Dedication
- For Caspian, who might really be Sirius
- Caspian was DWJ's dog, at the time of writing.
1
- The Dog Star
- Another name for Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major (which means "Greater Dog")
- The green light of his fury
- The name Sirius means "scorching". It's by far the brightest star in the night sky. Throughout this story, Sirius is said to be green. In fact it's blue-white; we see it as green (as well as other colours) because of the atmosphere between us. There are no green stars, because their heat depends on their temperature-- blue-white at their hottest, then passing through red to black
- the assembled luminaries
- a neat pun: "luminary" is both a word for something that physically gives light and a respectful way to refer to a wise person
- roof-trees
- a roof-tree is a wooden beam that runs along the highest part of a roof, to which the rafters connect. Also called a ridgepole
- Castor complex
- Castor was once thought to be a single star. We now know that it's six separate stars kept by gravity in a complicated dance around one another
- Antares
- brightest star in the constellation Scorpius; fifteenth-brightest overall
- Betelgeuse
- a huge red star, the brightest in the constellation Orion; tenth-brightest overall
- Sirius saw his Companion
- again, Sirius was once thought to be a single star. Astronomers discovered in the 1800s that it's a pair of stars, the very bright Sirius A, and the much smaller Sirius B
- Not to speak of the nova sphere
- a nova is the explosion caused by the collision of a pair of orbiting stars. Possibly DWJ was thinking of a supernova, which is an explosion at the end of a star's life? (I don't know enough to be sure.) There doesn't seem to have been a notable nova in Orion around the time this book was written
- Polaris
- called the North Star: although this is only the forty-eighth brightest star in the sky, it's particularly famous because it's almost exactly the point around which the stars appear to turn
- Being a Cephid, he had a slight stammer
- Cephid stars, such as Polaris, vary rapidly in their brightness and size: Polaris brightens and dims every four days
- turned upside down
- to check his genitals; if he was female they could have kept him to breed from, but breeders have much less need of male dogs
- That’s the sixth beastly dog in this litter. To one bitch
- "dog" is specifically a male dog, and "bitch" is a female dog-- it's not an insult in this context. The use of these particular words, rather than just saying something like "male" and "female", marks the speaker as someone who spends a lot of time around dogs
- Your bitch must have got out somehow
- these people are dog breeders. They keep Bess in order to breed puppies of a particular breed. When Bess got out, she mated with a dog who wasn't a purebred, meaning that her puppies are also not purebreds and the breeders won't be able to sell them for much
- Got that sack, Brian? … Brick too
- they are planning to drown the puppies, by putting them in the sack, tying it to a brick, and dropping it into a body of water. Feeding them would cost more than they could sell the puppies for
- "Oh, eughky! There’s a dead puppy in the rushes!”
- "eughky" is an idiosyncratic way of spelling "yucky". Rushes are any of many species of grassy plant that grow beside rivers
- a third voice, gentle and lilting
- This introduces Kathleen by marking her voice out as different-- her accent is Irish. Lilting means a sing-song way of speaking
- An Irish rat. Shamus O'Rat
- here we're getting into the anti-Irish prejudice that forms an important theme of this book: Basil tries to keep Kathleen in her place by mocking her regularly for being Irish. "Shamus" represents the English pronunciation of the name "Séamus", the Irish form of James. "O'Rat" is his attempt to make an Irish-sounding name out of "Rat": "O'" is a prefix meaning "son of" (from "óg", young)
2
- Get out, Tibbles. Buzz off, Romulus and Remus
- Romulus and Remus are twin cats, named after the legendary twins who founded Rome. Tibbles is a traditional name for a cat: I'm not sure where it comes from. The earliest usage I can find is from 1896. "Buzz off" is a curt way to tell someone to leave
- Dogs don't have green eyes
- a few do, but it's very rare
- I think lions have yellow eyes
- lions' eyes are tawny, a light yellow-brown
- Sirius was sick
- vomited
- He cowered in the corner of the fender
- a fender is a raised border around a fireplace, to stop the ashes being swept into the room
- without so much as a by your leave
- without so much as asking permission
- drown it in the water-butt
- a water-butt is a tank to store rainwater, so you can use it to water the garden later
- buy it a licence and walk it and house-training
- you needed a licence to keep a dog between 1878 and 1988 in England. House-training is teaching it to excrete outside
- a little sloven like you
- a sloven is someone who's careless and untidy. It seems an old-fashioned word now, but I don't know whether it was at the time
- Wet drops fell on his head
- Kathleen is crying
- but the cloth on Kathleen's was old and frayed
- the adults don't spend much money on Kathleen
- left a puddle
- urinated
- It was soft, with a lilt in it which none of the others had
- as mentioned above, Kathleen's Irish accent marks her as "other"
- "Wolf's eyes," said Basil
- but they usually have yellow eyes
- "A Great Dane perhaps?"
- one of the largest kinds of dog in the world
- under the sideboard
- a set of side cupboards (called a buffet in North America)
- Tibbles should sit on Kathleen's knee only over his dead body
- only if he could do nothing about it
- see himself in the long mirror
- on the inside of the wardrobe door
- Sirius did not make the mistake of thinking it was another dog
- a standard test of animal intelligence is to show them a mirror and see whether they realise they see their own reflection, not another animal
- He's eaten the telephone wire now!
- the curly cable connecting the phone to the wall socket. The voltages in these cables are very low, so he wasn't in danger of electrocuting himself
- wrapped black sticky tape round the telephone wire
- insulating tape to replace the chewed cable sleeve. The cables were usually black, so this would also help to hide the damage
- There was a red jingly strap
- his collar. I think it was jingly because of the ring to attach it to the leash, rather than because it had a bell on it like a cat's
- Something seemed to be pulling his neck
- Kathleen has attached the leash to his collar
3
- dustbin
- a domestic rubbish bin. Today this would be a plastic wheelie bin. They were made of steel at the time
- goluptious
- magnificent
- black-legged and stinking
- from the muddy banks of the river
- packed into a noise that went "ork"
- accents in southern England, like Basil's, are non-rhotic— they drop the "r" sound after a vowel, so "walk" does end with "ork". Presumably Kathleen is from a non-rhotic part of Ireland; the only one I know of is Dublin
- he could not use his paws as they did
- partly because cats can retract their claws
- flipped his nose
- flicked a finger to hit him on the nose, which is painful for a dog
4
Under construction...
Thanks
Researched and written up by Marnanel, with invaluable help from the list. More thanks will appear here when we're done.
