Let's leave aside the pastry for a moment (but I'll come back to it), and note that the "pie," before it was a dessert, was a bird, the bird that we now call the MAGPIE (scientific name: pica pica). The name for this bird in classical Latin was "pica," which came into French and then English as PIE.
The word PIED was also an adjective describing the particular black and white coloring of the pie/magpie or, by extension, any multicolored plumage or clothing. Hence, the PIED PIPER of [the German town of] Hamelin who, according to folklore, led the children away from the town with his pipe after the townspeople were not willing to employ him as a ratcatcher. This story seems to date from as early as 1300.
MAGPIE was a later development of the word PIE to refer to the bird, though pie continues to be an alternative name for the bird. The magpie, it should be noted, it not exactly a much loved bird. Related to the crow, and marked by its noisy chattering call, it is also known to take an hoarde bright objects.
All together, the bird became an ill-omen. The association of women with many of these negative traits--especially its noise and its hoarding tendencies--led to the affixing of "mag" to the beginning, probably short for Maggie or Margaret, probably around 1600. The word Pica, the Latin term for pie/magpie and in reference to the magpie's feeding on miscellaneous foods, became a word used in medicine for a tendency or craving to eat substances other than normal foodstuffs, esp. non-nutritive substances, seen chiefly during childhood or pregnancy or as a symptom of dietary deficiency.
Nearly every feature of this bird became an epithet for people. The term "magpie" came to be used in reference to idle chatters in general, too. "He was so fond of talking," said one 1895 story, "that his comrades nicknamed him ‘magpie’." In the twentieth century, magpie was a nickname for hoarders, particularly collectors.
Lovers of printing and type will be interested to know that the PICA, original Latin for the pie/magpie, and now a typographical term, may also derive from the bird. The term refers to "size of type of about six lines to the inch" or about 12pt font. It may come from the fact that Pica was the nickname for a 13th century ecclesiastical book, the Sarum Ordinale which may have had a pied appearance because of the unevenly spaced blocks of text.
So what does this have to do with our ordinary pie, which are are celebrating (if obliquely) today?
Where PIE meaning "magpie" was used as early as the 1200s, PIE meaning yummy pastry seems not to have taken off until at least the 1400s. Initially, there was a link. If we recall, the magpie was known for its spotted appearance and tendency to collect lots of different things. The dish, which originally consisted of any variety of ingredients, may have been named by association with the bird, as it too was made by throwing together lots of different ingredients.
The phrase "Pie in the Sky" seems to have been coined in a 1911 poem, "The Preacher and the Slave," by labor leader Joe Hill, which was circulated in little red songbooks put together by the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.--the "Wobblies"). Scorning liberal and populist promises, including those by the Salvation Army, he wrote:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
No comments:
Post a Comment