Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom (16 page)

21
. Ineffable means indescribable. But once you have used this word, you have described the thing you are saying you can’t describe, so it
is therefore a pointless term and should probably be removed from all dictionaries. There is really no excuse for using it in a book, in particular a book for children. My reason for using it here
is, frankly, ineffable.

22
. ‘Sporting’, in this context, is a verb. I should make it clear that the shoes Armitage is sporting are not sporting shoes, and
never could be, unless the sport was competitive foot-only balloon bursting, or a how-far-can-you-point-without-using-your-hands contest. Just to make sure there’s no confusion, the point is
that he’s not sporting sporting shoes, he’s sporting non-sporting shoes.

23
. This paragraph breaks the world record for the highest number of uses of the word ‘prance’, previously held by the first
paragraph of
A Prancer’s Guide to Prancing
by Peter Prettyfoot.

24
. A speleologist is somebody who explores caves. Jesse, by the way, was also a claustrophobic, which is somebody who hates confined spaces, so
he would have hated being speleologist almost as much as being a human cannonball, but he still would have preferred it to being a thief.

25
. I have an uncle who collects cacophones. These are Victorian machines for playing cacophonies, which used to be recorded on brass discs
roughly the size of a dinner plate, and are thought to be the loudest hand-powered device ever built. A cacophone looks a bit like a half-straightened-out tuba connected to a pair of bellows, a
crank and a foot pump. They are very hard to find. Even my uncle, president of the International Society of Cacophonists, only has two.

26
. Nobody actually knows what ‘woe betide’ means.

27
. Mathematicians among you may be thinking that a centipede can only scratch a maximum of fifty feet at any given time, since you need one leg
to scratch the other. Not so. An abrasive surface can be used.

28
. To convert that into metric measurements, ‘inches’ here means ‘centimetres’. ‘Centimetres’ however, is
an ugly word, and makes it sound like I have got a tape measure and figured out the exact distance between the noses and feet in question, which I haven’t, so I’m going to stick with
‘inches’. If vagueness (or imperial measurements) annoy you, here is a suggested nose-to-foot distance: 7.3 cm.

29
. Philosophosophising is like philosophising, which is like thinking, only more so. People who are really deep sometimes
philosophosophososphisticise, but only after years of training.

30
. This doesn’t mean there was a group of people playing bingo inside the truck. I just means the key turned and the door swung open.

31
. In fact, Jesse would have been miserable as a fisherman. Yup. You guessed it. Seasickness. He could catch it in a pedalo. Even a deep bath
made him slightly queasy.

32
. Literally flaming. Not as in, ‘I’ve stubbed my flaming toe’, but as in, ‘the Olympics is started with a flaming
torch.’

33
. These people are all geniuses, which is a fancy way of saying they did something nobody else had thought of before, or did something
familiar in a radically new way. There are four novelists, three composers, two scientists, poets, playwrights, film directors and painters; an explorer, a mathematician, a psychoanalyst, an
astronomer, an engineer, a businessman, a philosopher, a footballer, a queen and a sculptor. If you want to know who did what, you can look them up. You could also ask an adult, but you might get a
very long answer, with lots of complaints about who is and isn’t mentioned.

34
. In fact, you don’t need a law degree at all. Unless you want to be a lawyer. And who wants that?

35
. ‘But who is Fizzer?!’ I hear you yell, really quite annoyed now. Then, miraculously, like the sun bursting out from behind a
cloud, all anger vanishes from your voice. ‘Oh, I get it!’ you exclaim, joyously. ‘This is, like, a mystery! A puzzle! There’s no answer! Fizzer is who is he is.
That’s all there is to it. He’s an enigma dog. A conundrum canine. He comes when he comes and he goes when he goes. Wow! That’s so cool! This is just the best book I’ve ever
read!’