gilt assess each other with their Thud tactics. Also, Crispin Horsefry's dismissal of the game (not that he didn't play it, but that he couldn't see past the obvious to the intricacies) is an(other) indication of his low intellect.
• Smoking Is Glamorous: Adora Belle Dearhart smokes constantly. Moist finds himself quite attracted to what she does with a cigarette and describes kissing her as like kissing an ash tray, but in a good way.
• Starting a New Life: Moist is forced to start over after supposedly being executed for his crimes. He's not entirely on his own, because Lord Vetinari has decided to make him the new Postmaster, which means that he's starting out with a job and a small apartment, but it's still an adjustment for him, because he's not used to making an honest living and has to get over his instinct for cheating other people.
• Stealing from Thieves: Deconstructed. Moist von Lipwig spent most of his life convinced he was doing this on the grounds of "you can't fool an honest man", concentrating on Violin Scams or only stealing from large businesses. However, he comes to realize that he was still hurting innocent people in the process, culminating in The Reveal that his Love Interest lost her job as a bank teller when she was blamed after he tricked her into accepting a bad check before they'd properly met — seeing only the faceless employee of his mark at the time.
• Stealth Pun:
  • Reacher Gilt dresses like a pirate and has a parrot that says "Twelve and a half percent!" In fractions, of course, 12.5 percent equals 1/8th, or "pieces of eight".
  • At the end, Gilt leaves his parrot to Moist.
    Miss Dearheart: It's Gilt's, isn't it. He's given you the bird?
  • Also, see This Is My Side. For non-commonwealth readers, a Stanley Knife is a box cutter or utility knife.
• Strawman Political: When Gilt is introduced, he speaks the language of a self-made, freedom-loving, tyranny-fighting libertarian who could have been the hero in an Ayn Rand novel. Later, it turns out he only cares about his own freedom, though he is a true believer at least that far.
• Stress Vomit: After Moist von Lipwig kills an assassin in self defence, the text notes that it would be the perfect time for a Bond One-Liner. Instead, Moist just becomes noisily sick.
• Sympathetic P.O.V.: From Moist's point of view, The Ankh-Morpork Times is a useful tool, and Miss Cripslock makes for a great verbal whetstone (that is, she forces him to keep his wits sharp), but the editor-in-chief is an overly wordy, pompous stuffed shirt. Which makes for an interesting triangle of protagonists, since both Moist and de Worde are dismissive of Sam Vimes, and he's not so fond of them either.
• That Man Is Dead:
  Vetinari: It occurs to me that this is exactly the sum of money thought to have been stolen by a recently notorious con man.
  Moist: Albert Spangler? He's dead.
  Vetinari: Are you sure?
  Moist: Yes, sir. I was there when they hanged him.
• That's What I Would Do: Moist about Reacher Gilt's plans for the Grand Trunk.
  'I'd suspect him of anything,' said Miss Dearheart. 'But you sound very certain.'
  'That's what I'd do,' said Moist, 'er... if I was that kind of person. It's the oldest trick in the book.'
• This Is My Side: Groat and Stanley's living quarters are an example of this. Stanley maintains the border with a very sharp knife. The table is divided into two halves, but since they only have one salt cellar it gets its own little 'demilitarized zone', a white circle in the middle.
• This Is Not a Floor: The fate of a previous Postmaster, and nearly Moist himself.
• Three Laws-Compliant: Moist assumed golems are, and in a sense they are, but with a twist: they actually are not allowed to harm a human being…unless ordered to do so by a duly constituted authority. This essentially inverts the Laws, making it more important to obey (certain) humans than to protect humans.
• Tiger by the Tail: By the time the Board of Directors learns Reacher Gilt's true nature, they learn he also has dirt on all of them thanks to Crispin Horsefry's blabbing. They realize not only are they riding a tiger, but the tiger knows where they live.
• Time Abyss: The golem Anghammarad, built over 20,000 years ago and still functioning, remembers times, events, places, and languages that nothing else on the Disc does. He's carrying a message on a tablet strapped to his arm. He intends to deliver it. To do so, he has to wait for time to start over. To quote Ms. Dearheart: "Golems aren't afraid of forever. They aren't afraid of anything."
