Notes

1 The original has Bon et Rebon, the second word being an improvisation implying “re-good” or “good again,” but as George Orwell’s “newspeak” has already co-opted “plusgood” and equipped it with particular connotations, it seemed preferable simply to use “better.”

2 I have left this “translation”—actually a partial anagram—as it appears in the text, save for removing an acute accent from the e, although it is not irrelevant that the French pie-grièche means a shrike, or, figuratively, an ill-tempered woman. The name supposedly rendered in the original language is also compounded out of French terms, grippe meaning influenza or, figuratively, dislike, mort meaning death and boche being an insulting term for a German.  

3 A richarde, in French, is a wealthy woman, but the slang term carries the implication of a resentful sneer.

4 The notional storyteller intrudes at this point to allege that the name in question is a trivial insult that implies someone dirty. An inhabitant of the south of France, however, would know liron as a term borrowed from the Spanish word for dormouse, used colloquially to apply to someone who sleeps a lot—i.e. an idler.

5 The four kinds of supposed elemental spirits are normally rendered in English as gnomes [earth], sylphs [air], salamanders [fire] and undines [water], following terminology popularized by a sixteenth-century Latin document falsely attributed to Paracelsus. French, unlike English or German, splits the terms into masculine and feminine forms: gnome/gnomide; sylphe/sylphide; salamandre/salamandrine and ondin/ondine. Although the present text retains gnomide and sylphe, it conflates elemental spirits, in an idiosyncratic fashion, with the nymphs of ancient Greek mythology, substituting nayade [naiad] for ondine, and also adding hamadryade [a tree spirit] to the schema. 

6 The original, naturally, has crapauds à la crapaudine, the culinary expression referring to items split in two and roasted. “Lardé des aspics” [larded with aspics] is also a pun, linking the conventional culinary meaning of aspic with another, which refers to vipers.