Well, okay. Did you already know it was a common breed (brand, model, whatever) of car in Britain around the time the books came out? (See, Adams says Ford got confused about the most important species on our planet, something like that. Hee! Yeah. Not his most subtle, but a little linguistic confusion made it seem esoteric indeed.) It's like an alien character going to live undercover in modern America and naming himself Toyota Corolla.
And people had varying reactions to this name joke, as I understand it:
Brits from around that time period got the joke. "Ha-ha," they probably said.
People who read the book in translation (in some languages, anyway) also got the joke, as it was translated into (I think) Ford Escort for them. I imagine they said whatever their local version of "ha-ha" was.
Your average American person assumed it was some Anglo-Mutant spelling of perfect and soldiered on; they probably also said "ha-ha," but in the wrong places.
British people from the post-Ford Prefect era either got the joke or didn't, depending on how much they knew about old American imports.
And proto-TFV assumed it was a joke about, you know, prefects. (This was before J.K. Rowling made the term common knowledge, but I'd read all the Wodehouse school stories, not to mention like 75% of the children's books written in the UK between 1875 and 1950, so I knew from prefects.) I thought Adams was saying that children were the dominant species on earth, and that the Ford part referred to some school in the UK.
And if you already knew all that, I bet that was the dullest explanation ever.
But, anyway, many years after my first encounter with the Hitchhiker's books, I first read about the Ford Prefect (the car). And I suddenly got the joke, violently and about a decade too late.
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And people had varying reactions to this name joke, as I understand it:
- Brits from around that time period got the joke. "Ha-ha," they probably said.
- People who read the book in translation (in some languages, anyway) also got the joke, as it was translated into (I think) Ford Escort for them. I imagine they said whatever their local version of "ha-ha" was.
- Your average American person assumed it was some Anglo-Mutant spelling of perfect and soldiered on; they probably also said "ha-ha," but in the wrong places.
- British people from the post-Ford Prefect era either got the joke or didn't, depending on how much they knew about old American imports.
- And proto-TFV assumed it was a joke about, you know, prefects. (This was before J.K. Rowling made the term common knowledge, but I'd read all the Wodehouse school stories, not to mention like 75% of the children's books written in the UK between 1875 and 1950, so I knew from prefects.) I thought Adams was saying that children were the dominant species on earth, and that the Ford part referred to some school in the UK.
And if you already knew all that, I bet that was the dullest explanation ever.But, anyway, many years after my first encounter with the Hitchhiker's books, I first read about the Ford Prefect (the car). And I suddenly got the joke, violently and about a decade too late.