1 From A Child's First Book of T'sel, by Brother Banh Dys-T'saben.
2 Words marked with a star are defined and talked about in the glossary volume.
3 The Standard year is divided into ten decimi, or "deks."
4 The Standard clock is divided into twenty hours of one hundred minutes each. Thus 13.20 is midafternoon.
5 The first known emperor, Amberus, had had public and private libraries and collections destroyed wholesale. Government and other computer banks, archives, and paper files had been ruthlessly culled of everything earlier except Standard Technical material and very limited current administrative records, on the psychotic consideration that all events prior to his reign were not only irrelevant but an insult. Writing or telling about history became a capital crime, and historians were executed wholesale. While there were numerous efforts to secret historical materials, over the course of his twenty-seven-year reign, and with considerable use of bounties and informers, these were generally rooted out. Only fragmentary materials have been recovered.
6 The Standard twenty-hour day, with its hundred-minute hours, are used throughout the Confederation, the unit lengths varying according to the planetary diurnal cycles.
7 For torvard, sergeant in Standard.
8 Half past five by the hundred-minute clock.