Saturday Rave: The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carol Collodi.

I've never got very far with watching the Disney version of Pinocchio.

It's the cricket.

Mostly.

Carlo Collodi's original story is wild and bonkers, as is Geppetto's home-made marionette Pinocchio. Pinocchio is forever being imprisoned, fooled, hanged, or eaten, but, hey, he always bounces back, and in the end (which wasn't Collodi's original ending, which was very sad) he makes good.

Oh, and that fairy. In the original story she isn't blue at all, she just has turquoise hair. She starts off as Pinocchio's substitute sister and ends up as his substitute mother.

Well, why not? It's that sort of a story. Wild and quite quite bonkers.

Word To Use Today: marionette. This word comes to us from French, and manages to be a sort of double diminuative. Marie has been 'shortened' to Marion, and the ette is another way of making something smaller (as in cigarette).

The original Pinocchio, though, was quite tall. For a puppet.


By the way, while I'm here, perhaps I should mention the Pinocchio paradox. Pinocchio's nose grows when he tells a lie, so what happens when he says "my nose will grow now"?

I don't know, either. It's interesting, though, isn't it.