Vetinari is essentially a Renaissance Italian prince and incessant plots against him are rather to be expected.
I don’t think it was his culture so much as the child’s misunderstanding of an idiom (or two or three that he’d mixed together in a haze of chemicals).
The potato statements were platitudes that he’d overheard - as a kid, he had attached some kind of mystical quality to them that wasn’t intended by the speaker.
IIRC, Tulip has a vague memory of his village or town being ransacked by soldiers, and the villagers (including his family) hiding in the church and getting very hungry. He hears his grandmother say, “As long as we’ve got a potato, everything will be all right”, and, being very young, interprets it in a religious sense instead of a practical sense.
You guys all get that Mr. Tulip and Pin and all the “-ing” is Pterry riffing on Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta’s characters from Pulp Fiction in general and Tarantino in particular, right?
I mean, that’s what I got from it. Maybe I’m wrong…
BTW, I read the potato thing as a sly nod to (Pratchett voice artist) Tony Robinson’s Blackadder character Baldrick and his turnip obsession. But I was probably overthinking things.
Rincewind also got a potato obsession at the beginning of Interesting Times
One my favorite PTerry bits of all time is the wallet (can’t remember from which character) that reads “Not a very nice person at all.”
That would be Mr. Pin’s wallet.
For me Pin & Tulip reminded me of Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint from Diamonds are Forever …
That wasn’t a literay device it was a real life event,I never realised just how much I enjoyed potatoes until I spent some time in the Far East,they weren’t unobtainable but they weren’t particulary common either.
As to the" ing" thing,I once worked at a holiday camp where the barstaff would say King hell instead of fucking hell so that customers couldn’t report them.
(It didn’t work the customers just lied and said that they had sworn within their earshot)
So maybe that practice was usual in some spheres.
Personally I thought that The TRuth was one of Pterrys best works.