• Title Drop: Notably, this is the only book in the main Discworld series to avert this.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • There are people in the story who mouth off to Vetinari. Twice. Incredibly, they live. Possibly.
  • There's also the man from the Grand Trunk who makes demands of Ridcully, while within Unseen University. He's lucky he left that room in the same shape he was in when he entered it.
    Ridcully: Oh, please sue the University! We've got a whole pond full of people who have tried to sue the University!
• To the Pain: Moist von Lipwig narrates one of these to himself about what he'll do to Reacher Gilt near the end.
  I'll kill you, Mr. Gilt. I'll kill you in our own special way, the way of the weasel and cheat and liar. I'll take away everything but your life. I'll take away your money, your reputation, and your friends. I'll spin words around you until you're cocooned in them. I'll leave you with nothing, not even hope...
• Tranquil Fury: Just before the Clacks-vs-Post Office race, Moist successfully baits Reacher Gilt to the point that he passes right through visible anger and into "the calm, limpid waters of utter, visceral fury".
• Trash Landing: Moist jumps from the window of the hotel when Mr. Pump is chasing him, only to realize that he's landed in manure.
• Treacherous Spirit Chase: The Ankh-Morpork Post Office wraps unsuspecting postmasters entirely in a beguiling vision of the building's opulent past. Unfortunately for them, this includes images of floors and walkways that have long since rotted away. Moist von Lipwig nearly takes a very long tumble by almost stepping onto a balcony that had long ago ceased to be.
• Twisted Echo Cut: We cut from Gilt having a meeting with his staff to Moist and Adora Dearheart having lunch together:
  Gilt: We're in your hands, Mr. Pony. You're the man with the plan.
  —
  Moist: I don't have one.
  Adora Dearheart: No plan?
• T-Word Euphemism: Moist's rant when he realizes what Gilt is doing apparently includes the K-word, the L-word, the T-word, two different S-words, the V-word and the Y-word.
• Under New Management: Moist Von Lipwig as the new management of the post office, and Gilt and his cronies at the Grand Trunk.
• Unfortunate Names: Moist von Lipwig (who was named so by "unwise but doting parents" and has heard every possible joke on his real name) and Adora Belle Dearheart (who claims to have "no sense of humor whatsoever" after growing up with a name like that). No wonder they end up together.
• Unfulfilled Purpose Misery: Anghammarad is a nineteen-thousand-year-old golem who was supposed to deliver a warning that the sea goddess was angry to a city, but the city was underwater by the time he got there. Fortunately, golems believe time is cyclical, so he only needs to wait until the universe resets and he can finally deliver his message (which he has repeatedly retranscribed over the millenia). When he dies in the Post Office fire, he tells Death he is perfectly happy waiting where he is, as not having to do anything is the golems' definition of freedom.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Moist eventually decides not to go with the Smoking GNU's plan, which was described in detail. The message he sends instead, for maximum dramatic effect, is hidden from the reader until after it's been received. (This is entirely in character with Moist, who is the consummate showman.)
  "You wouldn't like to give me some little clue?" said the Patrician.
  "Best all round if I don't, sir," said Moist.
• Unstoppable Mailman: Anghammarad. He gets through The Postman's Walk — an obstacle course including roller skates, stray bottles and a letterbox laced with razor blades, done with a hood over one's head — by crushing everything in his path and punching a hole in the door. The other, human postmen find the display gratifying.
• Unusual Euphemism: For death. The Order of the Post is explained as making sure a postman’s family is cared for when he’s “Returned to Sender.”
• Verbal Tic: Groat has a tendency to repeat, sir, repeat his words.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Gilt, to the point where even he is incredulous about it.
• Violin Scam: One of Moist's most common tricks back when he was a crook. At the start of the book he has several glass rings and a very nearly gold coin on hand that he plans to use to make enough money to get out of town.
• Waking Non Sequitur: Moist has one after visiting Unseen University and discovering a room full of glass jars through which voluntarily-dead wizards communicate with the living. He dreams of wizards in bottles all shouting his name, and when he is shaken awake he blurts out "some of them were covered in jam!"
