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Authors: Bev Vincent

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In
The Dark Tower
, King says that his editor usually forces him to cappendix-hange words he makes up if they are too strange. However, over the course of the past few decades, King managed to slip a few unusual words past him. The following list contains expressions mostly from High Speech that refer to concepts in the
Dark Tower
mythos. Some are common phrases from Mid-World speech.

 

Alleyo:
Running away.

An-tak:
The Big Combination. The Crimson King’s child-powered engine that Roland knows as the King’s Forge. Its energy output fuels evils in the myriad universes of existence.

An-tet:
The position of a person who follows a dinh.

Aven kal:
A tidal wave of disastrous proportions that runs along the Path of the Beam. Sometimes it becomes a hurricane or tsunami, sweeping people along with it. This indicates the very Beam means to speak with these people, who would do well to listen. King’s creative force made real.

Can Calah:
Angels.

Can Calyx:
The Dark Tower, aka the Hall of Resumption.

Can’-Ka No Rey:
The red road leading up to the Dark Tower.

Can Steek-Tete:
The Little Needle. A sharp upthrust of rock in Thunderclap.

Can-tah:
The little gods. The turtle scrimshaw is one.

Can tam:
Little doctors; the black bugs associated with Type One vampires.

Can toi:
The low men, taheen-human hybrids; sometimes called the third people. They wear human masks, take human names and hope to replace humans after the fall of the Tower. Roland calls these soldiers of the Crimson King the fayen-folken.

Commala:
Refers to rice and the festivals associated with it. Also a dance and a festival of fertility. The word is used in numerous ways, many of them expletive. See
Wolves of the Calla
for a summary of its meanings.

Dan-dinh:
An implicit agreement between someone who is an-tet and his dinh. When presenting a personal problem dan-dinh, the follower opens his heart to his leader and agrees to do what the leader says. This tradition predates Arthur Eld.

Dan-tete:
Little savior. John Cullum is a little savior for Roland and Eddie.

Dash-dinh:
A religious leader.

Devar-tete:
Little torture chamber.

Devar-Toi:
Prison where the Breakers are held. Known as Algul Siento—Blue Heaven.

Dinh:
The leader of a ka-tet. It also means “king” and “father.” This latter ties Mordred to the legends of Arthur and Charlemagne, where children were born of incestuous relationships. Roland is Susannah’s dinh, in some ways a father. Walter o’Dim thinks of Mordred as his new dinh.

Din-tah:
The furnace of destruction. Chaos.

Discordia:
The great chaos. All that will remain if the Tower falls.

Fan-gon:
Exiled one.

Gan:
Supposedly the creative force in Hindu mythology according to fictional Stephen King.
1
It is everything that is not Discordia, a force too great to be called God. Gan rose from the void (the Prim) and gave birth to the universe through his navel. Then he tipped it with his finger and set it rolling, and that was time. Gan is responsible for the creative force in King. The Tower is Gan itself.

Gilly:
A woman usually taken to bear children outside wedlock. Concubine or mistress.

Graf:
Apple beer.

Gunna:
A person’s worldly possessions.

Howken:
Roland’s hypnosis trick in which he uses a bullet that dances along his fingers.

Ka:
A force of fate and destiny. When someone doesn’t know what to do in a certain situation, they throw themselves into ka’s hands.

Kai-mai:
A friend of ka, someone who carries out ka’s will, like Father Callahan bringing Black Thirteen to the Calla from the way station.

Ka-mai:
Ka’s fool, a term Roland applies to Eddie. Mia says it is one who has been given hope but no choices.

Ka-me:
Someone who acts wisely.

Kammen:
The bells that accompany a todash journey.

Ka-shume:
A melancholy awareness of an approaching break in a ka-tet.

Kas-ka Gan:
Prophets of Gan or singers of Gan, for example, authors, like Stephen King and, perhaps, Robert Browning.

Ka-tel:
Roland’s gunslinger class.

