Distinction Without A Difference / Literature

Distinctions Without a Difference in Literature.

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• Angel in the Whirlwind: Lampshaded. Of course the Theocracy doesn't persecute other religions, they allow total religious freedom! ... Except its tax policy is heavily slanted in favor of the One True Faith, and their standard practices upon conquering a planet include the destruction of native places of worship and summary execution of any religious leaders.
• Animorphs has Ax retort that he did not fall asleep in class, as has been insinuated, he just became calm and restful and not completely alert.
  Rachel: Did you snore when you got all calm and restful and not completely alert?
• Artemis Fowl:
  • Averted in the first book, when Mulch curses his rotten luck at falling into the hands of a goblin gang. The leader replies that "It ain't got nothing to do with luck. Fortune delivered you into my hands." This establishes goblins as having mystical influence over their own future.
  • Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception: Inverted when Trouble Kelp orders his troops to "retreat". The narration points out the troops' disbelief; whether it's called a retreat or a tactical withdrawal, they're still running away.
• The Belgariad has a lot of fun with this, particularly regarding nautical terms. Land-based characters are frequently called out on their use of "tip over" instead of "capsize", "right" instead of "starboard", and "boat" instead of "ship".
• In Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr series novel, Burglars Can't Be Choosers, Ellie claims to be David Merrick's secretary over the phone to get some important information from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
  Bernie: I thought you never lie.
  Ellie: I occasionally tell an expeditious untruth.
  Bernie: How does that differ from a barefaced lie?
  Ellie: It's a subtle distinction.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The Oompa-Loompas' song about Augustus Gloop: they assured that he won't be harmed, merely "altered". As the song goes on to make clear, "altered" includes being sliced up with knives and boiled.
• Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM, has an interesting take on this. Usually the reword puts someone in a better light. He, on the other hand, spends hundreds of pages explaining in detail how he is not a hero, that he doesn't charge the enemy, he's really retreating through them, and all those acts that looked like selfless heroism were just him trying to save his sorry hide in a way that just so happened to save a lot of people in the process.
• Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.: When Thunder Dick's cat complains that Dick neutered him, Dick protests that this is untrue: he had a vet do the neutering because the instructions were too complicated for him to do it himself.
• The Dark Profit Saga: Heraldin Strummons very much insists that he was not a thief. Nope, he used to be an acquisition specialist or an improvisational locksmith. He explains that if a certain Benny the Hookhand learns that he is still in the thievery business, things wouldn't end well for Heraldin.
• Discworld:
  • Sam Vimes: "I was a drunk. You have to be richer than I was to be an alcoholic."
  • Granny Weatherwax doesn't get lost. She always knows where she is. It's the rest of the world that has a location problem. This is actually accurate as of Witches Abroad.
  • The author himself said Discworld doesn't have continuity errors, but it does occasionally have alternate pasts. This is not just a clever reinterpretation—attempting to understand the canon timeline is an exercise in futility because the timeline in the Discworld was literally shattered into a billion pieces and glued together bit by bit by a bunch of monks. Twice. And those are just the incidents we know about; it's strongly implied that the History Monks do this all the time. These monks are also constantly shunting time from places with too much to places with too little, so how long things take depends on how long they need to take.
  • The Discworld books have also used the "poor people are mad, rich people are eccentric" line a few times. In the Companion it adds that King Ludwig the Tree (who believed there should be a new kind of frog, and wore his underpants on his head) was "a little confused".
  • The Assassin's Guild are masters of this trope:
    1. Small-a assassins are thugs who kill people for money; capital-A Assassins are refined gentlemen of wealth and breeding who enjoy food, wine, and culture and are occasionally commissioned by other refined gentlemen of wealth and breeding to "remove, for a consideration, any inconvenient razors from the candyfloss of life".
    2. Capital-A Assassins do not "kill" people. They "inhume", "delete", "rub out", or "remove" people, but "killing" implies a certain unprofessionalism.
    3. Capital-A Assassins are never "employed". They are "commissioned", "engaged", "retained", "contracted"^note Of the three, the most valid. There exists a minor but valid distinction under Real Life Employment Law that presumably also applies on the Discworld. There is also the fact that Assassins consider themselves gentlemen, and consider being "employed" the same as "being a servant" which is unworthy.