• Walk, Don't Swim: Vetinari explains to Moist that even fleeing to a different continent would not help him to escape his Golem parole officer. It knows where he is, all the time, without having to observe him, regardless of how far away he is or how he masks himself; it does not tire, eat, drink, sleep, breathe or stop at all on any account, and would thus be able to walk under any body of water eventually. Four miles an hour without stopping is six hundred and seventy-two miles in a week ^note While there are eight days in a week, Mr. Pump does have a day off where he won't have to pursue Moist. But there's no need to tell Moist this, and while most golems are very diligent in observing their days off...and there's always the chance that one might choose to make an exception. It adds up. Eventually the officer would catch him by sheer implacability.
• Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: Because "greengrocer's apostrophe" has become a phrase referring to unnecessary apostrophes (usually in plural words on shop signs, like "Apple's" or "Banana's") the greengrocer character Antimony Parker speaks with apostrophes in front of every single S he uses. Moist also comes upon a letter that's possibly from the Trope Namer Captain Carrot, given how awkwardly it's written.
• Water Tower Down: During a fire at the Post Office, the rainwater tank on its roof (which acts as a counterweight for its freight elevator) breaks free and falls into the fire, causing a massive steam explosion that kills the golem Anghammarad. It's noted that neither water nor fire would have been enough on its own.
• The Window or the Stairs: Moist von Lipwig is given a choice by Vetinari, who presents himself as an "angel" to Moist: He can take over the job of Postmaster General, or walk out a door in Vetinari's office, and Vetinari would never bother him again. Being a Genre Savvy sort of chap, Moist goes to the door, carefully peeks through it, and finds a deep pit where the floor should be. He drops a spoon into the pit, and it doesn't make a sound for a rather long time. He takes the job. At the end of the book, Reacher Gilt is offered the same choice with a job at the Mint. It isn't stated whether he walks straight out the door without pausing to look or purposefully did not consent to Vetinari's bargain (given the kind of man he was, the former is more likely), but it seems we will not be hearing from him again.
  Vetinari: You have to admire a man who really believes in freedom of choice. Sadly, he did not believe in angels.
• With All Due Respect: In Reacher's first scene, he repeatedly peppers his speech with the words "all respect" to Vetinari. Vetinari clearly realises the meaning behind the phrase, and simply comments that it's gratifying to be shown such respect.
• Worthy Opponent: Speaking relatively, Vetinari and Reacher Gilt "loathe...every aspect of [each other]'s personal philosophy to a depth unplumbable by any line", each also grant the other that they are not Crispin Horsefry.
  • More classically, Gilt and Moist recognise each other for what they truly are more or less at first sight, when they meet at Le Foie Heureux. Moist is left in stunned awe, tempted to offer himself as an apprentice to learn how to do things like the three card trick with entire banks. Gilt, off-balance by the fact that Moist isn't in the Post Office (where Mr Gryle is looking for him) and - it is implied - impressed by the gall and skill it took to successfully forge an invite from Gilt to the extremely posh restaurant they're at, graciously offers to pay their bill. At the end, recognising that he has been beaten by the better con-man, Gilt sends Moist his intentionally pirate-like parrot.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: At the beginning, just as Moist is beginning to hope that Drumknott's arriving with a stay of execution, he instead tells the executioner to get on with it; it's getting late.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are:
  Dearheart: You're fooling no one but yourself.
  He let the golden glow rise. He'd fooled them all, even her. But the good bit was that he could go on doing it, he didn't have to stop.
• "You!" Squared: The bar brawl version is known as the "Double Andrew", and is worth quite a lot of points. Bar brawls in Ankh-Morpork have become somewhat formalized. There are scoring rules, judging, official teams, and extensive brawl planning. They even have an Igor on standby to stitch back on anything that happens to get cut off (and they recommended having your name tattooed on extremities to make sure he stitches the right bits back on you). The impression is more of sport or folk dancing, or particularly stylised martial arts. Of course, any resemblence to the choreographed and pre-arranged outcome of a typical Professional Wrestling bout, possibly of the cheap-and-cheerful old-school British style, is all in the mind of the beholder.

