Pished: I am assured that this means ‘tired’
Scunner: a generally unpleasant person
Scuggan: a really 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.
Waily: a general cry of despair.
N’choate, Azhural, A Klatchian stock dealer. [MP]
Necrotelicomnicon. (Also known as the Liber Paginarum Fulvarum.) A book, written by ACHMED THE MAD, which lists all of the old, dark gods of the Disc. The first edition is kept in the LIBRARY of Unseen University, between iron plates, behind a balanced stone door, with its name hacked on to the lintel over the door. The page headed ‘About the Author’ combusted shortly after his death. Legend says that any mortal man who reads more than a few lines of the original copy will die insane; it is also said that it contains illustrations that could make a strong man’s brain dribble out of his ears. Usually, people only read tenth or twelfth hand copies.
There was once a wizard who started to read it and let his mind wander. Next morning they found all his clothes on the chair and his hat on top of them and the book had . . . a lot more pages. [ER, MP]
Nef, Great. An incredibly dry desert region of the Disc, Rimwards of KLATCH, at the heart of which is the DEHYDRATED OCEAN. It is so dry that it has a negative rainfall. It is the site of the Lost City of EE and the Light Dams of the Sorca people. [COM, P]
Nesheley. An inhabitant of Inkcap, in the Ramtops. His claim to fame is that he once nearly ran over Granny Weatherwax in his cart and is still alive. [WS]
Nhumrod, Brother. Novice Master in OMNIA. A kindly (by the standards of Omnia, anyway) old man, waxy-skinned, with thin, blue-veined hands. He walked with a cane and was also a mass of nervous tics, but perhaps this was due to the fact that he survived in the Omnian citadel for fifty years and spent every night wrestling with the evil temptations of the flesh. [SG]
Nijel. Nijel the Destroyer, son of HAREBUT the Provision Merchant. To say that he is lean would be to miss a perfect opportunity to use the word ‘emaciated’ – he looks as though toast racks and deckchairs have figured in his ancestry. He has a shock of lank, ginger hair, eyes like boiled grapes and a face that is a battleground for its native freckles and the dreadful invading forces of acne.
Short-sighted, with quite a good brain and a tendency to asthma attacks, Nijel does not conform to the normal perception of a classic hero. He does, however, dress like one: a few studded leather thongs, big furry boots, a little leather ‘holdall’ and goose-pimples. The woolly underwear doesn’t really work, but he promised his mother.
And, indeed, he acts like a hero, too. In fact Nijel has every necessary attribute for the classical hero except strength, charisma and skill. [S]
Nine Turning Mirrors. Grand Vizier of the AGATEAN EMPIRE. Grew old in the service of several Emperors, whom he regarded as being a necessary but tiresome ingredient in the successful running of the Empire. He did not like things out of place – his view was that the Empire was not built by allowing things to get out of place. He had very clear views about who should run the country – e.g. that it should be him. Met his end during his attempt to poison a young Emperor who was handier with a pair of chopsticks. [COM, M]
Ninereeds. The rather unpleasant Agatean Master Accountant to whom TWOFLOWER was once apprenticed. It was also the name given by Twoflower to the dragon he conjured from his mind at the WYRMBERG. [COM]
Nitt, Agnes. (See NITT, PERDITA X.)
Nitt, Perdita X. The inner name of Agnes Nitt, daughter of Terminal Thomas ‘Threepenny’ Nitt (his parents, unusually well if not wisely educated by Lancre standards, called their three sons Primal, Medial and Terminal.)
Agnes was a member of DIAMANDA’S amateur coven in LANCRE when first encountered in the canon, and was a small fat seventeen-year-old with a naturally rosy complexion; the sort of girl who would love to be a Goth but was cut out by nature to be two Goths.
Easily swayed by her more imaginative friends, Agnes/Perdita wore black, had a black hat with a veil, and even a black lace hanky, all this conspiring to give the effect of a small, low-flying thunderstorm. Despite her love of black, she had two shelves of soft toys. According to Nanny OGG, who is seldom wrong in these matters, Agnes actually did have some useful magical talent. Perdita X Nitt is the thin person who is supposed to be trying to get out of every fat person, although Perdita makes no attempt to leave and merely stays inside and dreams ridiculous daydreams.
