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Author Topic: Associating RL plants to DF crops  (Read 4469 times)

Snaake

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Re: Associating RL plants to DF crops
« Reply #45 on: September 14, 2013, 04:59:41 pm »

Sweet pods - sugar beets
Longland grass - wheat
Rope reed - hemp
Wild strawberries - wild strawberries (can be sown/planted in gardens, but not afaik finicky and of course the fruit are pretty small in reality, ca. or <1cm across)
Bloated tuber - (bloated?) potato (presumable no-one in DFverse knows how to cultivate potatoes, or only the elves do, never noticed humans or dwarves bringing them for trade, and the "bloated" part just comes from it being the biggest tuber they know of)

Dimple cup - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcodon_squamosus ...Finnish wikipedia lists it as being usable for blue dye, mentioned in other google hits as bluish-gray, in my mushroom guide book as "great shades of turquoise and blue" (translated). It's a symbiotic mushroom with the Scots Pine (which grows in climates ranging from mediterranean to taiga, so most ingame biomes would be eligible). Various other mushrooms can give shades of red, yellow, brown, or even green, but blue is rarer, it seems. As with other plant dyes, probably.

I've always thought of the prickle berry as a gooseberry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stachelbeeren.jpg

Those are way pricklier-looking than the gooseberries we have in our garden/the ones I've seen in Finland in general. But seems like a good fit. The other option is some kind of spikier blackberry/raspberry, to me.

Just realised that stinging nettles would fit rat weeds, I guess. They're definitely a weed, they can be brewed into tea (not booze though), but nettle stew is actually really good IMO. Tastes almost exactly like spinach. (also, gah! learned from the wikipedia article that the UK has an annual (raw) stinging nettle eating contest!). Stinging nettle fiber is usable for textiles too, and they could also fit blade weeds: "Nettles may be used as a dye-stuff, producing yellow from the roots, or yellowish green from the leaves." I'd lean towards rat weed though, since I imagine dwarves would be somewhat reluctant to pick it, like most humans probably are. :P

Rock nut could be canola?
Who in their right mind named the source for canola a Rapeseed?  No, seriously... wtf?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canola
Actually... that's apparently also a common name for the plant (as opposed to the scientific name, in latin). Canola is the name for a group of cultivars. You could also have a look at the wiktionary article, suggested etymologies include seizing/snatching for the act of sexual violence, but also stuff like words for grape stalks and scratching for the plant.
(beating a dead horse with the above, since I wrote the above before reading some other replies, but kept it anyway)...
Fair enough, and I did catch that (there's a blurb there as well), just... yeesh.  You'd think there'd have been a campaign to colloquialize it into something else.
That's how "canola" came about. Avoiding potentially offensive words happens too much to begin with. See "rooster" vs. "cock", for another example. Next we'll stop using "bear" for "tolerate" or "carry" because the animals are too scary, or something... and yes, I do realise rape is a horrifying, terrible thing (so let's not derail this thread with that any further). I'm just saying "the campaign" has already happened, since you didn't even know about said name for the plant initially.



But I don't think all, or even most, DF plants map to real-world equivalents. A few are really close, of course.
« Last Edit: September 14, 2013, 05:24:32 pm by Snaake »
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