Happy Magpie Day

In honor of Pi Day, celebrated in our homophone-loving society as a holiday in celebration of pies, I thought it was appropriate to reflect on the lowly PIE.

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.

Lexicon Valley Tackles Scrabble

Lexicon Valley, the new Slate podcast, speaks about Scrabble and its curious relationship to the English language. Ultimately does it celebrate language or not? Should language lovers love it or hate it?

If you don't want to listen to the full half-hour-plus episode, here is my synopsis:

Host Mike Vuolo interviews Stefan Fatsis, who wrote Wordfreak. In the interview, Fatsis comments on the nature of competitive Scrabble players, confirming that they are just not the same as us everyday Scrabble lovers. The difference: the rest of us love words and try to make high scoring ones. The competitive folks, in contrast, like math and probability. They know what letters are left in the bag; they make sacrifices in some turns to work towards 7-letter words later and make moves that eliminate the risk of opening up spaces for others. They try to memorize tons of words and stems of words that can be made into words when another letter is added: "an arsenal of language." It is ultimately a "limited use of language" oriented toward a very particular purpose.

Competitive Scrabble players build all sorts of skills. Of course the main one is rearranging letters and knowing whether there is likely to be a word contained in a particular group of letters. Some players like to learn definitions, but many don't. Fatsis himself says that he finds that it is too much for him--the goal is cramming words into one's brain and pulling them out when needed.

Lots of people hate Scrabble's reliance on super-obscure words that no one ever uses. What the game does--for the die-hards, anyway--is reduce language to a series of logical problems that can be solved by finding the optimal mathematical solution. To do so requires keeping track of what's been used already and what is yet to be played, what balance of vowels and consonants remains, and what one is likely to get on the next draw of letters.

Fatsis stresses, however, that a true word-lover can love Scrabble, too: Scrabble requires that we think of language in a way that is broader than daily usage, than active vocabulary. Perhaps it is cool that there are so many words in English that don't get used everyday. On another level, players can hope for something transcendent to happen. Something beautiful like placing whole words aligned with other words, using great or interesting words, building interesting shapes. Though technically Scrabble is all about utility, there is this beauty that can break through.

The conversation goes on to consider a great controversy about the Scrabble dictionary itself: there is a different American dictionary and international dictionary.

In 1978, the official American Scrabble dictionary 1st Ed. came out, but a different dictionary, with a broader lexicon, was being used abroad. This was in part because Hasbro owned the rights in North America, but Mattel owned them elsewhere. As Scrabble playing has grown abroad--for some reason South East Asia, and Thailand in particular, has become a hotbed for the game--the North American players who don't know the international dictionary or don't always play with it have fallen behind. Now there's pressure by some for North America to adopt the international lexicon, but others push back. Some say that it is flawed or too permissive, with too much archaism and an excess of words from Scottish and Welsh and even Maori. The controversy boils down to this: what is English? How broad is it? Does it include its full history and its full global spread? On the other hand, does an even further expanded lexicon make the game too easy? This was a critique when QI and ZA were added to the American Scrabble dictionary--now it is much less likely for one to be stuck with one of these two high-point letters. On the other hand, there have been some artificial limitations. Hasbro has also excised "offensive" terms from the dictionary, words including "jew," "jesuit," "fart," and "kike." After some protest, however, they now continue to allow those words in competition, on the basis of supplementary lists that include no definitions. For competitive players, after all, definitions are irrelevant: it's all about math and letter combinations.

Tender are my Muscles, Tender is the Truck

I got a massage today and the massage therapist said to tell her if my muscles were feeling tender.

Legal tender? I wondered, and with my face in that soft doughnut thing I started wondering about the word TENDER.

TENDER means soft, or easily broken. I found out that it comes from the Latin tener/ tenerum with cognates in all the Romance languages. This word was very popular in describing youth and femininity, both of which were long considered soft by nature. A 1382 translation of Deut. 28:56, renders its description of the terrible curses that will follow if the people do not follow God's laws, saying that even "A tendre womman and a delicate" will begin to begrudge the husband she loves. That word today ("rakh" in Hebrew) is today most often rendered in English as "gentle."

If "tender" is no longer so often used to describe women, however, it is still commonly used to refer to youth, often in the phrase "tender age." In fact, the Hebrew phrase "ha-gil ha-rakh" or "the tender age" using the same word "rakh" as in the verse from Deutoronomy cited above, is the common term used in modern Hebrew for preschool aged children.

John Keats famously used the phrase "Tender is the Night" in his 1819 poem "Ode to a Nightingale:

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

F. Scott Fitzgerald used the line as the title of his 1934 novel.


None of this, to my knowledge, has anything to do with legal tender, or, for that matter, to the use of TENDER, to refer to a truck. In modern Hebrew, I should point out, the word tender is the usual word for a pick-up truck. What's up with that? We'll get to that in a second.

But first: on back of our dollar bills there is the phrase, "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." Is it tender like my muscles? It turns out, no, it is from a different Latin root.

TENDER in this sense (and, interestingly, in the truck sense also) is from a very common Latin stem, tendere, meaning "stretch," the same one that gives us tend, extend, tendency, tendril, intend, and others. Interestingly, of all of these forms, tender is the only one that preserves the "er" ending of the Latin and the French through which the verb came into English. It is relatively rare for Latin-French verbs to preserve these -ar/-er/-ir endings in English.

to tender (v.) is to offer formally, i.e. to stretch out one's hand with something. Thus we have the phrases "to tender one's resignation" or "to tender an oath." In the sense of money, it means to present formally to satisfy a debt or liability. The noun, that which is offered in such an offer, comes from the verb and seems to date from as early as the 16th century, but the OED has "legal tender" only from 1740.

