Last night at bedtime...

Last night at bedtime, I was reading Pippi Longstocking to my daughter — the edition illustrated by Lauren Child. We were reading the chapter "Pippi goes to school". One page has an illustration of an S-shaped snake with a largish single quotation mark next to it.

My daughter spotted the quotation mark and said, "Look! A snake poo!"

When she had stopped laughing hysterically, she said, "No, it's a whistle."

For a moment, I wished it was a snake poo or a whistle. Either one was more fun than what I knew the mark to be — a piece of punctuation I spend a lot of time explaining or making sure is in the right place.

When we stopped giggling, I carried on, rather than stop to explain what the symbol really was. That could wait a few years. As we read on, we found out that Pippi's full name is Pippilotta Comestibles Windowshade Curlymint Ephraimsdaughter Longstocking — at least in English. Bit of a strange name for a girl, but it does have a certain ring to it. I repeated her name a few times.

"Comestibles," my daughter giggled.

The last time I had come across the word "comestibles" was in the Monty Python sketch "The cheese shop". John Cleese says to the cheese-shop owner, played by Michael Palin:

"So I thought to myself: a little fermented curd would do the trick. So I curtailed my walpoling activities, sallied forth and infiltrated your place of purveyance to negotiate the vending of some cheesy comestibles." In other words: "I want to buy some cheese."

"Comesitible" is usually found in its plural form. It means simply "an item of food". It's from the Old French, according to Cassell's Dictionary of Word Histories. Then I remembered that the Spanish verb for "to eat" is comer. Same root.

I didn't explain all that either. It was time to go to sleep.