glossary


Although Gormglaith has no made up words (neologisms), some are drawn from Gaelic, Celtic, Irish, Dutch or Norse (which has its feminist sway) with bits of slang and gweepspeak. These meanings can be gleaned from the tale and are here to help with glarks.

afliae	From a Norse rune of fate and the early matriarchs.
air witch	From Irish airmed and Norse eir, a healer who taught her craft and knowledge of herbs to her sisters (who are said to have been the only physicians in old Scandinavia).
ancheisht	Manx Gaelic for dilemma. Paradox. In the tale this always has to do with fylgjic ancheisht. See fylgja, plight.
ash	If not meaning a tree or hue, then elemental carbon, or as wontedly, organic macro-molecules, those skeinish braids of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and often sulfur which make up the carbohydrates, purines and pyrimidines with the phosphoric, amino and nucleic (RNA, DNA) acids from which life on earth is spun. Mab and Raoghnailt further call both amino and nucleic acids ash gobblers.
bane	In the tale this word wontedly carries a Manx Gaelic spin, such as white, blank, fallow or unplowed. In Sparks this is Fionnabhair's rather stark rune for the four twined forces of nature, strong, weak, stir (her word for electro-magnetism) and trimmid (Manx for gravity).
banshee	Manx Gaelic ben shee is alike with this Gaelic/Irish word meaning sister faerie, rune of an ancient helper linked with earth and stone, also known to wail upon an impending death of kin. In the tale, any of the last four plights in a teach clannin.
ben chee	Manx for wet nurse (spoken bɛːdn xiː).
besom	Twig broom, rune of girls, cleaning, home, the moon and life itself. In the tale a bit of mote craft has been spun through the ash wood and heather to also make it a deeply shared feely gadget, helping girls fetch (which is to say, go elsewhere in their minds) together. Now and then called the faerie's roan.
bluesquash	A big blue-grey squash which can roughly match the overall shape and size of a girl's head (or truth be told, her skull), more wontedly called the blue hubbard squash after Elizabeth Hubbard of Marblehead, Massachusetts (1842).
board	Middle English for table. Girls sit about a bone board at school (likely from boning up at the board).
Bryn larach	Scots Gaelic for fetching ruin (more or less).
bugs	In Sparks, Fionnabhair is speaking of microbal viruses.
bunchberry	Shared bike, bunchberries have the same orange-red hue.
bundling	Karyotype or arrangement of chromosomes.
butties	Northern UK (Liverpool) slang for sandwiches.
cairmeal	Gaelic word for licorice.
chavel	UK slang for something so broken, crumbled, wasted.
clannin	From clannin', a shortening of clanning from Irish clann, Gaelic clein and English clan, also meaning tribe, children. Singular and plural are alike. See plight, ancheisht, maegden.
clarsach	Highland harp. Also the northern constellation Lyra.
coorsyn	Manx Gaelic, monthly flow, catamenia. Most maedchen are wont to begin coorsyn from thirteen to sixteen. Geileis' talk of late onset with Gormglaith may hint at a stern rune for a maegden.
cormid	Manx Gaelic, equinox.
cutty sark	Scots Gaelic for short shirt. Pulling from the old Scottish yarn, one night some witches reel about a fire under the stars and moon. Among them is a rather fetching girl wearing a linen nightshirt which she long ago outgrew and now it's so starkly way short. In our tale this has come to mean a waist length or even higher cropped jacket with long sleeves, but for a forearm length only ever (and not often) worn with long, open fingered scollag's gloves. These are spun in many and sundry hues, cuts, weights and cloths, thrown on mostly to ward off chills or the sun. When falling to the hip bones a cutty sark's rather like an Argyll, if hemmed high at the ribs perhaps kind of a bolero. Either way it's more or less a rebeca, always single breasted, collared or not and so wontedly worn open.
