Fingers and toes

Now on my second pass of the Maigret story noticed at reference 1. A story, incidentally, involving the newly retired Maigret, the last story in the first of three cycles of such stories, a total I think of around 75 of them. I will find out in due course how he gets back into business: I suppose that Simenon had got fed up with his creation and tried to kill him off, but either shortage of funds or clamor of fans persuaded him to bring him back from the dead. I think Conan Doyle did something of the sort with Sherlock Holmes. Also that Ian Fleming got fed up with being joined at the hip to James Bond.

Shortly after the ether episode noticed at reference 1, we have Maigret back at Fernande's flat, where she get undressed but he does not, during which undressing she pauses to take a good look at her toes. I had not noticed first time around that toes is 'doigts de pied', with French having no separate words for fingers and toes in the way that we do. I think their arrangement is that 'doigt' is finger unless qualified.

Off to the OED where I am reminded that the corresponding word in English is digit, once similar in usage to that noted above. Plus it was also a unit of length, the thickness of a finger, about an inch. Plus a digit is also the sort of number that you can count on your fingers or toes, at least approximately - as we don't count zero and ten has more than one digit. Confusingly, the twelfth part of the diameter of a planet is also called a digit, the unit of magnitude of an eclipse.

PS: along the way, I find that the nearby 'dight' get a much longer entry, a very common word in old England, related to the Latin 'dictare', to dicate, compose, order or proscribe. With the word, its various meanings (for example, to engage in sexual activity, possibly preliminary rather than consumatory) and its relatives getting more than five columns, a lot more than that accorded to digit and its relatives.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/maigret.html.