As so often happens, magical talent given no vent finds an outlet in other forms of expression, and it turned out that Agnes had an incredible singing voice – she could, in fact, reproduce practically any pitch or sound and could sing in harmony with herself (Perdita had a rather reedy voice). She took this talent to Ankh-Morpork’s Opera house just before GRANNY WEATHERWAX and NANNY OGG decided that she would make a good third witch for their coven (they were tired of making their own tea). Events, as they say, eventuated (described in Maskerade) and as a result, to no one’s surprise, Agnes found that when witchcraft calls you there’s no point in hanging up. And that when it comes to choosing between, on the one hand, someone with talent, good hair and a wonderful personality and, on the other, someone who merely looks stunning, the world doesn’t hesitate either.
Agnes is splay-footed, wears too much eye liner and has big hair . . . well, not simply big hair, it is enormous hair, as if it’s trying to counterbalance her body. It is glossy, never splits and is extremely well behaved except for a tendency to eat combs. Her hair obeys the rule. Perdita doesn’t. Perdita is vain, selfish and vicious. She thinks Agnes is a fat, pathetic, weak-willed blob that people would walk over if she weren’t so steep.
Agnes is now back in LANCRE, still with Perdita’s beguiling inner voice. She’s also realising, after her experience, that she is probably more intelligent than other people, that most people don’t think straight, and that the world needs sorting out. It seems that Granny Weatherwax has won again.
Nivor, Grunworth. A tutor at the ASSASSINS’ GUILD. Fat, jolly and fond of his food. He was TEPPIC’S housemaster and lectured about traps and deadfalls on Tuesdays. [P]
Nobbs, Corporal C. W. St J. (Cecil Wormsborough St John). A corporal in the Ankh-Morpork Night WATCH, generally known as Nobby. A four-foot-tall, pigeon-chested, bandy-legged man, with the muscle tone of an elastic band and a certain resemblance to a chimpanzee, Nobby is actually smaller than many dwarfs and carries at all times a tattered affidavit attesting to his species, and possibly his genus as well. He gives his age as ‘probably thirty-four’, but he’s been ‘probably thirty-four’ for years. He is the son of Sconner and Maisie Nobbs of Old Cobblers, where he was brought up in a cellar, and he is either their youngest or the only child, since it is beyond belief that any parents could look into the cradle containing the young Nobby and still be prepared to have another go. He is the grandson of Slope Nobbes, who was possibly the illegitimate son of Edward St John de Nobbes, Earl of Ankh, although the link is suspect.
When he was a boy, Nobby dressed in an oversized evening dress jacket, shiny with grease and greenish with age, and a top hat that must once have been trodden on by a horse. No single feature on his childish, pinched-up face was more than passably ugly, but the combination was greater than the sum of the parts. He was streetwise and, frankly, a street urchin – that is, ugly, prickly and smelling strangely of fish.
He is rumoured to have terrible personal habits, although these appear to be no more than a penchant for petty theft (usually from people too unconscious or, for preference, too dead to argue), an ability to do tricks with his facial boils, and a liking for folk-dancing.
Men like Nobby can be found in any armed for
ce. Although their grasp of the minutiae of the Regulations is usually encyclopaedic, they take good care never to be promoted beyond, perhaps, corporal. He smokes incessantly, but the weird thing is that any cigarette smoked by Nobby becomes a dog-end almost instantly and remains a dog-end indefinitely or until lodged behind his ear, which is a sort of nicotine elephants’ graveyard.
Nobby’s normal method of locomotion is a species of sidle; in times of danger he has a way of propelling himself from place to place without apparently moving through the intervening space. And he tends to speak out of the corner of his mouth. In fact there is something altogether very cornery about Corporal Nobbs.
Nobby is known to have served as a quartermaster in the army of the Duke of Pseudopolis. There are rumours that he had to join the Watch after items missing from the stores were found in his kit. Since the items were the entirety of the store inventory, Nobby’s kit at the time consisted of two warehouses.
He lives in the New Watch House in Pseudopolis Yard, Ankh-Morpork, moving from room to room as he fills them up. He is, or rather was, the founder of the Guild of Watchmen, which appears to have lasted for just as long as it took Commander Vimes to find out about it.
