And the oldest Clacks operator in the tower (he’s called Grandad - he’s twenty-six) says that so long as the name goes through the Clacks, he stays alive in the semaphore: The name is that of an inventor who tried to start a rival semaphore system and was murdered by the new Clacks company so they could keep their monopoly. She recognizes it as a “GNU” code - a code that means that the message goes ahead to the next tower (G), is not logged (N), and is turned around at the end of the line to go through the entire semaphore system again (U), but the whole message is just GNU and a name, meaning that it’s a name that just goes up and down the line constantly. The point is that halfway through the book, we see a scene set inside one of the Clacks towers, where one young Clacks operator sees a code go through the semaphore again. If you aren’t doing a publishing order read, it’s a great book to check out. It was my sister’s first Discworld book and she quotes it at me constantly. It’s a fantastic Discworld book, by the way. In Going Postal, a new company has bought out the Clacks and is running it at high-speed at all times, even as the operators are dying of the company’s negligence to make ends meet, and the plot of the book is basically about restarting the city’s old postal service to break the company’s monopoly on long-distance communication.
In Going Postal there’s a lot of focus on the Clacks system, a sort of pseudo-telegram system run by people up in boxes on the tops of towers who send messages from one corner of the Discworld to the other by flashing semaphore codes to the next tower in the line. The long version is that it’s a reference to a bit in Going Postal, one of the later Discworld books.
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