Terry Pratchett gets it.

From the Wee Free Men, page 5:

"But sometimes her father insisted that there had been Achings (or Akins, or Archens, or Akens, or Akenns - spelling had been optional) mentioned in old documents about the area for hundreds and hundreds of years. They had these hills in their bones, he said, and they'd always been shepherds. Tiffany felt quite proud of this, in an odd way, because it might also be nice to be proud of the fact that your ancestors moved around a bit, too, or occasionally tried new things. But you've got to be proud of something. And for as long as she could remember she'd heard her father, an otherwise quiet, slow man, make the Joke, the one that must have been handed down from Aching to Aching for hundreds of years. He'd say, 'Another day of work and I'm still Aching', or 'I get up Aching and I go to bed Aching', or even 'I'm Aching all over'. They weren't particularly funny after about the third time, but she'd miss it if he didn't say at least one of them every week. They didn't have to be funny, they were father jokes. Anyway, however they were spelled, all her ancestors had been Aching to stay, not Aching to leave."

👍︎ 6
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👤︎ u/Morbanth
📅︎ Oct 31 2013
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