“Ah, hello, Number Two,” said the Captain, waving a cheery sponge, “having a nice day?”
Number Two snapped even further to attention than he already was.
“I have brought you the prisoners I located in freezer bay seven, sir!” he yapped.
Ford and Arthur coughed in confusion.
“Er… hello,” they said.
The Captain beamed at them. So Number Two had really found some prisoners. Well, good for him, thought the Captain, nice to see a chap doing what he’s best at.
“Oh, hello there,” he said to them, “Excuse me not getting up, having a quick bath. Well, jynnan tonnyx all round then. Look in the fridge Number one.”
“Certainly sir.”
It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian “chinanto/mnigs” which is ordinary water server at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan “tzjin-anthony-ks” which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.
Number Two stood before the Captain’s bathtub trembling with frustration.
“Don’t you want to interrogate the prisoners sir?” he squealed.
The Captain peered at him in bemusement.
“Why on Golgafrincham should I want to do that?” he asked.
“To get information out of them, sir! To find out why they came here!”
“Oh no, no, no,” said the Captain, “I expect they just dropped in for a quick jynnan tonnyx, don’t you?”
“But sir, they’re my prisoners! I must interrogate them!”
The Captain looked at them doubtfully.