He is not, repeat not, related to Bledlow Alf (Alphonse) Nobbs from UU.
Noddy. A friend to Crash and a member of his music group, originally called Insanity. He was the Other One – you know, the one who isn’t the lead guitarist, the bass guitarist or the drummer. The one who jumps around on the stage, sweating and drinking beer. [SM]
Nork the Impaler. A regular at the Mended Drum. No one has even dared ask how he got the nickname. [GG]
Notfaroutoe, Count and Countess. (Arthur & Doreen Winkings) Members of the FRESH START CLUB and vampires, by inheritance. Arthur had been in the wholesale fruit and vegetable business before he inherited the title and, with it, a ruined castle and vampirism. At least, so he believes. And that is the important thing.
Vampirism sits uneasily on the middle class. The difficulty the couple face is that they feel there are established ways vampires should look and behave, and they do their best to behave that way. The snag is that these details – the wearing of evening dress at all times, and so on – were designed for people a good deal taller, thinner and, well, more inherently stylish than Arthur and Doreen. But since the only vampires they’ve ever heard of wear posh clothes and live in castles, they set out with a sort of resigned and dogged unimaginativeness to fit the stereotype.
The Countess (born to a washerwoman in Cockbill Street Ankh-Morpork), for example, is basically a pear-shaped, amiable woman who is trying to look like a consumptive and mysterious lady two feet taller. She wears a figure-hugging black dress, long dark hair cut into a widow’s peak and very pallid make-up. Nature, however, designed her to have frizzy hair and a hearty complexion. She speaks with an affected foreign accent except when she forgets. Vampires are always foreign, she believes. She is now the Treasurer of the AM Mission of the Überwald League of Temperance.
The only vampire trait not embraced by Arthur is the one involving climbing into the bedrooms of young women and sucking their necks. Doreen put her foot down about this. He has to have rare steak and black pudding and like it. This disappointment is on top of his shaving problem; his face is a mass of small cuts, because it’s very hard to shave when you can’t see yourself in the mirror.
Their four-roomed terraced house at 14 Masons Road, Ankh-Morpork, boasted a crypt, a vault (the Winkings haven’t worked out that these could be the same thing), a torture chamberette, a dining room with dribbly candles and a painting whose eyes moved, a secret passage, an organ that was so big that a hole had to be knocked in the parlour ceiling for it, a laboratory and a moat. The house fell down shortly after Arthur knocked down the last load-bearing wall in order to install an Iron Maidenette, and the Winkings subsequently lodged with the understanding Mrs CAKE. It is believed that the Count’s gravel-filled coffin is the first attempt to meet the orthopaedic needs of the vampire with a bad back. [RM]
Nourishing. A young female rat involved in MAURICE’S ‘Pied Piper’ scam. She had been in the Light Widdlers but transferred to the Trap Disposal Squad, under DARKTAN’S leadership. Worships Darktan. [TAMAHER]
N’tuitif. On the veldt of Howondaland live the N’tuitif people, the only tribe in the world to have no imagination whatsoever.
For example, their story about the thunder runs something like this: ‘Thunder is a loud noise in the sky, resulting from the disturbance of the air masses by the passage of lightning.’ And their legend ‘How the Giraffe Got his Long Neck’ runs: ‘In the old days the ancestors of Old Man Giraffe had slightly longer necks than other grassland creatures, and the access to the high leaves was so advantageous that it was mostly long-necked giraffes that survived, passing on the long neck in their blood just as a man might inherit his grandfather’s spear. Some say however that it is all a lot more complicated and this explanation only applies to the shorter neck of the okapi. And so it is.’ The N’tuitif are a peaceful people, and have been hunted almost to extinction by neighbouring tribes, who have lots of imagination, and therefore plenty of gods, superstitions and ideas about how much better life would be if they had a bigger hunting ground.