Eachdraidh	From Eachdraidh nan fylgjic, Scottish-Gaelic, Tale of the Fylgjic.
eigenwert	Transformation characteristic wontedly thrown in spells like functional analysis, from German eigen for peculiar, individual or neach.
faaish	Manx Gaelic, a sprite or sprite-like.
faeries	From many and sundry European myths with much Celtic spin, in the tale these are meed, fetching and very fylgjic runes meant mostly for moppets. They're also quite alikened, in the English way, to the notions of pixies, sprites and Germanic elves, these latter words more wontedly spoken as shorthand for how some girls (like Raoghnailt, Blodwen, Mab or Enid) might look or seem to others.
fallain	Gaelic, healthy.
feep	Gweepspeak for the sine wave first sounded long ago by computers of the later 20th century (often by piezoelectric means). I'm startled.
feish	Manx Gaelic, festival or big gathering, shortened from feish chiaull, a musical one. In the tale, a yodeling show.
Fen Glioon	Glioon is Manx for knee. Same spot as something fleetingly called Geneva.
flurt	Gaelic for feast. See also ben chee.
freayll, the	Gaelic for conservation or keep (spoken as fɹeɪl). What grew from swaps and keeps. A freayller (from freayll arrey er, linked with chaperon or tend) is someone who does this.
Frigg, loch	A lake once known as both Como and Laria.
fuck	Most likely came to Anglo-Saxon over a thousand years ago through Scottish Gaelic from Scandinavia. A token of this is when Njorthrbiartr (n'joʊrbɜːt) shouts it with hard Gaelic spin in sheaf eighteen, whereby it's a rune for the closest kind of braiding and steadfastness between girls and may hint at a handfasting. Tegan chides Gormglaith for widening its meaning, something maegden (and the dashing tongue witches among them) are wont to do.
furlong	220 yards, eight to a mile. Lengths are told the English way since this seems to fit more closely with how girls think of things (and is widely known among English speaking readers).
fylgja	Norse myth, a guardian who shows up in dreams, linked to an ancheisht of safety, danger and the notion of doppelganger. A pailtfylgjic is a kind of university, pailt being Gaelic for many.
Galad bane	From Manx Gaelic, a name for Mont Blanc, the tall mountain south of Geneva, Switzerland.
gauge	British, the wonted 14 gauge weave of longstockings is rather heavy at way over a 16th of an inch, whilst a ring bowed with 17 gauge wire is a bit under a 16th of an inch thick.
ghost	Three dimensional cast of polarized light. Holograph.
gibecrake	Middle English, small bedeckings, wontedly in the hair.
girl	From Anglo-Saxon gerle, meaning child, later shifting to juvenile or adolescent daughter, sometimes widening to x2, where it's fixed in the tale. Nigh her 272nd birthday Blaanid Raine-Blairie would say she's a girl like Beiwe ('beɪwiː) at five.
glain	Welsh for clean or pure, related to gel and English gleam, an egg shaped (and sized) feely gadget.
glark	Gweepspeak for infer from context.
glass	Can carry a Manx Gaelic spin, light green.
goblin	A ghosted (holographic), more or less freely flying control or small display cast of light. See tangle.
gore	A three cornered swatch, a triangle. In the tale these are often upended (inverted) as runes for x2.
Gormglaith	Gormglaith Grendel Hafgan Halsen, Celtic/Gaelic for dark blue green loch, storm in summer veering.
gweep	From early hackerspeak, to hex.
gwaen	Welsh, a flat plain.
gwli	Welsh, lane behind a house, a small alley.
hex	Numeric base16. The way to ten in hex is 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f 10. As a noun, the calls for toasters and pinks. As a verb, gweeping them. The Pennsylvania Dutch homonym is way twined.
hopper	A bit cruncher (computer), after Grace Hopper (1906-1992).
hough	Anglo-Saxon for a spur of land, wontedly in the bend of a river or stream.
ice	Any crystal, ash ice being carbon crystal (diamond).
jeen	Manx Gaelic for proof which is so too Latin for Rathyen.
Keayn sheear	Manx Gaelic, Atlantic Ocean (sea of the endless west).
