Fizmer, feetings, flosh, blinter – enjoy these words and forget them immediately, advises Adam Nicolson

Wolfsnow is a dangerous blizzard at sea; slogger the sucking sound made by waves against a ship’s sides; ammil the sparkle of morning sunlight through hoar-frost; af’rug the reflection of a wave after it has struck the shore; blinter is a cold dazzle; sutering the cranky action of a rising heron; èit, a Gaelic word, is a piece of quartz placed in a moorland stream so that it glimmers in the moonlight and in that way attracts salmon in late summer and autumn; summer geese is steam that rises from the moor when rain is followed by hot sunshine; fizmer the noise of wind rustling in long grass; may-blobs are kingcups; zwer is the whizzing of partridges as they break cover; feetings are footprints of creatures as they appear in the snow; twindle is stream foam; an after-drop is the rain drop which falls after the cloud that produced it has passed; a cockle is a ripple on water caused by the wind; a keld a deep smooth still part of a river; a flood is a land shut; a glaise a rivulet; the slack water at a bend where there is a pause in the current is a lum; where on a weir the water tips over the level into the curved form held in the air by its own momentum and its sudden falling, that is a sill; a flosh is a stagnant pool overgrown with reeds; a pudge or a swidge is a little puddle, the mardle, slightly bigger, a pond big enough for cows to drink in; the maril’d is the sparkling luminous substance seen in the sea on autumn nights, and on fish in the dark; hummaruz is a noise in the air you can’t identify, or a sound in the landscape whose source cannot...