79.hail-ripperthroat.10.0

I was out and about today, having a rare free moment. The humidity plant seems to be over its crisis, but there is still plenty of activity on the undergrowth, which led me on to thinking about the flora and fauna and the confusing (if you're reading this in the off-world) terms that you may encounter in my recordings. So... On stingers, scratchers, buzzers and biters: This is a translation thing, I know, so I wanted to add an entry to my diary to try and explain it, a little at least, because even to me it's confusing. Stingers, scratchers, buzzers, biters, slicers, slingers, dicers, bitchers, breechers, belters, filtchers, grinchers, haggers, that's just a brief summary of some of the words that are used in The Dark Peak to refer to critters -- both animal a vegetable -- and they're often used interchangeably. A stinger, in terms of The Dark Peak, always refers to what you would understand to be a wasp of the yellow jacket variety, which obviously (I say obviously, it may not be that obvious), doesn't exist in The Dark Peak -- there are no wasps in The Dark Peak. The lack of existence of wasps of the yellow jacket variety is, from what I have researched, the reason for the existence of the denizens at all -- the clown, Dyapnid, The Xin, The Nascenti and the others, would not exist at all (as they don't in the off-world. See the origin story). Yet there are plenty of stingers, both of the insect variety and the plant. What you might call nettles are known as stingers, so are what you would call a bee -- which here, are also referred to as buzzers (but also see below). A scratcher is a cat in the off-world, but here, can also mean literally anything that can give you a scratch -- like a briar, thistle or even the branches of a mountain ash. Buzzers, as noted already are bees, but also flys, or any flier which makes any sound at all -- yet you can be equally be buzzed by a thorn or a gorse bush, similar with biters: Usually small insects such as what in the off-world you'd call midges or mosquitoes, here they are the same, but because of the translation can sometimes mean vegetation like bind weed that grabs as you pass, or a plant that bites in the murk, such as yellow snough weed, as in: That snough come out of murk and bit me like a bastard.