Having belatedly caught up with this thread, I offer the following (with suitable apologies to Terry Pratchett!)



It is a well-known fact on the Slipped Disc World that the Fifth Elephant was responsible for the world’s best deep fat mines. Without these valuable reserves the monastical deep-fat friars would have long ago had their chips. A lesser-known fact is that, as a close cousin of the Hairy Mammoth of A’tuin, the Fifth Elephant also bequeathed us our leading reserves of hair. Not just ordinary hair, of course: high quality carbon fibre. With the proliferation of the weird wild wubberyuh (more commonly referred to as the interknot revolution) the demand for endless threads seems… well, endless.

Faced with such demands, leading Swiss scientist Herr Werner Suigeneris mounted an exploratory expedition to scalp fresh supplies at source. Deep in the forests of Awadia he encountered a dwarf, who was distinguished by his extraordinary wig of long, flowing black hair. Werner’s smoky grey eyes lit up at this clue. “Can you show me more of this hair, my little fellow?” he asked.

The longitudinally-challenged one drew himself up to Werner’s knees, and spluttered his reply: “I am not your little fellow… I am the biggest in my family… How dare you offer me such a low insult…”

Werner was quick to apologise having intended no slight. “Sorry, please calm down…” “Down? Down!!” shouted the dwarf. Werner tried again: “I am so sorry, I meant no offence at all…” “TALL?” squealed the dwarf, “are you taking the piss?”

“No, no”, replied Werner hastily. “Ah, look, I have gold to pay for suitable long threads, if you are interested.” And the dwarf’s eyes widened at the glint of his favourite metal. “Why didn’t you say so?” he said, suddenly cheerful. “I’ve got loads of hair – my nearest mine is just over here.”

Werner followed the dwarf into a large cavern. Sure enough the back wall was a hairface – but when Werner sampled it, the filaments were very short fragments. “Yes, very nice”, he said, “but these are too – ah - do you have any, ah, longer hair?”, he asked carefully. “Certainly!” said the dwarf. “I’ll show you my number two mine, over here”.

Following into a deeper cavern, Werner again saw a hairline deposit. Again the threads were too short. “I am sorry,” he said to the dwarf, “I cannot buy this length either.” The dwarf replied: “No problem in the slightest. I have plenty more mines to show you.”

So Werner followed the dwarf into mineshaft after mineshaft until they got to the eighth working. “This is getting more like it!” exclaimed Werner, examining a very long thread. “Is this the best you have available?” The dwarf looked carefully through narrowed eyes, and said: “This is the best I have for sale.” Werner looked at him sharply, saying: “Do you mean you do have some better material?” “Well…” said the dwarf slowly, “I do have some of the best hair ever dug out. But I don’t really want to sell it…”

Werner, with the Swiss nose for a deal, could feel a tension in the air. “OK, OK…. But just show me, out of interest, will you? They say the French stuff is the best on the market”, he added slyly.

“French – pah!” snorted the dwarf derisively. “Come down here and tell me this isn’t the very best hair you’ve ever seen.” He stepped proudly aside at the bottom of the last mineshaft, to reveal to Werner’s incredulous gaze the most apparently endless deposit of hair ever discovered which ran in a lustrous seam about 8.3 metres deep.

He turned back to the dwarf, and said simply “Name your price. I want it ALL, the whole nine yards!”

“Hah!” laughed the dwarf. Then he added the words that passed into dwarf etymology as the first true use of the interrobang, being both a question and an answer:

“You want to buy all of it – Nine Mine hair?!”