Kin Dails	Dails is Celtic for meeting grounds.
kindel	Middle English for offspring, children, also linked with Middle English kindelen, to spark.
klompen	Dutch for wooden shoes. In the tale these are the bighty (rounded) kind, often more so, sometimes bigger and a bit wider. The earliest klomp ever found was made almost 700 years ago and looks the same as those worn today. In 1997 klompen were CE certified by the EU as safety wear. Gormglaith runs a four minute mile in hers.
kynn	Manx Gaelic, deep affection, akin to kynney, kindred, for the plighted sisters who bring in and raise a clannin girl. Singular and plural are alike.
league	3 miles. Handy in tales but tell someone it's a league to your wonted carryout and they'll think you're daft (never mind it's too far).
leeg	Dutch for empty, also UK slang for not helpful, empty headed, a chavel.
lekker	UK slang (spoken 'lækə) for meed, fetching, from Afrikaans and back to the same Dutch word with a much alikened meaning.
longstockings	When she was twenty-three Hertha Thiele starred in the very first grrl flick, Maedchen in Uniform (1931, Berlin), set in a Prussian boarding school for girls and later banned but not before Maedchen made its sparkly splash across Europe to North America and Japan. In 1980 Thiele said, I wore those long dark stockings in the film... so that in those days the kiss and the stockings already created a cult. Hertha Thiele does the school play: Maedchen in Uniform (1931) Thiele told how in some places "where the film was very big" girls went to stores asking for the same kind of long stockings. Like those worn in the tale these two words are themselves woven together, handy and true.
luzz	UK slang, to throw or toss. Luzz ball is a kind of volley ball.
maedchen	German for girl, linked with Middle English maegden (see below). In the tale this means a girl in her pre, early or middle teens (between ten and seventeen).
maegden	Anglo-Saxon girl or maiden. In Eachdraidh, an unplighted girl between seventeen and twenty-four. Groking some shred of ancheisht in her life and given fylgjic ways, she'll very likely either plight a clannin or pledge a teach.
moof	Gweepspeak for a new hack, something edgy and untested.
moppet	From Middle English moppe for a rag doll or small child. In the tale, a kindel between three and ten.
mote	What protons, neutrons and electrons are made of.
natron	This caked mixture of plant-ash mineral salts (mostly soda "ash" [sodium carbonate] and about .17 "baking" soda [sodium bicarbonate] along with a bit of household salt [sodium chloride] and sodium sulfate) was being harvested straight from dried lakes in Egypt at least 10,000 years earlier. Mildly antiseptic and exfoliating, quick to break down fat and grease (never mind putting out their fires) and dry up water, this is a wonted soap and tooth scrub, also found in most any kitchen for both cooking and cleaning. The scientific symbol for sodium (NA) came from this word.
neach	Gaelic, individual, for unique, like none other.
neuchadjin	Manx Gaelic, rare, singular, for the first ever braiding of a tide (Geileis is neuchadjin, Gormglaith is twin).
Newhaven	A town near Brighton, Sussex where the afliae first gwept.
norn	From Scandinavian/Norse myth, one of three sisters who rune fate. May be tied to a Swedish word meaning to inform secretly along with the Indo-European root ner meaning to twist or twine. When spoken of in the tale, a kind of witch. See wyrd, also fylgja, plight.
ox	Can also take an Anglo-Saxon (Old English) spin, through Old Frisian oxa, meaning any cow and furthermore in the tale, beef, which as Raoghnailt ('rægnɔːlt) puts it, isn't gotten by slaughter.
pillywiggin	Echo of Celtic myth, spring flower faerie.
pink	Reckoning and outlook gadget. Early on, a keen kind of wire wrapped with pink sleeving had sometimes shown up in ranting gear, called pink hardware by some and the term stuck.
plight	From Middle English plighten by Anglo-Saxon plihtan, to endanger or put at risk, through pliht (danger, risk). Linked with Anglo-Norman plit (fold or wrinkle), Dutch verplichten (to impose an obligation) and Danish forpligte a pledge of honor or faith, which yielded the early clanninish meaning: To tangle with danger through gathered pledge (see fylgja, ancheisht, maegden).
pog	Gaelic kiss (in the tale this hints at tongues).
popinjay	Middle English, from Old English popingay, also popyngay, at its earliest (and ever still) meaning the European or English green woodpecker, who chatters rather a lot. Later came to mean this bird's colour too, a bright woodsy green, as in the tale. By Elizabethan times this word seems to have been utterly muddled with the Old French-Spanish-Arabic for parrot (papegai, papagayo) which caused sundry puzzlement among English speakers, never mind those who thought it was some kind of jay. Also more lately cited in the UK (2005) as someone given to idle or empty prattle, among other meanings.
