Suffering succotash!

For some reason it never really occurred to me that Sylvester's catchphrase might refer to a real thing, certainly not to a thing you might find stacked in the supermarket.

Even after seeing it there in the freezer I wasn't exactly sure what it was - Mrs Walles thought it might be some kind of green leafy thing, while to me it evoked some kind of delicious squash, but the outside of the bag showed corn and beans.  And it turns out that's just what it is: a mixture of sweetcorn and lima beans, boiled.  It's basically mixed veg (though there are slight variations, according to Wikipedia - which I must stop relying on so much).  It's from the Narragansett word msiquatash - I actually looked that one up in the dictionary.  On a hunch I also looked up "squash", and it too comes from Narragansett, this time asquutasquash.

Curious to know who these people were who made such a contribution to the language of food and cartoon cats I looked up Narragansett (in the dictionary, honest, but this way you can read about them, too) and found that it was a language once spoken by various tribes in New England and Long Island, which is fascinating especially since Mrs Walles hails from that part of the world.  I see on the Wikipedia page that they're trying to revive the language, well, they've got two words to build on right there.

Ah, what an amazing language English is.  At least the borrowed words from far-flung parts of the world show that the British took the time to talk to people before they seized their land.