Hamish X and the Hollow Mountain (31 page)

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   Wow, what a lot of footnotes on these two pages! Crazy!

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   Irony is a difficult concept. Irony occurs when something appears as if it should be one way but is actually the opposite. Candy and Sweet don't like candy and sweets. Ironic. Other examples: a bald man winning a year's supply of hair cream. Or a man with no head winning a free hat. (Although, a man with no head has bigger problems to worry about than having a free hat and nowhere to put it. Life without a head is a challenge at the best of times.)

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   The expression “wash behind your ears” comes from the steppes of Russia, where peasants were forced to scrape soil out from behind their ears. The peasants were so poor that they would try to steal dirt, one earload at a time, from the farms they worked on in hopes of one day accumulating enough soil to start a farm of their own.

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   Maybe this was a holdover from the raccoon mind that the George/Raccoon bots were based on. Raccoons are very careful to clean their food before eating it. Some have even been rumoured to brush their teeth between meals, but this has never been documented.

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   Highland society is divided into “clans,” or extended family groups. Each clan has a tartan pattern so that people can recognize other family members in the middle of a battle. As more and more clans developed tartans the process of identification became increasingly difficult, until entire battles had to be halted while people sorted out who they were supposed to be chopping. This led to war being abandoned in Scotland. Instead, people discuss their tartans. Much less dangerous and far more interesting.

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   Mrs. Francis does have a point.

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   A chimichanga is a Mexican food consisting of yummy spicy fillings sandwiched between two tortillas and then deep-fried to a delicious crispiness. I truly love them, but this really isn't the time to be discussing Mexican food. Return to the story immediately.

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Etiquette
is another word for “manners.” It is shortened from the French words
être une racquette
. Literally translated, this means “to be a racquet.” Tennis was so important to the Kings of Renaissance France that King Louis the Thirteenth dressed his entire court as tennis racquets. Appearing this way in public was deemed to be the height of fashion and grace. The hopeful dressed as tennis racquets and hung around, hoping the King would notice them. For some reason, the term came to be synonymous with politeness. Words are weird. The word
synonymous
is worth a whole footnote on its own but I don't have time right now. Get a dictionary.