Knurd

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, knurd is the opposite of drunk, as opposed to the median state of sobriety.

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It is a state achieved through excessive use of Klatchian coffee. When knurd, you see life as it really is, for the first time in your life. Few live through the experience without going insane.

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Knurdness is the opposite of being drunk; it is as sober as you can ever be. It strips away all the illusion, all the comforting pink fog in which people normally spend their lives, and lets them see and think clearly for the first time ever. This, needless to say, is a very traumatic experience. Those seeking to treat drunkenness by having the sufferer drink Klatchian coffee should take care, lest they send him too far the other way - Through sobriety and out the other side.

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"There the men in taverns drink coffee laced with desert orakh. This drink (made from cacti sap and scorpion venom) is one of the most virulent alcoholic beverages in the universe. But the nomads do not drink it for its intoxicating powers, but to mitigate the effect of Klatchian coffee. It made you knurd."

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Also, Samuel Vimes, one of the Discworld's most notable characters, is sometimes referred to as being constantly knurd and two drinks short of actual sobriety, which at least partially accounts for his depressive nature and tendency towards alcoholism—he started out looking for a cure to knurdness.

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Knurd is also said to be one of the origins of the word nerd.

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Terry Pratchett: Terence David John Pratchett OBE (known to some fans as Pterry, following the convention he used in his book Pyramids where characters were given names such as Ptraci and Pteppic) is an English fantasy author (born April 28, 1948, in Beaconsfield, Bucks), best known for his Discworld series. As of M...

Discworld: :Diskworld, spelled with a "k", was a disk magazine for the Apple Macintosh, later renamed Softdisk for Mac....

Drunk: REDIRECT Alcohol intoxication...