Hello & welcome! You'll find my masterlist & snacks in here...

Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to my Tumblr thing. I write meta analyzing Good Omens with a special emphasis on its use of language. On this blog, we've also been decoding Crowley & Aziraphale's etymology-based hidden language, which we've dubbed Ineffable Husbands Speak, for a little while now. You'll find a compendium of posts related to that, as well as other theories and analysis, below the cut.

In this post, you'll find my meta masterlist. You can go to my original welcome post here to read more about the content of my blog. This post contains links to meta on language and characters. You can find story analysis meta here, theories here, and silly stuff over here. 💕

To Buy (or Have Bought) The Farm

American idiom; exact origins unknown but known to date back to the pre-Industrial Revolution times. In modern times, a general euphemism for dying (similar to "to kick the bucket") but it evolved into that from being a reference to the death of a soldier in an armed conflict.

While the idiom was used in reference to a soldier's death, it actually describes that death in terms of the action it might trigger-- the ability of the soldier's family to use the life insurance payout to gain some autonomy and independence by being able to have a more secure livelihood through ownership, like through buying a family farm.

When Crowley miscalculated his miracle in upset over Morag being shot and sent the grave guards to Hell, he knew it would likely only be a matter of time before Hell figured it out and came after him. He thought that, if they did, he might not survive it.

He kept that information to himself in hopes that maybe he'd get away with the mistake and in order to have some time with Aziraphale without him worried about it. During this time, they were helping Elspeth and had, ironically, earlier talked about farming as an occupation.

Quietly thinking that he might be about to buy the farm himself, Crowley gave Elspeth the equivalent to coming into some family money that she would not otherwise have. He told her not to dare try to buy the farm herself again-- just to buy a literal farm and some safety with their money.

Still love how Furfur's photo caught them sneaking a quick moment of holding hands in plain sight.

Hi there! 💕Thank you. Oh, yeah, I got you. 😉 Opinions galore on the drake scenes below. *passes the box of chocolates*

A drake, as we know, is a male duck, but the word also can refer to a serpent, a dragon, or a sea monster. So, visually, in front of our word-nerdy Crowley and Aziraphale in this scene? There's this duck-- this water-dwelling bird-- that is very, very Crowley, right?

And this Crowley-esque duck? What's happening to him in the scene? He's getting fed some bread by Aziraphale, yes?

Bread is bread, yes, but, in an amusing bit of Nightingales blasphemy here, bread is also a word that has also been used to mean all food collectively since that was first coined in the "give us this day our daily bread" bit of 'The Lord's Prayer.' And what's very obviously food in Crowley and Aziraphale's Nightingales speak, as many scenes, including Job's cellar and The Ritz, have shown us? Sex. One of the oldest euphemisms in history and Crowley and Aziraphale basically unintentionally started it with the whole Eve and the apple bit. So, anyway...

Bread is food and food is sex. So, bread (and all its built-in rising dough jokes) is a sex partner or a bit of sex. The bordello owner Mrs. Sandwich... Aziraphale "baking" four different kinds of sourdough loaf during the first days of Covid lockdown... "And the brioche..." in 1793... The Russian cultural attache's black bread was particularly sought after by the more discerning duck... and so on.

So, in the drake scene, Aziraphale tosses some literal bread to the Crowley-esque duck. Crowley, flirting, has the-drake-that-is-like-him respond the way Crowley himself feels like doing whenever Aziraphale feeds him any euphemistic bread.

The drake pecks at the bread, as ducks and birds do. A joke on Aziraphale's hilarious choice of the bird-originating peckish in 1793 as euphemistic for horny-- and, also, the fact that a peck is a kiss. Birds and ducks both eat and kiss with pecking movements so the-drake-that-is-Crowley happily consumes some of Aziraphale's bread. Then what?

Crowley then has the drake respond to the bread consumption by squawking-- the duck version of crying out-- and dying. Imitative of orgasm-- literal death as "the little death." This post has more examples of Crowley and Aziraphale using sex-and-death metaphors in other scenes. They are all more verbal innuendo, though, while, in this scene, Crowley's temporarily literally killed the drake in the process of this flirtation.

