When Cuddy and Detrius are chasing Cruces down Grope Alley, Pratchett mentions that the origin of the name is "fortunately" lost in the mists of time.

Both before and after, the company exhibited all the trademark bureaucracy of an unwieldy monolithic corporation with the associated lack of concern or interest in their clients - the travelling public. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the first place. The 1946 song "Laughing on the Outside (Crying on the Inside)", with music by Bernie Wayne and lyrics by Ben Raleigh was popularized by Dinah Shore, Andy Russell, and Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra (with vocal by Billy Williams). Pratchett is playing with the name of the Swedish pop group Abba, one of whose members was Bjorn Ulvaeus.

A metasyntactic variable is a placeholder name - words that can refer to things or people whose names do not exist, are temporarily forgotten, So in the example given Gaspode has forgotten the proper word for "thingy" and also "wossname" and has used a placeholder to get his message across - in this case something like "clothing has never been a 'condition' of dog 'deportment'. As well as being a play on Detritus' helmet fan and a clockwork soldier being a toy that would be in a child's model army, this is also a reference to the New Model Army. Page 246 - Gaspode says, "There's rats along there that'll make your hair stand on--" Gaspode is a terrier type dog and they were originally bred to catch and kill rats. Page 80 -"'That's three beers, one milk, one molten sulphur on coke with phosphoric acid --'" Phosphoric acid is in fact an ingredient of Coca Cola.

And someone armed and dangerous has been getting ideas about power and destiny and lost kings, committing a string of seemingly random murders across the city. Page 43 - Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler and his 'sausage ina bun" are regular features in all the Discworld novels although he often branches out into other entrepreneurial fields. Lance-constable Angua von Überwald, later in the series promoted to the rank of Sergeant, is introduced in this book.

Page 98 - "that's against nature, in my humble opinion" and Page 99 "One of the thoughts jostling for space was that there was no such thing as a humble opinion. There have been a lot of jokes based on this old euphemism for whiskey in the names of various North American Bluegrass bands; The Soggy Bottom Boys, The Foggy Mountain Boys and the Foggy Hogtown Boys to name a few.

The double entendre relates to the conventional stereotype that both under-sized males as well as black males are 'better-endowed' than white males. Wolves operate this way and the victims of werewolfs in classic movies and tales are described as having their jugulars ripped open. Many imaginative, but incorrect stories have come up over the years, including that cop refers to the police uniform's copper buttons, the police man's copper badge, or that it is an abbreviation for "constable on patrol", "constabulary of police", or "chief of police". It has been hypothesized that Alexander the Great and Ptolemy XIV Philopator were murdered via aconite.Page 2 - Edward d'Eath's name is an obvious play on the word 'Death" but it is in fact an old English name.