this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
5 points (100.0% liked)
Vampires
275 readers
6 users here now
"Few creatures of the night have captured our imagination like vampires.
What explains our enduring fascination with vampires? Is it the overtones of sexual lust, power, control? Or is it a fascination with the immortality of the undead?"
Feel free to post any vampire-related content here. I'll be posting various vampire media I enjoy just as a way of kickstarting this community but don't let that stop you from posting something else. I just wanted a place to discuss vampire movies, books, games, etc.
🧛
founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The one I love is “dandelion”. I’ve heard that it’s still sometimes called dent-de-lion in some French regions?
I actually discovered this one while trying to read Watership down in English. Although it's a children's novel, I found it much more difficult to read than Dracula because of the nature-related lexical field.
Dent-de-lion is also used in italian (dente di leone), catalan (dent de lleó), spanish (diente de león), portuguese (dente-de-leão), en welsh (dant y llew), german (Löwenzahn), espéranto (leontodo), danish (løvetand), romanian (dintele leului), cornish, (dans-lew), norwegian (løvetann), and dutch (leeuwentand).
Dent-de-lion is more poetic than its common form "pissenlit" (piss in bed), used because of its diuretics properties. 😅
In France, I've never heard anyone use another term besides pissenlit. But, Wikipedia says that it's sometimes called liondent, cramaillot in Franche-Comté, baraban in Saint-Étienne or cramias in Romandy (Suisse romande).
Plants tend to have so many names, it’s confusing. Pissenlit is a bit gross, but more informative than dent-de-lion, I guess. It seems that they’re sometimes called pissabed or piss-the-bed in English, but I suspect that most English speakers wouldn’t understand if I used that word? If I ever end up visiting London again, I’ll try to place it in a sentence as a challenge. 😈
Trévoux’s dictionary says:
... I’ve just looked at many pictures of lions’ dentitions, and I really can’t see a likeness. The author doesn’t seem really convinced either, ha ha.
:-)