So what about the trucks?

Back to the root "tend": to tend to someone is to stretch out one's hand to help them. Thus, a "tender" is anyone who helps someone else (a nurse, attendant). By extension, the term came to be used for a vehicle that helps out another vehicle. By the late 17th or early 18th century, tender was being used to refer to a small ship that was employed to attend to a larger ship. London Gazette, 1675: "Here are arrived five Dutch Men of War, and four Tenders." The British Royal Navy then started using this term for a vessel commissioned to act (in any capacity) under the orders of another vessel.

By the 19th century, a tender was a small ship used to carry goods or passengers from a larger vessel, often when that larger vessel wasn't able to reach the shore. This usage was then extended to trains, where the tender became a carriage specially constructed to carry fuel and water for a locomotive engine. Tenders were also names for support vehicles used by the British during World War I--some of the better known were the one's produced by Crossley Motors: the Crossley Tenders.

We can start to see here how "tender" could be the name for a vehicle used to carry things around. But the use of "tender" for a pick-up truck seems to be present only in Hebrew. The British apparently used Crossley Tenders as part of their police force while they were in control of Palestine between World War I and 1948 and, after it was adopted into Hebrew, came to be used as the standard name for a pickup truck.

These kinds of tenders were important enough in the legacy of Jewish settlement in Palestine, specifically around Jewish attempts to protect Jewish settlements, that the tender entered the Hebrew cultural tradition in the form of a 1939 song, "Ha-tender nose'a" (The Tender Drives)," which had several versions. You can listen to several of them here.

Here's a translation of the chorus of one the versions, from 1939, by Yaakov Orland:

The tender drives, the tender runs along here.
From the shores of the Dead Sea to Ein Ha-Mifratz [in the North]
The night, the night is dark.
The tender--what is one night from another?

The tender--open your mouth in song
Our heart is wide and young.
With fire before us and fire behind.
The tender! Don't stop!

Let the G's Fall: Mitt's Southern Strategy

What does it take to win over southerners? Politico reports on Romney's efforts in the linguistic realm in advance of the Mississippi and Alabama primaries.

Meet the new Mitt Romney — the grit eatin’, critter stompin’, country music lovin’, y’all sayin’ presidential candidate.

Apparently it means dropping your final g's and saying "y'all" quite a bit.

There have been tons of posts on politicians dropping their g's to try to achieve down-home, authentic, southern, folksy appeal. Language Log has been at the forefront, chronicling this phenomenon in Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, and generally.

Obama has been cited for dropping his g's when talking to the black community. (See here). And there was some controversy when Obama called on the African American community to "stop complaining" in a September 2011 speech and the AP chose to transcribe the gerund in that sentence without its final G.

According to Politco, Romney has been traveling quite a bit with campaign aide and 2009 Ole Miss grad Garrett Jackson.

“He’s now turning me into an, I don’t know, an unofficial Southerner,” Romney said in front of several giant oil-drilling rig platforms sitting at the port. “I’m learning to say ‘y’all.’ I like grits. Things are, strange things, are happening to me.”

Romney's linguistic transformations seem not to come naturally to this northerner-to-the-bone. In fact, moving around the state of Mississippi and meeting with the governor, it seemed that Romney couldn't stop calling attention to how odd it felt:

“The governor said I had to say it right: Mornin’ y’all. Good to be with you,” Romney bantered.

Politico's unofficial polling of some individuals at Mitt's campaign stops yielded some mixed reactions to the newly acquired southernisms.

Jimmy Carlson, a Birmingham salesman said, “We know he’s not a Southerner. But at least he’s trying to seem that way.”http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

But Martin Perkins, a lawyer from Jackson, wasn't so convinced:

“That might be perceived as disingenuous,” Perkins said. “Maybe he should probably just be Mitt and let the chips fall where they may to some extent.

Let the chips fall, but not the g's.

Update: See Charles M. Blow's commentary on Mitt's southern strategy: "Dabbling in dialectic speech won’t quench people’s thirst for straight talk. Being called warm and comfortable doesn’t remove the gut feeling that you are cold and rigid. There is something missing from the core of the man, and people can see straight through him."

Poisonous Fish

POISON, from POTION, a drink, later, a potion/poisonous drink, from Latin potare, "to drink."

I always thought that the French word for fish, poisson, looked just a bit too much like "poison," and that this was unfortunate. But that's just a coincidence. It's actually cognate to fish/piscis, where we get the zodiac sign Pisces and the Spanish get their pez/pescado. And the pescatarians get their pescatarian diet.

There are of course quite a lot of poisonous fish out there. You must be careful.

The QWERTY non-effect

Wait, what? Because there are fewer letters on the right-hand side of the keyboard, we subconsciously prefer words that have more letters on the right-hand side and are thus easier to find and type, so says a new paper by linguists Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto.

But Language Log checked it out, and it seems like the effect is not statistically significant.

To Each People in Its Own Language

The Persian Empire in the Book of Esther was a multilingual one.

Esther 1:22 says:

He sent dispatches to all parts of the kingdom, to each province in its own script and to each people in its own language, proclaiming in each people's tongue that every man should be ruler over his own household.

This was the age of the multilingual empire, when power was exerted not through a Persian-only strategy but through the effective implementation of a multilingual policy.

English-only advocates, take note.

Let's not overlook, though, that egalitarianism in one realm (language) was used in service of anti-egalitarianism in another (gender). In the wake of a showing by an assertive queen (Vashti), the message (to the multilingual men) was clear: you should be rulers in your households.