Rank, the	Manx, what was once called France.
Running	The Rhone river.
rusted water	Hydrogen peroxide.
scaanish	Gaelic, meaning spooky, ghostly, or like a double. Akin to scaa, for someone way thin, shadow, or shade. Linked with wraith.
scollagyn	From Gaelic for schoolgirls and scollag for scholar, with scollaghan, for nestling. Spoken with a hard g, the singular and plural forms are alike. Scollagyn may call each other scollies. These are maegden pledged to a teach, most likely at seventeen or eighteen (like Gweneth), instead of plight. Raoghnailt's maedchen pledge at sixteen seems to have been unwonted and she lets Gormglaith hear about it.
shawn trews	From Scots Gaelic seann truibhas meaning old trousers, as in kicking them off in a hurry.
shee	Manx for peace, also for the highland faerie, daoine sith, rune of ancient, steadfast sisters linked to the earth and harvest. Once pledged a teach but may plight sooner or later anyway (Flann did it sooner, Brighde much later). Unplighted, some flit about, others (like Devon) may hang out with a clannin for quite some time, by whatever stir. A shee's twin daughter is carried to birth by another shee (and not born a scollagyn), then mostly lavished with care by the witches, shees and scollagyn about her, brought up and schooled in the teach to later pledge or plight like anyone else when they're maegden. Flann, Raoghnailt and Feegan are "Blairie bairn" who happened to pledge there as scollagyn too, which does seem somewhat wonted.
shenn	Manx Gaelic auld, for ancestor.
skate	Same craft as a sled, mostly, but bigger and kinder to the freayll since it skims on a narrow, laid groove.
skeeal	Manx Gaelic, yarn, tidings, news.
slan	Irish, health, for healthy.
slash	UK slang for urinate.
slattag ghlass	Gaelic for cucumber.
sled	Wontedly carries up to eight and is shared by a thorpe or town. Floated and pulled by a sled lane (which looks like any byway).
Sleepingland	English meaning (and in the tale, name) of Siberia.
slushstone	Concrete (mix of water, clinker, fly ash, gravel and sand which has dried and spun together into hard stone).
Snotra	Norse myth, Frigg's helper, rune of knowledge and of a girl's self-sway or grip. In the tale this is where the fylgja clannin lives, what was once Bellagio at the fork of lake Como in northern Italy.
Soohead	Name of a maedchen haunt or hangout in Elmthorpe, taken from Manx soo for sip, soak up, suck, jam and wholesome food, also berry.
spells	What the calculus came to be, kind of. Can also mean a learned or set way of doing something, such as a recipe.
spider witch	Gweepspeak, a witch keened and jeened on the hex running at Snotra.
stern	Behaviour deeply rooted in the early Eachdraidh. A clanniner or shee brought up this way, perhaps lastingly swayed by nightly readings from the Eachdraidh, is wontedly called a henge maedchen (often behind her back).
stoep	Afrikaans English for an outdoor terrace, from the alike Dutch word for sidewalk or riser.
stone	14 pounds. 8 stone is a hundredweight (or 112 pounds), a bit more than middling weight for most.
string	As wonted, also loosely for what motes are made of.
ta!	UK slang, eager thanks.
tangle	Can mean any kind of interactive interface, or running one.
teach	Old Irish for house. Boarding school for scollagyn, who leave as shees after four years of boards like clannin school but more of them and with a fylgjic bent. A teach is spun by eight plighted shees, whose clannin name is taken by anyone who pledges there. Carrying over is the shifting of one's pledge from one teach to another (like Feegan does from Blairie to the Wrath).
