Hellsborough Exposed — names

Exacid names come one hard word apiece, nearly always lifted from the steel trade: Coker, Fettler, Puddler, Grinder, Slagger. Whether an Exacid chooses the word or is issued it by The Nascenti is a question I have asked twice, of two different exacids, and been moved along twice, by two different pincers, with what I would describe as identical body language.

Pip presses Van on the xaexs's name after their bar exchange:

"What did she say to you?" I asked Van.

"She just said, there you go pal, enjoy."

"And what did you call her, it sounded like 'dirty leaves'."

"Yeah, that's her name."

"Dirty Leaves?" "

Yeah, well that's as near as a translation as tha's ever gonna get."

Ask what you call a group of anything in The Dark Peak and you get an argument rather than an answer: a parliament of flatfaces, a murder of corvids, a murmuration of starlings, a pack of ripperthroats, a stampede of demonspawn. For a gathering of milting nobody has settled on one at all — I have heard a convention, an ageing, and, from a man three pints deep in the Sportsman, an eon — and I am beginning to suspect the disagreement is the point, not an oversight.

Worth learning the local names before you make a fool of yourself in a Middlewood bar: what you'd call a magpie is a pied corvid here, a jay is a bearded corvid, and a common crow is -- inevitably -- a common corvid. The Dark Peak orders its flitters with a tidiness it grants almost nothing else.