656 “Part One… Part Two” (al-juzʾ al-awwal… al-juzʾ al-thānī): according to the translator’s first reading of the text, this statement would indicate a humorously lopsided (709 pages in Part One versus 33 in Part Two in the 1855 edition) division of the work into two parts (see Volume One, xxxi — xxxii); it now seems more likely to him that “Part Two of the work will follow after the author has been stoned and crucified” should be understood to mean “once the critics have had their say.” That the author gave at least half-serious thought to writing a continuation of Leg over Leg is indicated by his earlier statement, “My friendship for you [the Fāriyāq] will not prevent me, should I examine your situation at some later time, from writing another book about you” (4.20.1).
657 The letter that follows is written in Egyptian dialect, an unusual choice at that date (for context, see Davies and Doss, al-ʿĀmmiyyah) and one for which the author gives no explanation; Michael Cooperson suggests that the author may have chosen colloquial to make the point that the addressees (“Shaykh Muḥammad” presumably excepted) were likely to be ignorant of literary Arabic.
658 “Sīdi” etc.: in keeping with the colloquial nature of the letter, titles (Sīdi, etc.) have been given in their colloquial forms; Sīdi means literally “My Master” and Sayyidna “Our Master,” while Ṣirna (“Our Sir”) is a humorous adaptation of “Sir” to Egyptian titling norms.
659 “Sīdi Shaykh Muḥammad, Sayyidna Metropolitan Buṭrus,” etc.: attempts have been made to identify at least some of these persons (see, e.g., al-Maṭwī, Aḥmad, I:80); however, it seems more likely that they represent categories of person, i.e., the Muslim scholar (“Shaykh Muḥammad”), Christian clergymen (“Metropolitan Buṭrus,” etc.), and Europeans of various nationalities. For further examples of “Shaykh Muḥammad” used generically, see Volume Two (2.18.1n272) and 5.2.4 below, and for a similar roll call of European titles, see Volume Three, 3.12.25.
660 “my words aren’t addressed to / cattle, donkeys, lions, and tigers” (kalāmī mā hūsh ʿala l-baqar wi-l-ḥimīr wi-l-usūd wi-l-numūr): Rastegar suggests that “the animals… are perhaps a reference to the orientalists, religious scholars, colonial officials, and others with whom Shidyaq was compelled to work (and who, outside the small exilic Arab population, were the only possible audience for an Arabic text published in Europe)” (Rastegar, Literary Modernity, 118).
661 Long as this list of lists is, it is not complete. To cite but one example, the list of “despicable traits of the dissolute woman” in Volume Three, at 3.19.13, is succeeded in the same paragraph by a brief list of words for types of city streets, followed by another long list of words relating to sexual intercourse, which is itself followed by a brief list of words relating to inappropriate behavior by women; the last three are not listed here. In addition, the semantic range covered in the text is sometimes wider than that suggested by the particular word or words the author has chosen to represent it in this list.
662 “Doublets”: i.e., two-part exclamations such as marḥā marḥā (“Bravo! Bravo!”).
663 “thurtumī [?]”: the meaning of thurtum is “food or condiments left in the dish” (Qāmūs), in which sense it occurs a few lines before this list of vessels (Volume Two, 2.3.5).
664 “a place”: the Arabic text, quoting the Qāmūs, uses the abbreviation 
for 
(mawḍiʿ, “place, locality”).
665 “sukk”: discs made from an aromatic, musk-based substance called rāmik (see Volume Two, 2.16.25n252) that are strung on a string of hemp and left for a year and of which the Qāmūs says “the older they get, the better they smell.”
666 “maḥlab”: a kind of plum (Prunus mahaleb); presumably the stones are what are used.
667 “Alas for Zayd” (wayḥan li-Zayd): the passage cited contains a list of six words meaning “Alas!”; the words “for Zayd” seem to be added to situate the phrases within a spuriously scholastic context, “Zayd” being a name conventionally used in examples by teachers of grammar.
668 “makeup and face paint” (al-khumrah wa-l-ghumrah): the relationship between the two words as used here is ambiguous: the Qāmūs defines khumrah as above and defines ghumrah simply as “saffron,” which is one of the substances listed among those used as makeup in Volume Three, at 3.19.4; to the Lisān, khumrah is a variant of (lughatun fī-) ghumrah.
669 “Things peculiar to women” (ashyāʾun khāṣṣatun bi-l-nisāʾ): in fact, the text refers only to the women of Paris.
670 “Arabic languages” (al-lughāt al-ʿarabiyyah): meaning, perhaps, Arabic in all its literary and dialectal varieties; note the discussion of diversity in Arabic at 5.3.7.
671 In his Grammaire Persane, ou, Principes de l’Iranien Moderne (Imprimerie Nationale, Paris, 1852), Chodźko writes, “L’Europe est depuis longtemps en possession de tout ce qui est nécessaire pour l’étude des langues orientales; elle a des bibliothèques, des écoles et des savants parfaitement en état de les diriger: aussi, sous le rapport de la philologie, de la philosophie et de l’histoire des langues d’Asie, un ustad persan, un muéllim arabe ou un brahmane hindou auraient beaucoup à apprendre de nos professeurs” (p.i).
672 “the chapter on marvels” (faṣl ḥadanbadā): Volume Three, chapter 19.
673 “the letters” (al-rasāʾil): the Grammaire Persane contains a number of letters as exemplars of epistolary style.
674 Q Ṭā Hā 20:106.
675 “and he satisfies himself with the sands of the plain”: in the French (p. 201) Ils se contentent du sable des déserts [sic; the French uses the plural (“they satisfy themselves”)].
676 “Shaykh Muḥammad, Molla Ḥasan, or Üstad Saʿdī”: i.e., from an Arab, a Persian, or a Turkish scholar.
677 Abū l-Ṭayyib: i.e., Abū l-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī; see Glossary.
678 “my sandy shaykh” (ayyuhā l-shaykhu l-ramlī): see 5.3.2n383.
679 Lughat al-aṭyār wa-l-azhār (The Language of the Birds and the Flowers): the Sufi work Kashf al-asrār ʿan ḥikam al-ṭuyūr wa-l-azhār (The Uncovering of the Secrets Concerning the Wise Sayings of the Birds and the Flowers) by ʿIzz al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Salām ibn Aḥmad ibn Ghānim al-Maqdisī (d. 678/1279) was published in Arabic in 1821 along with a translation by Joseph-Héliodore-Sagesse-Virtu Garcin de Tassy (1794–1878) under the French title Les oiseaux et les fleurs: allégories morales (Paris, Imprimerie Royale).
680 “the correspondence of a Jewish broker with an imbecilic merchant” (muḥāwarat simsār yahūdī wa-aḥmaq mina l-tujjār): the reference may be to Louis Jacques Bresnier’s Cours pratique et théorique de langue arabe… accompagné d’un traité du langage arabe usual et de ses divers dialectes en Algérie, Alger, Bastide, 1855 (second edition), which includes (pp. 465, 467) an example of Jewish Arabic in the form of a letter from a Jewish businessman to a cloth merchant. According to Bresnier (p. xi), “Nous publiâmes… en 1846 la première édition de cet ouvrage, que l’insuffisance des resources typographiques nous contraignait à autographier nous-même” and it may be that this was the edition that the author saw. However, the second, more formal, edition was published in Paris in the same year as al-Sāq ʿalā l-sāq and by the same publisher (Benjamin Duprat) and he may have seen it then.