THE TANTALUS AT THE ASSASSINS' GUILD

 In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, the tantalus (liquor cabinet) at the Assassins' Guild HQ has its decanters labelled in sdrawkcab: Mur, Nig, Trop... The smallest one is labelled Nosiop.

(If you don't get sdrawkcab, read the labels from right to left!)

(A footnote speaks of Discworld nobility also labelling the decanters in their own tantaluses in sdrawkcab, but failing to notice that a butler or footman had drunk up the whisky and replaced it with Eniru! LMFAO!)

This footnote deals with language that excludes, in so far as it uses wordplay and the structure of the page to turn the original censorship on its head. This time the world order which is being rebelled against is social. In Hogfather, Lord Downey, head of the Assassins' Guild, deems it necessary to offer the prospective clients he is meeting a drink:

Downey stood up with some relief and walked over to his large drinks cabinet. His hand hovered over the Guild's ardent and valuable tantalus, with its labelled decanters of Mur, Nig, Trop, and Yksihw.

 'And what would you like to drink?' he said, wondering where the Auditor kept its mouth. His hand hovered for just a moment over the smallest decanter, marked Nosiop. 

We do not drink.

(Footnote: It's a sad and terrible thing that high-born folk really have thought that the servants would be totally fooled if spirits were put into decanters that were cunningly labelled backwards. And also throughout history the more politically conscious butler has taken it on trust, and with rather more justification, that his employers will not notice if the whisky is topped up with Eniru.)

The very dry British humour. Sharing in expensive spirits is traditionally a distinguishing mark of the (male) upper classes, something to do among gentlemen, and the accumulation of adjectives ("ancient and valuable"; "labelled") makes the mythological allusion inherent in the etymology of the noun "tantalus" sound elitist and conceited. The snobbery on display is all the better deflated with the footnote, since reading it implies literally (for the readers' eyes) and metaphorically travelling downwards, from the upstairs world of the masters to the downstairs world of servants (situated in the lower level of a noble's house). The solemn note of the footnote ("it's a sad and terrible thing") seems to be aping the lords' elocution, and as their own trick is directed back at them, the servants can make fun of their masters' naivety and lack of taste. The backwards labelling of the bottles, which disrupts the usual flow of storytelling by making us reconstruct the words, becomes an embodiment of the subtle ways in which power relationships can be upended. Toilet humour (another way to play upon the up/down opposition, since it relates to the lower body) is one of the more obvious manifestations of the anti-elitist tendency of Pratchett's humour: not only is the reader, through the footnote, in on the joke that the butler is playing on his master, but the core of the trick (i.e. mirror-writing) is simple enough for any child to decode.

TV Tropes Hogfather page says:

• Expensive Glass of Crap: In a footnote, it's mentioned that some aristocrats operate under the delusion that labeling the types of expensive alcohol in their bottles backwards will fool servants into not drinking it. It dryly notes that the servants are rarely fooled, and assume with rather more justification that their masters won't notice if the bottles are then topped up with "eniru".

Auf Deutsch (Übersetzung von Andreas Brandhorst)

Witwenmacher stand nicht ohne eine gewisse Erleichterung auf und ging zum alten, kostbaren Getränkeschrank. Dort verharrte seine Hand kurz über den Karaffen, deren Etiketten Aufschriften wie Mur, Nig, Trop und Yksihw trugen.*

»Was möchtet ihr trinken?« fragte er und überlegte, wo sich der Mund der Revisoren befinden mochte. Die Hand wandte sich der kleinsten Karaffe zu – auf ihrem Etikett stand Tfig.

Wir trinken nicht.

(* Es ist traurig und peinlich, daß hochwohlgeborene Leute ihre Bediensteten zu täuschen versuchten, indem sie Spirituosenkaraffen mit rückwärts geschriebenen Worten beschrifteten. Darüber hinaus gibt es in der Geschichte zahlreiche Beispiele für politisch bewußte Butler, die durchaus darauf vertrauen durften, daß ihre Arbeitgeber den Whisky selbst dann tranken, wenn er mit Niru gestreckt war.)