---

The TV adaptation contains examples of:

• Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
  • With Moist and Adora, to the extent we see her crying and him saying: "I deserve to die!"
  • The adaptation puts a lot more emphasis on Moist's guilt in general; as part of this, the number of people Mr. Pump calculates he has killed is about ten times what it was in the book.
• Adaptation Distillation: Unlike with the Colour of Magic adaptation, a lot of things were implemented in a different way to the book rather than simply left out.
  • Mr. Gryle's climactic fight with Moist takes place in the middle of the burning post office, instead of in the cellar. He dies by being incinerated by the Post Office itself, rather than being spliced by the mail sorting machine.
  • In the book, the deaths of Moist's predecessors were genuinely accidents, caused by the psychoactive properties of the Post Office. In the film, they were unambiguous assassinations directed by Gilt and carried out by Mr. Gryle.
• Adaptation Dye-Job:
  • Or adaptation lack of a dye job. Charles Dance plays a blonde Vetinari, which is a shame, since he's otherwise pretty perfect in the role. Amusingly, in the book Adora actually says "They say he dyes his hair, you know".
  • The creators seemed to go Color-Coded for Your Convenience-route, fearing that a dark-haired, more menacing Vetinari could be mistaken for the villain by a casual viewer.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • The filmmakers are deadly determined to give Adora Belle a larger part in the story, with varied results. Adora trying to get the golems to strike is silly, as it requires Ankh-Morpork's leading golem expert failing to understand the nature of golems. Adora devising the Woodpecker herself, though, is so brilliant it makes the viewer regret the author hadn't thought to put it in the book.
  • The filmmakers also chose to have Moist become more unambiguously repentant, rather than retaining the original idea that, whatever else Moist von Lipwig is, he is still a con artist. (This does gradually happen in the books but isn't solidified until Raising Steam). Since the ultimate con he runs (that he can give up everything and go back to being an itinerant con man, which allows him to not do so) is on himself and entirely in his head, it would be hard to do.
  • Tying in with the above point, in this film Moist's fake bonds con is shown to have caused the economic crisis, closing several banks and giving Gilt the opportunity to buy the Trunk, so he has a lot more reason to be repentant. On top of that, the letters, rather than hallucinating the glorious past of the post office, directly show Moist the harm his schemes caused.
  • The film adds a short prologue showing Moist's career and apprehension by the Watch. The book starts with Moist already in prison and awaiting execution. The Watch officers who arrest Moist are led by Angua, who has several unnamed appearances in the book but never interacts with Moist directly.
  • Horsefry has a lot more screentime, and serves as Gilt's Bumbling Sidekick instead of the one-note pencil-pusher he was in the book. Gilt also personally beats him to death, rather than having Mr. Gryle kill him.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole:
  • The subplot about what happened to the previous postmasters is skipped by revealing they were killed by Reacher Gilt's banshee assassin. However, the only reason the Post Office is standing in the book is that Gilt doesn't see it as a threat; as soon as he does, he doesn't mess around killing postmasters, he burns the place to the ground. In addition, a rearrangement of scenes means that TV Gilt has to kill Horsefry personally, when the man is visiting his office, rather than employing the hard-to-track Mr Gryle to swoop down and kill him in his own home. Despite the TV version retaining Ankh-Morpork's capable and determined Watch (and its bloodhound-like werewolf), this crime apparently goes unsolved.
  • Angua twice arrests Moist for breaking his parole by leaving the city, but for some reason there was no problem earlier when he took a horse to Sto Lat. (In the book, it's made clear he can leave the city as long as he's on Post Office business, which applies all three times.) It's also not clear why this is even Angua's job; Mr Pump is still his parole officer, and collects him when he actually tries to escape.
• Adaptational Heroism: Mr. Pony, whose saving ledgers and giving them to Adora helped to bring down Reacher Gilt. In the book, he did something similar by keeping detailed records about how the board constantly refused his recommendations for needed maintenance, but that subplot (and the board itself) was mostly cut.
