Fash: worry, upset
Geas: a very important obligation, backed up by tradition and magic. Not a bird
Gonnagle: the bard of the clan, skilled in musical instruments, poems, stories and songs
Hag: a witch, of any age
Hag o’ hags: a very important witch
Hagging/Haggling: anything a witch does
Hiddlins: secrets
Kelda: the female head of the clan, and eventually the mother of most of it. Feegle babies are very small, and a kelda will have hundreds in her lifetime
Lang syne: long ago
Last World: the Feegles believe that they are dead. This world is so nice, they argue, that they must have been really good in a past life and then died and ended up here. Appearing to die here means merely going back to the Last World, which they believe is rather dull
Mudlin: useless person
Pished: I am assured that this means ‘tired’
Schemie: an unpleasant person Scuggan: a really unpleasant person Scunner: a generally unpleasant person
Ships: woolly things that eat grass and go baa. Easily confused with the other kind
Spavie: see Mudlin
Special Sheep Liniment: probably moonshine whisky, I am very sorry to say. No one knows what it’d do to sheep, but it is said that a drop of it is good for shepherds on a cold winter’s night and for Feegles at any time at all. Do not try to make this at home
Spog: a small leather bag at the front of a Feegle’s kilt, which covers whatever he presumably thinks needs to be hidden, and generally holds things like something he is halfway through eating, something he’d found that now therefore belongs to him, and quite often – because even a Feegle can catch a cold – it might hold whatever he was using as a handkerchief, which might not necessarily be dead
Steamie: only found in the big Feegle mounds in the mountains, where there’s enough water to allow regular bathing; it’s a kind of sauna. Feegles on the Chalk tend to rely on the fact that you can only get so much dirt on you before it starts to fall off of its own accord
Waily: a general cry of despair