Mostly Harmless
The only entry about Earth in the Guide used to be "Harmless", but Ford Prefect managed to change it a little before getting stuck on Earth. "Mostly Harmless" provoked a very upset reaction from Arthur when heard. (Those two words are not what Ford submitted as a result of his research — merely all that was left after his editors were done with it.) It is the title of the fifth book in the Hitchhiker series. Its popularity is such that it has become the definition of Earth in many standard works of sci-fi reference, like The Star Trek Encyclopedia. Additionally, "Harmless" and "Mostly Harmless" both feature as ranks in the computer game Elite. Also, in World of Warcraft, there is a rifle that fires (mostly) harmless pellets. In the MMORPG RuneScape, there is an island called Mos Le Harmless (Mostly Harmless). Low-scoring players in the multiplayer version of the game Perfect Dark and GoldenEye 007 are awarded with the designation "mostly harmless". In the 2008 edition of the board game Cosmic Encounter, the Human race is given the attribute "Mostly Harmless." In Valve's game, Team Fortress 2, when a strange weapon is received by the player, the rank that it starts with is "mostly harmless."
Read more about this topic: Phrases From The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Famous quotes containing the word harmless:
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We
all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we
are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in
others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we
grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins
the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a
charm to any character, and so our struggle with them
dies away.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)