• Adaptational Intelligence: Horsefry in the book was so stupid that in the Smart People Play Chess scene his only contribution was that as a child he got a piece stuck up his nose and seemed to think this meaningful commentary. In the special he's completely competent, just not savvy enough not to keep a second set of books with accurate records. In particular, his justification for keeping the books here (that he needs accurate records somewhere if he's going to be able to properly conceal Gilt's illicit spending) actually makes sense, whereas his justification in the novel emphasized that he was a Cloudcuckoolander.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Although he was a straight villain anyway, Mr. Gryle's set of victims has been expanded to include all of the previous postmasters, because the original explanation that they were killed by the hallucinatory post office was changed. Since they died by falling or fright, and Gryle is a scary flying banshee, it works rather neatly.
  • Vetinari goes from being simply unconcerned whether Moist lives or dies (it's why he sent Moist after a few postmen and clerks died in the position, because Moist is expendable) to threatening to have him hung if he loses the bet with Gilt. This is rather out-of-character for Vetinari. For one thing, he could always find more uses for Moist; for another, getting the Watch and the hangman involved might reveal to the city that the postmaster was a criminal. It's also throwing away his best chance of reigning in the Clacks, especially since Moist is the only person who's had any success at rejuvinating the Post Office so far.
  • Mr. Pump's oddly specific calculation of how many people Moist has killed is upped from 2.338 people in the books to 22.8 people.
• Adapted Out: Several minor characters are completely absent, such as the elder golem Anghammarad and the entire board of the Grand Trunk. The Mail Sorting Machine is also absent.
• Age Lift: In the book, when Moist gives a man a long undelivered acceptance to his marriage proposal, it's been forty years, and he and his former sweetheart have both since been married and widowed. In the series, it's only been a few years, and the two are still in their twenties or thirties and unattached.
• Almost Kiss: Happened thrice, between Moist and Adora. She deliberately stopped the first and third ones, a concurrence of circumstances interrupted the second one.
• And a Diet Coke: Well, in Sacharissa's case, two figgins and a skinny Klatchian coffee. Given the properties of Klatchian Coffee (it makes you so sober some Go Mad from the Revelation), the figgins aren't going to help.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • The flashbacks show how Lipwig's cons drove a farmer to suicide, sent a bank clerk to prison, destroyed the bank and ruined the Dearheart family... and drove Adora to start smoking cigarettes.
  • Also, the movie's tagline is "A Tale of Love and Revenge...And Stamps."
  • The list of Lipwig's crimes include Littering with Extreme Prejudice.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: Mr. Gryle and Moist's final confrontation. Unlike the books, where the two fought in the smokey-but-not-actively-burning basement, here they go up against each other in the middle of the roaring mail-fire Gryle started.
• Beyond the Impossible: Deconstructed. Moist knows it's impossible for the postal service to beat the clacks in a long distance race, so instead of trying to beat the laws of physics he works with them to win the race. He implants an Engineered Public Confession into the Clacks message that gets Gilt arrested.
• Big "NO!" (and Little "No"): Lipwig's reactions at his "dreams".
• Bizarrchitecture: The Ankh-Morpork Post Office is quite a large building, but it seems to contain corridors that run for miles in every direction. This may have something to do with the power of words to warp space.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word:
  Adora: If you want to manipulate him, you might as well give up now.
  Lipwig: M-m-manipulate. Such an ugly word.
• Broken Bird: Adora, who was always pretty tsundere in the novel (her brother nicknamed her "Killer" after all).
• Continuity Cameo: Otto von Chriek, the Ankh-Morpork Times' vampire iconographer from The Truth, silently accompanies reporter Sacharissa Crisplock in a couple of scenes.
• Create Your Own Villain: Adora explains that her father lost his business, the original Clacks system, because the bank he loaned money from was victim to fake bond fraud, that Moist started. Guess who took over the Clacks system and is trying to kill Moist?
• Creator Cameo: Terry Pratchett shows up as an unnamed postman at the end.
• Dead End Job: The position of Postmaster General. Vetinari gives the job to Moist Von Lipwig as an alternative to being hanged, on the off-chance that he might actually succeed in reviving the Post Office, but generally expecting him to be killed, as the job had already claimed the lives of some of Vetinari's clerks.
