THE ETYMOLOGY NERD
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MAGPICAS

7/10/2017

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Roughly seven millenia ago, people on the Eurasian steppes used the word peyk as a blanket noun to cover all kinds of noisy birds. One of the eventual derivatives of this word was the Latin term pica, which described the bird we now know as a magpie. This word took a step towards its current state when it became French pie, then English pie. Later, people added a nickname for Margaret, Mag, to the front of pie to create magpie. This happened because Margaret was colloquially considered to be the name of a talkative female chatterbox, and the bird chirps a lot, so the connection happened, odd as it is. Now let's go back for a moment to the Latin word pica, also "magpie". Since magpies eat whatever they can find, including rubbish, pica later got adopted as a scientific term for a disorder where one eats nonedibles. This habit of eating jumbled things also brought about the definition for the edible pie, because early pies were cooked with a myriad of jumbled meats beneath the crust. SO MANY CONNECTIONS. Now, appreciate the irony that pie comes from PIE.
1 Comment
Rollin Kennedy link
5/31/2021 11:16:33 pm

Hi Adam,

I think we may be kindred spirits, of sorts. I have a blog that celebrates the love of words and language, and I like to follow the unintended stories created by misspellings, typos and simple misuse of words. I have been working on a post based on an article I saw that used the phrase 'often literally pie in the sky" when, in fact, there was literally no pie anywhere.

The idea for the post started out as a rant against semantic bleaching, with the word 'literally' in the cross-hairs.

I started following the evidence, which for me sometimes means following word-association rabbit holes to see where they lead. I started thinking of acceptable references to actual pies in the sky, and considered that a flying magpie could be such a thing, not (yet) realizing the etymology of the word 'magpie'. I then stumbled across the fact that my idea was more than just a play on words.

And then I saw your site, and was distracted for several minutes by exploring it. I love it! While looking around, I decided that Proto-Indo-European would be a good origin for the word 'pie' based on the acronym alone. And then, when I saw your blog entry for 'magpie' I thought it was too good to be true - the word does come from PIE! I can't even make this stuff up!

I am definitely going to keep an eye on The Etymology Nerd, and provide links to your site when appropriate. Keep up the good work.

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