Fun for Friday: The Wild Etymology of Magpie
Image by Nancy Schlegel from Pixabay
Useless Etymology recently posted about the origin of “magpie,” as in the bird, and it’s a wild ride!
First off, you’ve got “pie” as a name for a bird, which is derived from the Latin “pica.” Hang on, though. “Pica” is also a condition in which humans eat non-food items, normally because of a vitamin deficiency. Turns out, that’s connected to magpies, who will eat many things (though not non-food items … but not a lot of medieval bird observers were fastidious, so mistakes were made).
But what about the “mag” part of the name? In medieval Europe, “Mag,” as a nickname for Margaret, was given to women who talked a lot. It’s sort of the “Chatty Cathy” of that era. And since magpies are also noisy, they got this nickname added to their earlier name of “pie.”
Of course, this begs the question: are magpies related to the food version of pie? And the answer is yes. In this instance, it’s related to the “jumbled” coloration of magpies. Food pies also included many, jumbled things. Pie was also used for other jumbles of things, and it became part of the word “piebald” in that context (with bald being a Celtic word for “white,” and used similarly for bald eagles). So an animal (like cats, including several of my former cats) whose coat has white and other miscellaneous bits of color is a “piebald.”
So yeah. Pie is doing a lot of work out here. And all because people thought a magpie would eat anything.
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