    • The Assassins' Guild are so insistent on this, they've got regular citizens doing it. In Jingo, when Angua asks Carrot if Snowy Slopes (a deceased criminal) is an assassin, Carrot replies, "No. He just kills people for money."
  • It's not "necromancy", it's "Post-Mortem Communication". Necromancy is a very bad form of magic, done only by evil wizards. Since we are not evil wizards, what we are doing cannot possibly be called necromancy. To make it even better, the main stated reason why the Unseen University has a position for Post-Mortem Communication relies on it being necromancy (it allows UU to claim a monopoly on necromancy and such things done by bad wizards, and enforce it. With fireballs).
  • As the author has asserted, Fourecks is NOT Australia. It just happens to share certain suspicious resemblances.
  • Ankh-Morpork has a low rate of murder but a high rate of suicide. This is because there are many more ways to legally commit suicide in Ankh-Morpork than elsewhere in the Disc. These include calling a dwarf a lawn ornament or a troll a rock, announcing yourself as Ulfric the Unkillable, or walking in the Shades.
  • Unseen University doesn't pay taxes since the Wizards do not believe themselves subject to those laws. However, they do make a voluntary donation to the city which is equal to the amount they would pay in taxes if they were required to pay taxes.
  • In Men at Arms, Colon says only pillocks have shiny breastplates, like Captain Quirke. When it's pointed out Carrot himself has a shiny breastplate, Colon can only reiterate that the distinction is Quirke is a pillock (without saying what, if anything, applies Carrot for non-pillockhood).
  • In The Fifth Elephant, Vimes complains about the diplomatic trip to Uberwald that Vetinari seems to be suggesting he go on (Vimes and diplomacy do not go together well). Vetinari replies that Vimes is right, this is far too important a task to send a mere Commander of the Watch to represent the city for. He's sending the Duke of Ankh-Morpork instead - which is Vimes.
• Doctor Sleep: Dan notes at one point that "AA has no rules, but many unbreakable traditions". A minor character is also described by Dan as only having two emotions: "Angry" and "Severely Pissed-Off".
• The Dresden Files: In Skin Game Murphy asks Harry if they're really panning to rob Hades, Harry replies that he intends to burgle him. Legally speaking robbery involves violence or the threat of violence while burglary is just breaking in and taking things, and in spite of what people assume about him, even Harry would prefer to avoid offering violence to a god. While the distinction would be unimportant or unclear to most people, Murphy, being a police officer, would be well aware of the difference, and considering how powerful Hades is, avoiding direct conflict with him is probably the single most important part of the plan.
• Ender's Game:
  • Graff claims that Ender isn't a killer, he just "wins thoroughly"...by killing his opponents.
  • Similarly, Word of God is that Ender didn't exterminate the Buggers, he "removed their ability to make war" - and it just so happened that he did so by exterminating them. This isn't just sophistry, though: the idea that the morality of an action is determined solely by the motives behind it is prominent throughout the series, to the point that it's at the core of the religion Ender founds.
• In Paul Robinson's In the Matter Of: The Gatekeeper: The Gate Contracts, George Green is asked if he was rude to someone. He pulls a Rules Lawyer and asks for the definition of "rude". His boss hands him an electronic dictionary and discovers he was, so he admits it. Later he tells his boss he was going to say no, he had been "curt" but he discovered it's essentially the same thing, so he said yes, he was rude.
• In Heroics for Beginners, Kevin explains to his girlfriend, the princess of a foreign country, that he's not a spy. It's just that sometimes he sneaks into the rooms of important people, and sometimes reads their documents, and relays any information discovered back to his dad the king. And these endeavours require picking locks and writing in code.
  Kevin: Deserae does the same thing to us. It's expected.
• The Hobbit: When trying to recruit Bilbo Baggins into adventuring with the dwarven party...
  Gloin: You can say Expert Treasure-hunter instead of Burglar if you like. Some of them do. It's all the same to us.
