I Shall Wear Midnight (Discworld 38)

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