• Death Seeker: The weight of his sins thrown in his face pushes Moist into this. Mr. Pump tells him to become The Atoner instead. Unconvinced at first, Moist later goes for Must Make Amends, with a bit of Reformed, but Rejected from Adora.
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: If Gilt had spent a tenth of the money and effort he expended on sabotaging the post office on ensuring that the clacks was working properly, he'd have won hands down.
• Evil Is Hammy:
  • Gilt. "I haven't finished... SOARING!" He even stands up and spreads his cape. His minion laughs in a lampshade.
  • Mr. Gryle, when gloating to Lipwig. Right before his comeuppance.
• Evil Gloating: Mr. Gryle, along with "Time to shut up shop, Postmaster!" and "The Dearheart boy screamed like a pig! SCREAMED LIKE A PIG!!"
• Forced to Watch: Lipwig's dreams involve the letters forcing him to watch the consequences of his actions portrayed as silent movies, complete in some cases with dialogue cards.
• Good Feels Good: Played straight (in Lipwig's part) for most of the time, but subverted in a dialogue of Moist and Mr. Pump.
  Pump: How does it feel to make someone's life better, Mr. Lipwig?
  Moist: Unusual.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: The adaptation makers couldn't erase Adora's cigarette addiction, but they did give it a backstory: she took up the habit because of the stress brought on by losing her job and seeing her family ruined. This is a touch Anvilicious, as there weren't any Drugs Are Bad implications attached to Adora's smoking in the original book.
• Hot Scoop: Sacharissa, very much so.
• I Can Explain: But Adora didn't give him a chance.
• It's Not You, It's Me: Moist to Adora. Quite appropriately, she replies, "Oh! Cliches, as well, now I really am insulted."
• Kill It with Fire: How Mr. Gryle dies, combined with the power of letters from the post office.
• Large Ham:
  • Gilt. Boy howdy, Reacher Gilt. Not that we expected anything else. And he's played by David Suchet!
  • Also, in a very sharp change from the tight-lipped version in the novel, Mr. Gryle.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The fact that Lipwig had to face the consequences of his own crime which indirectly had caused ruining Adora's family and the death of her father is quite a sharp example.
• Looks Like Orlok: Mr. Gryle.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Mr. Pony turns over the evidence to bring down Reacher Gilt after the latter almost throws his niece off a clacks tower.
• Out-of-Character Moment:
  • Seeing Angua referring to anyone as "lunch" and changing in public (as she's seen doing in the trailer) is very jarring compared to her representation in the books, where she's a vegetarian who hates the impulses brought on by being a werewolf, and the only time she makes a corny joke about it was Self-Deprecation. The books also state that changing in public is considered highly impolite in were society, to the point where she doesn't even let her lover Carrot see her while she's changing shapes. While the watch having a Werewolf is common knowledge, the fact that the werewolf is Angua (and not Nobby) is not. Also, given that her clothes don't transform with her, she just stripped naked in the middle of a tavern to make a point, something the Watch goes to great pains to avoid in the books.
  • Also Mustrum Ridcully talking about the nature of words. The Ridcully seen in the books and, indeed, the other adaptations, is a big, hearty man who bellows in almost every situation and uses phrases like "damn silly fool". The Ridcully in this version stays soft-spoken and talks like a professor. This is because he's serving the role of Professor Pelc, which raises the question of why they didn't just call the character Professor Pelc.
  • Vetinari maintains a largely hands-off approach to Moist in the book; he only interacts with him when he has a point to make, or when he feels like pulling an I Know You Know I Know. In the adaptation, Vetinari has Moist arrested a second time after he "finds" his old stash for no obvious reason, and threatens to have Moist hung if he loses the bet with the Clacks. This is a far cry from the books Vetinari, who generally only has people killed for good reasons and would never throw away a competent, tightly-leashed underling like Moist over a mostly-meaningless bet. Making this even more egregious is that it happens after Moist has rejuvenated the Post Office and begun causing the Clacks serious problems, making Vetinari's explanation of Moist having outlived his usefulness fall flat.