En français (traduction de Patrick Couton)

Sédatiphe se leva avec un certain soulagement et se dirigea vers sa grande armoire à alcools. Sa main hésita au-dessus de l'antique et inestimable vitrine à liqueurs de la Guilde qui renfermait des carafes étiquetées Muhr, Nig, Otrop et Yksihw. 

...

Sa main survola brefs instants la plus petite carafe libellée Nosiop.

Nous ne buvons pas.

(Il faut s'en désoler autant que de s'en inquiéter : l'aristocratie a toujours cru que les domestiques n'y verraient que du feu si les alcools étaient servis dans des carafes astucieusement libellées à l'envers. De la même manière, tout au long de l'histoire, les majordomes dotés d'une conscience politique affirmée ont cru en toute confiance, et souvent à juste titre, que leurs employeurs ne remarqueraient rien s'ils refaisaient le niveau de whisky avec de l'Eniru.)

THE CABINET OF THE MARSH WITCH

The Marsh Woman, or Marsh Witch, is an aunt of the royal elf maidens, who are very well known. There have been poems written about them and pictures painted of them, but nobody knows much about the Marsh Witch, except that when the meadows begin to reek and steam out their fog and mist in the summer mornings the old woman is at her brewing down below.  A cesspool or cesspit is a wonderful palace compared with the Marsh Woman's brewery. Every vessel is reeking with horrible smells that would turn a human being faint, and they are packed closely together; but even if there were enough space between them to creep through, it would be impossible because of the slimy leeches and the fat snakes that are creeping and slithering along. And all the horrible, creeping mess is so icy cold that a mortal person shivers in every limb; becoming more and more stiff, until they are petrified yet retaining consciousness.

"I know as much as you do, anyway," said the marsh witch, and wrinkled her nose, which wasn't as pretty as it had been when she was an elf maiden. "Poetry and fairytales and stage plays are cut from one and the same cloth, as is all other literature; and as far as I am concerned, they can go and lie down wherever they please. All their work and all their talk--the same stuff can be brewed both cheaper and faster than they do it. I'll give you some for nothing. I have a chestful of bottled literature right here in this tantalus. There you will find the essence of poetry, and prose, and drama, the very best of it, brewed from both sharp and sweet herbs: all the literature that a person needs, and one can put a drop or two on one's handkerchief for Sundays and bank holidays."

"How amazing!" exclaimed the man, who was none other than H.C. Andersen himself. "You mean you actually have a liquor cabinet of literature in bottles?"

"More than you could bear to sniff," answered the marsh witch. "Have you heard the story about the maid who stepped on a loaf of bread to avoid getting her shoes dirty? I believe someone wrote it down and it has since been printed and published."

"I am the one who wrote it," said the man.

"Well, in that case you must be familiar with it. Do you remember what happened to the maid Ingrid, how she sank down into the ground? Well, she landed right in my potion brewery, on the very day when the boogeyman's great-grandmother was paying me a visit. 'Give me that creature who's just sunk down here as a memento, as a knickknack,' begged the great-grandmother, 'and I'll put her on a pedestal to remind me of my visit with you.' So I gave her the girl and the great-grandmother in return gave me her portable medicine chest and tantalus, or liquor cabinet--not that I have any use for it, it's a whole cupboard filled with literature in bottles. Look around! You have your seven four-leaf clovers in your pocket and on top of those a six-leaf clover, so, if you put that six-leaf clover over your left eye for a monocle, you ought to be able to see it."

