The Truth (Terry David John Pratchett) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги (ч. notes)

Footnotes

1

This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people.

2

The world’s rarest and most evil-smelling vegetable, and consequently much prized by connoisseurs (who seldom prize anything cheap and common). Also a slang name for Ankh-Morpork, although it does not smell as bad as that.

3

Your Brain On Drugs is a terrible sight, but Mr Tulip was living proof of the fact that so was Your Brain on a cocktail of horse liniment, sherbet and powdered water-retention pills.

4

Words resemble fish in that some specialist ones can survive only in a kind of reef, where their curious shapes and usages are protected from the hurly-burly of the open sea. ‘Rumpus’ and ‘fracas’ are found only in certain newspapers (in much the same way that ‘beverages’ are found only in certain menus). They are never used in normal conversation.

5

Which was not hard, as unkind people pointed out.

6

In any case, anyone eating raw steak from an Ankh-Morpork slaughterhouse was embarking on a life of danger and excitement that should satisfy anyone.

7

In many ways William de Worde had quite a graphic imagination.

8

William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it.

9

At this point Bingo had not been introduced to Ankh-Morpork.

10

Those, that is, who weren’t gathered around the harmonium at the Temperance Mission nervously singing songs about how much they liked cocoa.

11

Most dwarfs were still referred to as ‘he’ as well, even when they were getting married. It was generally assumed that somewhere under all that chain mail one of them was female and that both of them knew which one this was. But the whole subject of sex was one that traditionally minded dwarfs did not discuss, perhaps out of modesty, possibly because it didn’t interest them very much and certainly because they took the view that what two dwarfs decided to do together was entirely their own business.

12

The best way to describe Mr Windling would be like this: you are at a meeting. You’d like to be away early. So would everyone else. There really isn’t very much to discuss, anyway. And just as everyone can see Any Other Business coming over the horizon and is already putting their papers neatly together, a voice says, ‘If I can raise a minor matter, Mr Chairman …’ and with a horrible wooden feeling in your stomach you know, now, that the evening will go on for twice as long with much referring back to the minutes of earlier meetings. The man who has just said that, and is now sitting there with a smug smile of dedication to the committee process, is as near Mr Windling as makes no difference. And something that distinguishes the Mr Windlings of the universe is the term ‘in my humble opinion’, which they think adds weight to their statements rather than indicating, in reality, ‘these are the mean little views of someone with the social grace of duckweed’.

13

In other circumstances it would have been as likely as cows singing ‘Let Me Be Covered In Rapturous Gravy’.

14

Classically, very few people have considered that cleanliness is next to godliness, apart from in a very sternly abridged dictionary. A rank loincloth and hair in an advanced state of matted entanglement have generally been the badges of office of prophets whose injunction to disdain earthly things starts with soap.