Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably-Priced Love and a Hard-Boiled Egg

[cosmolinguist]

An overlapping but different (and seemingly more numerous) kind of nerdy person will tell you that today, May 25, is Towel Day.

Which is all well and good, but I find myself humming "how do they rise up..." instead.

Comments

[haggis.livejournal.com]

Do you know what the tune is supposed to be? I get the reference but don't know how it should sound.

[cosmolinguist]

I don't even know if there is a tune (though I'm sure fandom has provided one). But I have the audiobook of ‎Night Watch‎ and when Stephen Briggs, the guy reading it, gets to the part of the book with the song in, he sort of mutters it along to a little tune, and that's how I hear it in my head now.

[newandrewhickey.livejournal.com]

According to http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=43673 -- which is actually where Pratchett checked to make sure the song wasn't in copyright, it's to the tune of Ach De Lieber Augustine, which if you don't know it from the name is a folk tune that has all sorts of words attached to it. In my primary school, the tune was sung with the words "Charlie had a pigeon", and it was also used for the Grunhaller lager adverts in the 80s, if that helps you place it. It's the kind of tune people stick football chants to without knowing where it comes from.
That said, the scansion in Pratchett's version is slightly different than the lyrics they have there, and I always hear it in my head in march time, rather than the waltz time of the melody.