Feaking

I recently took a very cool class in falconry at Sky Falconry in the mountains just outside of San Diego, and I was reminded of all the great vocabulary that’s associated with falconry. Like, for example, haggard originally described an adult female hawk that was caught in the wild and not raised in captivity. And then later that was applied to humans who were kind of wild looking.

And also pride of place, which originally meant the airy height from which a falcon swoops. And Shakespeare uses it that way in Macbeth, talking about a falcon towering in her pride of place. And then there was a word that I learned from the instructors that was new to me, and that was feaking.

Do you know this word, Grant? Feaking? I don’t know what feaking is. Is this maybe picking at the animal underneath their claws? Well, feaking is what happens after that. To feak is to wipe the bill on something in order to clean it or to hone it, you know, to make it really sharp or to just wipe that food off your face if you’re a falcon.

Do you have any idea of the origin of that word, or is it just so old that we don’t know? That’s a good suspicion because we’re not completely sure. It may come from an old German word that means to clean, but we’re not totally sure.

So that’s feaking, F-E-A-K, to wipe the food off your face or your beak.

Yeah.

So if you have a runny nose, you can feak it with a tissue.

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