There in the middle of the meadow was something that looked like the hollow stump of an alder tree, but it was the liquor cabinet that had belonged to the boogeyman's great-grandmother, a very poisonous old creature (as old as Time itself) who was never idle and always doing something. She never goes out without taking some needlework with her, and she had brought some this time. She was sewing bits of leather to put in people's red shoes, so that they should have no rest, and keep on dancing even after their hearts fail, as their bodies decay. She embroidered lies, and worked up into mischief and slander thoughtless words that would otherwise have fallen harmlessly to the ground, had she not strung them together. Yes, she could sew, embroider, and weave, that old great-grandmother! "Anyone in the whole wide world could come and make use of it, the problem is to be able to find it," said the marsh witch. The cabinet could be opened in front and in back, on all four sides, and at the corners. It was a work of art and yet it resembled an ordinary hollow tree stump. Poets and novelists and playwrights from all over the world, but especially from our own Scandinavia, were to be found here in imitation. The rather artistic bas-reliefs represented all of them, as caricatures. The best of their work had been selected, criticized, improved upon, and finally brought up to date. With great talent--that is the word generally used when one does not want to say "genius"--the great-grandmother had taken from nature the smell or the flavour that seemed most like the style of this or that writer, then added a bit of wicked witchcraft to it, and presto! voilà! she had fiction and poetry and drama in bottles, preserved for eternity.

"Let me have a look inside!" begged the man.

"I have more important things than that to talk with you about," the marsh witch insisted.

"But now that we are here," mumbled the man as he opened the tantalus. "There are bottles of all different sizes," he said excitedly. "What's in this one? . . . And in that?"

"Here we have one that is called 'Essence of May.'" The witch stared at the small green bottle. "I haven't tried it, but they say that, if you spill a little on the floor, where it falls a beautiful lily-pond appears, the kind you find in the forest, in which water-lilies and cattails and irises and spearmint are growing. A drop or two in a notebook, even one from a school-child of the first grade, and you have a springtime idyl of fragrance strong enough to be produced on the stage and long enough to make you fall asleep. I am sure that it is meant as a courteous compliment to me that the label reads: 'Brewed by the Marsh Witch.'"

Another bottle was called "Scandal." It looked as if it contained only dirty water, and that was what was in it, only dirty water; but an effervescent powder of street gossip, made up of two grains of truth and two gallons of lies, had been added to make it fizz. The mixture, that tasted like vitriol, had been carefully stirred with a twig--not one that had been used in a cat-of-nine-tails on a criminal's back or by a harsh schoolteacher on naughty children, but a twig that had been taken from a broom with which the streets were swept.

There was also a bottle of devotional piety, ready to be set to sacred music like hymns. Every drop in the bottle had been inspired by the portals of hell, so that it sounded like a clanging door slam shut of those same hell-gates, and penned with the sweat and blood and tears of punishment and penance of the damned. 

There stood the bottle of all bottles: the largest of them all, and it took over half the cabinet. It was a large beast-skin bag filled with true-to-life everyday realistic stories. It had been wrapped and covered and doubly sealed with both a whole pigskin and the urine bladder of that pig, so that it couldn't lose any of its strength, because it lost its flavour so easily. From this bottle, each and every nation could make its own soup, all depending on how you turned and tipped the bottle; what would come forth would depend upon how you'd turn and tip the pigskin. There was old Prussian Blutsuppe, blood soup with cannon-meatballs; tasteless English governess soup; and French pot au coq, made from chicken legs (rooster leg bones) and frogs' eggs--in other languages, it is called cancan soup or cabaret soup. There was also a thin peasant soup for those who like high society, with real counts and courtiers who lay like vegetables on the bottom of the plate and greasy globs of philosophy, like fat philosophical eyes, floating on top in the middle. Oh, there was an endless variety in that bottle, but the thickest of all soups was the Russian borscht. And it is still regarded as such.

Tragedy was bottled in champagne bottles that start out with a bang, as tragedy should. Light Comedy was nothing but a bottleful of fine itching or sneezing powder to throw into the eyes of the audience. There were bottles of the more vulgar kind of comedy, but they were empty except for the playbills, in fact Coarse Comedy consisted only of future playbills, on which the titles were in the boldest typeface; there were some excellent titles: for instance, "One Right on the Jaw!" "The Sweet Jackass!" and "She's Drunk as a Newt!"

The man looked thoughtfully at all the bottles, but the marsh witch had no patience with them, she had more important matters to think about.

"You have looked long enough at that junk shop," she said.

While the man, the author, was completely lost in his thoughts, the Woman of the Marsh thought ahead; she wanted to put an end to this.
"By now you must have seen enough of the hodgepodge cabinet," she said. "You know what it is now."