This is why Mr. Brown of Brown's World of Carpets never stood a chance, you know. Shockingly, it has never once occurred to him to flirt with Aziraphale by finding a suitably wordplay-funny visual pun of a duck and then temporarily murdering it. Lacks a certain panache, Mr. Vacuum does. 😂 Unlike Crowley, who is just like...

See that duck over there that's just like me? Its heart just gave out, as mine still does after all these millenniums, at but the smallest morsels of your bread, my love.

Aziraphale's reply is a dry: "Really, my dear, was that necessary?"

Must you kill the poor waterfowl with your punny professions of love, Crowley?! Not that I don't completely love this but please undead the duck.

In the script, Crowley was to respond just with "Sorry." and bring the drake back to happy duck life. This scene, as you mentioned, is taken from a similar one in the book, though, and there's a little more there we should look at, too. In the novel, it goes like this:

Aziraphale tossed a crust to a scruffy-looking drake, which caught it and sank immediately.

The angel turned to Crowley.

"Really, my dear," he murmured.

"Sorry," said Crowley. "I was forgetting myself."

The duck bobbed angrily to the surface.

If you recall, when Crowley is described earlier in the novel, the paragraph includes this line:

And, whenever he forgot himself, he had a tendency to hiss.

Forgetting oneself can mean to act out in strong emotion-- and we have seen Crowley hiss a little when upset or overwhelmed in the tv series. Its chief meaning, though, is just to lose composure and self-control... which also can apply to a certain, other kind of situation where one might do that. Adding to that more innuendo-laden meaning, it also has a connotation of becoming deeply engrossed in something.

So, the scene with the drake in the book is then calling back to the "and, whenever he forgot himself, he had a tendency to hiss" line describing Crowley earlier in the novel. It underlines the innuendo by having Crowley say that he was "forgetting himself"-- on the surface, sounding like was lost in thought, but really referring to the joke that he, as the drake, was "forgetting himself"-- having an orgasm-- when the drake cried out and dropped dead from the ecstasy of consuming Aziraphale's bread. It makes one level of "when he forgot himself" being about when he comes, and then says that Crowley has "a tendency to hiss" when he does.

That "I was forgetting myself" line in the drake scene was likely dropped between the book and the script book because it existed in the book to call back to the earlier, written description of Crowley. That description was (as best as I can remember right now) the only other time it appeared in the novel. Skipping it in the tv series wouldn't have really impacted anything while having it in there might have been potentially confusing to those who hadn't read the book.

If you ask me why I think the drake scene never made it past the earlier draft of the script, though? I think it's likely because, if this scene had existed in the 1.01 St. James' Park scene? Or anywhere in S1, really? One of the biggest questions from S1 would have been why did Crowley kill the duck and bring it back to life? The audience would have figured it all out in big numbers from the start because more people would have been talking about it and, once you see it? It becomes pretty impossible not to see that they're lovers.

It's the fact that it's Book Omens and one of the more overlooked cut bits of the script that have caused it to fly under the radar. I think that cutting it from the tv series made sure that there was still plenty of bread-and-ducks-themed Nightingales in the scene without Crowley's romantic (?) temporary duck slaughter making it too clear to the tv audience too soon what those things are all about.

Adam & The Final 15

The Voice of God says that the day our history begins-- the day it all ends and a new beginning starts-- is the day of the specific horoscope for Libra in The Tadfield Advertiser that she read to us, right? And it's not just any day with this recycled horoscope, as we're shown a visual of what this particular, very specific issue of the paper looks like.

It's the day the paper looks like this:

Notice something significant about those headlines? All three of them are negative articles about Tadfield. This proves something pretty interesting, which is that the day our history begins was not any day we saw in S1 because this newspaper is not from S1. It can't be.

It definitely could be right where we left off in S2, though...