Ka-tet:
A group of people bound together by fate, broken only by death or treachery. Cort believed that since death and treachery are also spokes on the wheel of ka, a ka-tet could never be broken. Roland says, “Each member of a ka-tet is like a piece in a puzzle. Taken by itself, each piece is a mystery, but when they are put together, they make a picture.” Roland believes he’s not a full member of the ka-tet because he’s not from New York. However, Oy is a member of the ka-tet, and even Mordred falls within its scope.

Kaven:
The persistence of magic.

Khef:
Life force. The sharing of water by those whom ka has welded together for good or for ill—by those who were ka-tet. “Water” and “birth” are other meanings. In Greek, the word “kefi” means “spirit.”

Ki’-dam:
Shit-for-brains. Dinky’s nickname for the warden of Devar-Toi, Prentiss.

Kra Kammen:
House of Ghosts. What the Manni call the Doorway Cave.

Ma-sun:
War chest, like the cave filled with munitions at Little Needle above Devar-Toi.

Moit:
A group of five or six people.

Over, the:
The God of the Manni. The primordial soup (Prim) of creation, the greater Discordia. Henchick sometimes refers to it as the Force, as in
Star Wars.

Pol kam:
A dance from the Great Hall days of Gilead.

Saita:
A great, magical snake slain by Arthur Eld on a quest.

Seppe-sai:
Death seller (i.e., gunslinger).

Taheen:
Creatures neither of the Prim nor of the natural world, but misbegotten things from somewhere between the two.

Te-ka:
Destiny’s friend. Used by a low man to describe Ted’s relationship with Bobby Garfield.

Telamei:
To gossip about someone you shouldn’t gossip about.

Ter-tah:
An unflattering term used by Munshun to refer to our world.

Tet-ka can Gan:
The navel, derived from the belief that Gan created the universe through his navel.

Todana:
Deathbag. The black aura Roland and Eddie observe surrounding King.

Todash:
The passing between worlds and the empty voids between worlds. The Manni consider going todash to be the holiest of rites and the most exalted of states. Some pieces of the Wizard’s Rainbow can send people todash against their will. Terrible creatures live in the todash spaces.

Todash Tahken:
Holes in reality (thinnies).

Trum:
Someone who can convince people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do, like stick their head in a rock cat’s mouth. Roland is trum.

Urs-A-Ka-Gan:
The cry or the scream of the bear.
2

Ves’-Ka Gan:
The song of the Turtle. Sometimes the Song of Susannah. Perhaps an analog of the Voice of the Turtle in
It
that tells characters when it’s time to act.

ENDNOTES

1
Hindu scriptures credit Kaal Purush or Aadi Purush for being the creative force from whose body the universe was born via his navel. The sky came from his head, the earth from his feet and all directions from his ears. “Gan Eden” refers to paradise in Judaism.

2
When translating this phrase, Roland comments that it was hardly the time for semantics in deciding whether the words mean “cry” or “scream.” King may be using this odd aside to subtly chide readers who complained that he got the title of Edvard Munch’s painting wrong in
Bag of Bones.
Commonly known as
The Scream,
King calls it
The Cry
throughout that novel. Many legitimate sources translate the painting’s title as
The Cry.

APPENDIX IV:
THE DARK TOWER ON THE WEB
*
Stephen King fan pages
APPENDIX V:
SYNOPSES AND NOTES FROM
THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

“The Gunslinger”

Thus ends what is written in the first Book of Roland, and his Quest for the Tower which stands at the root of Time. [This is the first time Roland is named.]

“The Way Station”

SYNOPSIS: The dark days have come; the last of the lights are guttering, flickering out—in the minds of men as well as in their dwellings. The world has moved on. Something has, perhaps, happened to the continuum itself. Dark things haunt the dark; communities stand alone and isolated. Some houses, shunned, have become the dens of demons.

Against this dying, twilit landscape, the gunslinger—last of his kind, and wearing the sandalwood-inlaid pistols of his father—pursues the man in black into the desert, leaving the last, tattered vestiges of life and civilization behind. In the town of Tull, now miles and days at his back, the man in black set him a snare; reanimated a corpse and set the town against him. The gunslinger has left them all dead, victims of the man in black’s mordant prank and the deadly, mindless speed of his own hands.

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