thou, thee, tha	From Old English, second person singular pronouns for subject and object, forms of you (the latter only spoken in the tale as second person plural, matching the early way). Mostly misunderstood after Elizabethan times and often wrongly written (never mind conjugated) in sundry fiction as a botchsome hack for olden "formal" speech when truth be told, thou had become, for two centuries at least (about 1450-1650), the more or less familiar second person pronoun. Earlier than this however, as in the tale, notions of familiarity have no sway. They were last spoken in the mainstream only at the evermosts of either closeness or invective hurled between aristocrats. The writer glarks their drift from everyday speech had at least something to do with Elizabethan England's strong and fluid middle class, its roots in the Great Charter (Magna Carta) of 1215 and those which followed. Moreover in 1611, when they were already falling away, thou and thee showed up in the new KJ bible as a way to carry on the singular and plural second person pronouns found in the Greek and other early sources, although this was soon and wontedly very misunderstood by readers. Meanwhile by about 1600 the subjective ye (plural for thou) had also fallen out of speech as bearing too much on status (and is likewise unheard of in this tale). Either way, within a few decades most found it safer, more polite and altogether easier sticking to a one-fits-all you (the plural of thee). Speaking of which (to hop down a bunny trail), ye is now wontedly muddled with the old spelling for the word the which began with the letter Þ (thorn, which stood for the sound th) and was written Þe. Sets of type made in Germany and brought to England for the early printing presses there lacked this character, so at first Þe was sometimes spelled ye until folks settled on spelling it the. This mistaken ye is now almost always mispoken as jiː instead of ðə (or ðiː if before a vowel) when it shows up in codswalloped "Olde English" like Ye Olde Candle Shoppe, which by the bye in true Middle English would look more like Þe Old Candel Shoppe or, only for the fun of stretching things altogether way too far, Þe Eald Candelle Sceoppa in Old English (though Gormglaith might remind the reader that back then, sceoppa meant booth or house where a hoard is kept, talk about TOSS). Meanwhile the lack of a distinctive second person plural pronoun later gave rise to the use of such morphological analogies in the UK as yousuns and youse (there are others) and in some areas of North America y'all, the latter showing up in the tale only because the writer has been so delighted with it by her American friends. Thou and thee are still spoken (but without the old grammar) by some in Cumbria, the East Midlands and other spots in Western England. In Yorkshire, tha is still heard as a personal pronoun. In the tale this is spoken as a kind of contraction in everyday speech, as with tha knowst being much the same thing as ya know. Lastly, here and there about the Atlantic northeast of America some Quakers were saying thee for both the subjective and objective until the 1950s. Clanniners took them all up again, with slursome ways rather close to the late Elizabethan, likely as a help in their skienish and talkative braidings among friends, kindel, kynn and kin.
thrall	From Norse myth, for farmer.
thread	Sometimes means DNA, which is braided in a double plait or helix.
tide	From the nucleotide of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). A cast of DNA, which braids a living thing (also linked as a rune with the homonym for sea levels swayed mostly by the pulling moon).
toaster	Gweepspeak, from the box for grilling bread, also from slang toast, for something chaveled. Any gadget (other than a pink), wontedly swayed by a hopper, which is often inside.
wanton	Not stern but still fylgjic behaviour (more wonted in towns).
West meads, the	The swath of trundling meadows and forests on the far western reaches of the Running alps (once called the Rhone Alps).
wig	From Anglo-Saxon, idol, for a kind of robot having a look and some outward behaviour much likened to a girl.
witch	In the tale, someone split (or jeened) way keen at a fylgjic craft.
Wrath ness	Once called Cape Wrath, in the Scottish highlands. Ness is an Old English-Norse word for cape.
wyrd	Anglo-Saxon and Norse notion of fate, with an understanding that whilst bound by the past, each makes her own path in the wyrd through how she deals with what's happening now. Linked to norns, three sisters who weave a tapestry from the layers of what has been, each life being a string on the loom. The first sister runes that which has been, the middle one that which is and the last (wontedly known to be rather whist) that which is still becoming.
yah	Manx Gaelic girl or lass! with meaning akin to grrl.

Time of night or day is told in hours from sunset, midnight, sunrise or noon and is spot on for longitude. Canny, weird clocks show the nightly ebbs and flows of dusk and dawn along with the pulling moon, which each have their sways on nightly life. Snotrian time is told at need.

Nights of the week are reckoned sundown to sundown. Each night and day has an Anglo-Saxon name.