Nuggan. A god of Borogravia. He is a tetchy god, whose laws are enforced by informal citizen committees. His Book of Nuggan is in a ringbinder to accommodate new Abominations, which turn up in it magically. These are many and wide-ranging and include, for example, Chocolate, Garlic, Cats, Dwarfs, the Colour Blue, Oysters, Babies, the Theatre, Barking Dogs, Shirts with Six Buttons, Cheese, Women Wearing Men’s Clothes, Rocks, Ears, Accordion Players – and Beating Your Wife with a Stick greater than an Inch Across. Quite tricky to keep up. [MR]
Nutmeg. An officer of Sto Plains Holdings and on the Board of Reacher Gilt’s Grand Trunk Company. [MM]
Nutt, Mr ‘Gobbo’. When we first meet him, he is a Temporary Apprentice Candle Dribbler at Unseen University. He is young, with a grey, round, guileless face – he has an unshakeably amiable look about him. He is very untidily dressed; he looks like a scarecrow. Although he looks like a bag of second-hand clothes, he talks like a retired theologian – he speaks three dead languages, and twelve living ones. He appears quite slight (his fingers look like cheese straws) but he is not as little as he first appears. Partly, he weighs himself down with humility, but – as an orc, from Überwald – he looks smaller when he is upset; it’s a product of his morphic field contracting and expanding. He has a natural skill at football and he works with Trevor LIKELY at UU (another football fan).
He becomes close friends with Glenda SUGARBEAN. [UA]
N’vectif, Banana. Cunningest hunter in the great yellow plains of Klatch. He designed a better mousetrap shortly before being trampled by 1,000 elephants. [MP]
Oats, Quite Reverend. His full name is Mightily-Praiseworthy-Are-Ye-Who-Exalteth-Om Oats, but this is often shortened to Mightily. He is a priest of the Omnian religion who trained at the Ohulan mission. He is a quite young, skinny man with a ripe boil beside his nose, and a smile that appears on his face as if someone has operated a shutter. There is something damp about him, the kind of helpless hopelessness that makes people angry rather than charitable. He is in two minds about almost everything since he always tries to see both sides of every question. He wears a black robe which ends at his knees and a razor-sharp starched collar. His legs are encased in grey socks and his feet are encased in sandals. He also wore a holy turtle pendant and carried a finely printed graduation copy of the Book of Om, which he unfortunately mislaid during the events of Carpe Jugulum. Indeed, during the events of that book he embraced a more muscular form of Omnianism and might by now be doing or wearing anything. [CJ]
Octarine. The eighth colour of the Disc spectrum. The basic colour of which other colours are merely pale shadows impinging on normal four-dimensional space. It is a sort of fluorescent greenish-yellow-purple. (See also LIGHT.)
Octarines. Gemstones which gl
ow in a strong magical field. Otherwise they look like rather inferior diamonds. [S]
Octavo, the. The CREATOR’S own grimoire. Reputedly left behind by the Creator – with characteristic absent-mindedness – shortly after completing his major work.
The Eight Spells are imprisoned on its pages.
For the whole of recorded time – except for a brief spell inside the LUGGAGE – it has been kept in a little room off the main LIBRARY, in the cellars of Unseen University. The walls are covered with occult symbols and protective lead pentagrams, and most of the floor is taken up with the Eightfold Seal of Stasis. The only furnishing is a lectern in the shape of a bird – or at least in the shape of a winged thing it is probably best not to examine too closely – and on the lectern, fastened to it by a heavy chain covered in eight padlocks (one key for each of the Heads of the Eight Orders of Wizardry), is a book, so full of magic that it has its own keen sentience.
It is a large, but not particularly impressive book. The rather tatty leather cover has a representation of BEL-SHAMHAROTH and could be described in a library catalogue as ‘slightly foxed’ although it would be more honest to admit it looks as though it has been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well. Metal clasps hold it shut. They aren’t decorated, they’re just very heavy – like the chain, which doesn’t so much attach the book to the lectern as tether it. They look like the work of someone who had a pretty definite aim in mind, and who has spent most of his life making training harnesses for elephants.
No one is allowed to stay in the room for more than 4 minutes and 32 seconds (a figure arrived at after 200 years of cautious experimentation).
Octiron. A strange, iridescent metal, almost as highly valued in the lands around the CIRCLE SEA as SAPIENT PEARWOOD and about as rare.
A needle of octiron will always point to the Hub of the Discworld, being acutely sensitive to the Disc’s magical field; it will also miraculously darn socks. Octiron radiates a dangerous amount of raw enchantment and is a metal so unstable that it can exist only in a universe saturated with raw magic.
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