• The Power of Love: In his second last words, Moist preaches about it. And about Love Redeems, too.
  Lipwig: The man who has never known love has never really lived. But worst is the man who avoids love. Because the man who runs from love and all its trials and tribulations, that man is just conning himself, swindling himself out of true... happiness.
• Paperworkaholic: Crispin Horsefry. In the book, he's just a somewhat dim member of Gilt's club of rich hangers-on, who tries to soothe his conscience about the whole "embezzling money and running the company into the ground" thing by keeping records of what money they stole, so that once they have enough they can put it back and it'd be like there wasn't any crime at all. In the TV film he's obsessed with balancing numbers, to the point that he keeps detailed notes of his company's illegal deals. When Gilt finds out about this, he's so incensed he kills him and tries to burn the records. Nevertheless, the books are rescued and used to oust the corrupt board members.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Gryle (and Lipwig in return) tried to make this, but it didn't work for either of them.
  Gryle: You know what they say?... Hear the cry of a banshee... and die! [attacks Moist]
  Lipwig: Actually, it's "banshee cries, somebody dies". [stabs him] Today, it's you!
• Prophet Eyes: Moist fakes this with turtle egg shells.
• Related in the Adaptation: Mr Pony is the grandfather of Princess.
• Rule of Three: Lipwig has three "dreams" about the effects of his past crime deeds, not only because it is a magic number, but as a Shout-Out to A Christmas Carol (stated by the director's commentary).
• Shout-Out: As the director's commentary says, the nice old lady with a clackgram in the beginning of the film is an allusion to The Ladykillers.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Adora Belle and Lipwig have a bit more of a... combative relationship in this adaptation.
• Slasher Smile: Stanley, at the beginning.
• Smug Snake: In contrast to the book's polished Magnificent Bastard, the Reacher Gilt of the adaptation is pale, greasy and charisma-free (as well as losing his "con artist with vision" angle for a straight Corrupt Corporate Executive role). This has the side effect of making him a much less intelligent villain; in the original he knew full well his policies would drive the business into the ground and stood to make a fortune by doing so, but in this version it would ruin him.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Subverted: Horsefry lasts longer than he does in the book, outliving Mr Gryle, who killed him in the original. Then, Reacher Gilt realises that Horsefry has recorded all the assassinations in his accounts books (since Gilt had to pay Mr Gryle for each assassination). Gilt then beats Horsefry to death with his cane and disposes of the body.
• The Stinger: After the long end-credits have rolled. Groat and Stanley return sore and exhausted after their round-trip to Uberwald in the mail coach, but elated because they bet all their money on Moist to win the race at 50-1. Then they suddenly realise they've left the betting slip back in Uberwald...
• Three... Two... One...: As in the book, Moist finds out the missing letters of the sign outside the Post Office headquarters ended up on the sign of a hairdresser salon labeled "HUGOS", without the apostrophe. When the employee refuses to let him talk to Mr. Hugo, he leaves the message that he'd hope to avoid it, but they might get in trouble with Lord Vetinari. As Moist exits, he's counting to three before being anxiously called back.
• Too Dumb to Live: Gilt accuses Horsefry of being this before beating him to death for recording the assassinations in his ledger.
• Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: In the miniseries based on the book, Moist discovers that one of his large-scale cons caused the ruin of his beloved Adora's family. He is so struck with guilt and remorse that, when he meets Adora in a restaurant, he admits he can't think about food.
• Tricked to Death: Lord Vetinari offers (at different times) to let both Moist Von Lipwig and Reacher Gilt the opportunity to leave through a specific door, promising them "freedom" if they do. Moist is genre-savvy enough to suspect a trap and refuse. Reacher is strongly implied to have chosen death rather than work for Vetinari.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: When Moist introduces himself, Adora remarks that his name is unusual and asks if his parents were "stupid" or "cruel".
• You Have Failed Me: Inverted. Horsefry is beaten to death by his boss for doing his job too well, in a rare moment of competence.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Vetinari says this to Moist before the big race. That's why he added the "if you lose then you will be hanged" condition.

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