Easy as pie

 

What better time than August, with its abundance of fresh fruit, to talk about the word "pie".

In Latin the word pica was the name for the bird we call a magpie. The French did their usual drop-a-consonant squishing job on this word and turned it into pie (still the French word for this bird). But after we borrowed it from French, we got creative.

First of all, we added the nickname “Mag”, short form for “Margaret”, to the word for the bird, so that now we call it a “magpie”.

Then, in the 1300s, we started to use "pie" for a pastry-enclosed dish of meat or fish and other ingredients. Although the etymology of our edible pies is uncertain, it could be related to the bird, in reference to either its spotted appearance or its tendency to collect different articles, pies being made of assorted ingredients. 

A couple of centuries later, we got the bright idea of putting fruit in pies, and by the 1800s pie was so popular that eating it had become the quintessence of something easy to do, hence "easy as pie", and one's reward in heaven was referred to as "pie in the sky".

To return to the Middle Ages, though, another development of the word "pie" will be of particular interest to indexers. 

A third type of "pie" was a book of directions for church services, listing how saints' feast days could be moved if they coincided with a big feast day such as Pentecost or Easter. Why was this book called a "pie"? Possibly because the pages had a very black-and-white blotchy appearance from unevenly spaced blocks of text. Other similar types of reference books also came to be known as pies or pie books, especially alphabetical indexes to records. There was even a verb in the 17^th century, to “pie” meaning to make an alphabetical index.
 

(Incidentally, pica the typeface is possibly related to this, perhaps having been used in one of these liturgical indexes, called “pica” in Latin.)

There are more unsuspected links between indexing and magpies, however. 

A "gazetteer" is a geographical index, for a map or atlas. This word was first used in 1693. This comes from the word "gazette" from Italian gazzetta.  The gazzetta was a type of newspaper first published in Venice about the middle of the 16th century; similar news sheets appeared a bit later in England. They seem to have been the tabloids of the time; the OED says "the untrustworthy nature of their reports is often alluded to by writers of that period; thus Florio [an early-17th-century Italian-English lexicographer] explains gazzette as ‘running reports, daily newes, idle intelligences, or flim flam tales that are daily written from Italie, namely from Rome and Venice’."

The Venetian gazzetta could be had for the price of a coin also called a gazzetta. But there is a possible  connection to gazza (magpie), as the publication was a gallimaufry [there, I've always wanted to use that word!] of trivial items like those gathered by the notoriously thieving bird.

When I revealed these hitherto undisclosed links between their profession and magpies to the Indexing Society of Canada and pointed out that a magpie was in fact a good symbol of what indexers do, flitting over a book and removing attention-grabbing items to their "nest" at the back of the book, the indexers were so tickled by it that they have adopted the magpie as their mascot and created this very handsome pin:

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