Fishing in The Dark Peak is called slipping — the fish are slippers, the act is slipping, the person is a slipperman — and the sign on the Loxley that reads "No Slipping Past This Point" is not about the bank. Species include snarljaw, rainbowslid, dullslid and fallclimber. Why slipping is prohibited at that particular point is not explained anywhere I can find; presumably the District Council has its reasons.

Van's therapeutic prescription for a crosslander with three weeks of missing memory was rockcrust, administered via clean straw, followed by fried smelt, rooter trotters, skewerwing and venomtooth. He described the alternative — thinking too hard about where you'd been — as "grizzler smelt thinkin'," which I have found, in the time since, to be one of the more useful phrases the Dark Peak dialect has contributed to my personal vocabulary.

Off-world visitors tend to struggle with two items of Hellsborough vocabulary above all others: ¢hits (the cryptocurrency, pronounced 'chit', which occasionally develops opinions about its ownership — this is a known property of the currency, not a glitch, and the financial system has adjusted accordingly) and 'snough', an expletive approximately equivalent to 'bloody hell'. You will use both within twenty-four hours of arrival. The ¢hits will find their way into your pocket. The 'snough' will arrive considerably faster.

Dark Peak time runs in its own vocabulary: murkrise for dawn, murkneet for the full dark, Bleak for winter. The seven days are Mard'y, Toid'y, Midd'y, Neard'y, Besd'y, Spand'y, and Splend'y — the week ending on Sunday, which is named for being splendid. Optimism of that kind, in a world that calls its winter Bleak, is either admirable or delusional, and the distinction has not been resolved.