• N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy: The four Physical Gods trapped in enslavement to the Arameri Dynasty are euphemistically called the Enefadeh — they can't be slaves because slavery is illegal. To Yeine, the weasel words are even worse, Adding Insult to Injury by not acknowledging that the injury even happened.
• Lives of the Mayfair Witches: Lasher:
  Mona: I didn't lose my virginity. I obliterated all traces of its existence.
• Becoming involved in the machinations of Contact in Look to Windward, Ziller suggests some of the Minds may be lying and is corrected by a Contact drone in an Expospeak Gag fashion:
  Drone: Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent, and willfully misunderstand with what appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
• Monster Hunter International: In Monster Hunter Legion:
  • The Hunters are fighting a monster that can take your worst fears and make them real. Trip worries about what it might be able to pull from Owen's mind:
    Trip: I mean, come on, you've been to Hell.
    Owen: It wasn't really Hell. It was more of an infinite dimension of eternal suffering populated by awful beings beyond comprehension. Totally different.
  • The sequel contains descriptions of what a Christian like Trip would probably consider Hell (the dimension where Lucifer and the other Fallen Angels were banished after their rebellion against God failed), and it reveals that yes, it is in fact a totally different place from the dimension of the Old Ones that Owen visited, and they don't have much in common beyond the fact that they both suck.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: The second episode is named Princesses Are Never Lost: (Everything Else Is Simply Misplaced), which is just another way of saying that they don't know where they are.
• The Ramayana: Ravana reassures Sita that, of his "great love", he's not going to rape her. Just kill her if she doesn't have sex with him. Interesting that the distinction might be meaningful in Ravana's case. Long ago he raped an apsara (basically, a minor goddess) and consequently was cursed: should he try to rape another woman, he would immediately die. But the curse said nothing about killing or threatening murder...
• The Reckoners Trilogy: Megan teases David about being a nerd throughout Steelheart; in the sequel, Firefight, David's narration frequently states that he's not a nerd, eventually leading to:
  David: I hadn't been a nerd, mind you. I'd just been the type of guy who spent a lot of time by himself, focused entirely on a single consuming interest.
• Sacred Monster: After Jack describes his Casting Couch incident:
  Detective O'Connor: You had sex with George Castelberry!
  Jack: Mostly, George had sex with me.
• The Scarlet Pimpernel: Chauvelin is shocked when Marguerite accuses him of using blackmail to force her to spy on her friends. He'd never do such a thing! He's simply offering her the opportunity to serve her country, and simultaneously prevent her brother from being killed.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Essential Guide to Alien Species: The entry on the Duros includes a passage citing a Duros pilot being highly incensed at being mistaken from a Neimodian (which, as the narration notes, are somewhere between a subspecies and an ethnicity of the Duros) and pointing out crucial differences between the two, such as Duros eyes being "a nice, deep blood-red" (as opposed to the Neimodians' "dark pink") or their skin being "bluish green" (as opposed to "greenish blue").
  • Star Wars: Kenobi: Orrin Gault, deep in debt to Loan Sharks, doesn't want Annileen's money! He just wants to marry her so he can access her account!
• Thursday Next: Acheron Hades, the main villain of the first novel, isn't "mad", despite the fact that he does terrible things for the sake of doing them. No, he's "differently-moraled". And don't you forget it.
• Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell has a nice example:
  "It's not exactly that she's unobservant. It's just that she doesn't always notice what's happening."
• The Trouble With Peace by Joe Abercrombie: King Orso demands to know if the Closed Council are really proposing to deny a man a fair trial (because he's almost certainly guilty, but finding him so would be politically awkward, so the expedient thing to do is just keep him locked up on suspicion, forever). The Council are outraged; they would never deny someone a a trial. They just aren't going to give him one.
• Vorkosigan Saga: The Vor Lords do not pay taxes to the Emperor. They just give him a cut of their district's tax revenue once a year as a birthday present.
• World War Z: T. Sean Collins is a mercenary and calls himself such. He finds the tendency among his colleagues to use euphemisms like "freelance security consultant" to be a hypocritical way of whitewashing their profession.

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