Word Stories: magpie

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

No doubt many of us have had the unpleasant experience of accidentally swallowing something that isn’t normally on the menu – a coin, perhaps, or a ring. Frenchman Michel Lotito, who you may have heard of under the name ‘Monsieur Mangetout’ (‘Mister Eat-all’), is in the Guinness Book of Records for a lifetime of consumption of metal, glass and sundry other items, including a whole aeroplane. While few manage to make a career out of it like he has, there are people, including some pregnant women, who develop an appetite for things such as chalk, paper or soil. And there’s a word for it: pica.

The disorder takes its name from the Latin word pica (magpie), which is also related to the Greek κίσα. That black and white member of the crow family (pica pica, the European magpie) has a reputation for eating anything that comes its way. It also has a reputation for stealing shiny things, and there is an old superstition in parts of the UK that the number of magpies you see in a group foretells the future. There is a rhyme connected to this idea, which appears in various forms. One common version runs:

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.

Until the 17th century, that bird was referred to as a pie, derived via French from pica. From then on, it became more commonly known as a magpie or megpye. The first element, mag or meg, is a shortened form of the woman’s name Margaret (which, of course, is why the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was known…affectionately…as ‘Maggie’, amongst other things). The reference is to the raucous, cackling call of the magpie, which was taken to resemble the noise of chattering women.

The bird has also given its name to other things that are two- or multi-coloured: a piebald horse has white and dark patches, while the Pied Piper of Hamelin wore clothes of many colours.