The Feel of a Word: magpie

The thieving bowerbird has led me to the thieving magpie.  As was often the way in the naming of Australian flora and fauna, the magpie was given that name because it bore a slight resemblance to the European magpie, a bird of the crow family, both being predominantly black and white.  The name breaks up into two parts, mag and pie.  The pie part is how the Latin word pica, magpie, has ended up in English having travelled through French. The Latin name for the bird came from pictus decorated, painted in various colours. Mag is one of the short forms of the name Margary, others being Magot or Maggot.  We are talking the 1500s here. It was thought that the European bird chattered like a woman so it was called Maggot-a-pie, or Maggoty-pie, and finally magpie.

The pie in magpie is related to pied which in the 1300s referred to a friar’s habit. Being black and white it was likened to the magpie, so pie + -ed.  The pie in piebald is also a reference to black and white, this time in the horse’s coat.  Bald in zoological terminology means ‘having a white head’.

And so in Australia the name magpie was given to a bird that belongs to an entirely different family comprising the butcherbird, the currawong and the magpie.  Our magpie gained a reputation for being talkative although it warbled whereas the European bird chattered.  It was inquisitive and could be persuaded to be a pet  relatively easily, although it was inclined to be ferocious in the nesting season, swooping on people, animals and other birds wandering near its territory.

The European magpie had gained a reputation for being attracted by shiny things and collecting these in the nest.  So from this magpie, applied to humans, acquired the meaning of ‘an opportunistic hoarder’.   These senses carried over to some extent into Australian English, and we probably grew to think that they related to our magpie as well, even though our magpie had never been a collector of objects.  As late as 1951 we have a description in Jimmy Brockett by Dal Stivens:

Every time I went to see young Joyce I took something or other, because she liked getting presents – scents, gloves, rings.  She was like a magpie and her bloody dressing-table looked like a pawnbroker’s shop.

It turns out that even the European magpie has been falsely accused. It has no particular love of shiny objects but when it happens to pick one up people notice, whereas when it picks up dull things like sticks and leaves, no one notices. It doesn’t arrange the shiny things in the way that the bowerbird does but just flings them into the nest along with twigs and grass and the like. So the perception of the magpie as a collector of shiny objects is actually a human construct.  When that misapprehension becomes popular culture and there is even an opera (by Rossini) called The Thieving Magpie, the poor bird hasn’t got a hope of clearing its name.

The colouring of our magpie provided a new line of thought where anything that was two-coloured, particularly if one of the colours was white, was described as magpie.  Cattle particularly were designated in this way.  An advertisement in 1830 lists four working bullocks, one being red and white magpie.   There are ads from the 1820s for a magpie bullock, a black and white magpie steer, a brown magpie cow.

This notion of the split colours moved across to lawn bowling where it seems that a drive, a bowl that goes straight up the green, was described as magpie if it wobbled so that the white ring on the side alternated with the colour.  This newspaper article from 1935 describes a newbie being taught the art of bowling:

Taking the bowl firmly in my right hand, I took a look at the jack and rolled my lump of wood straight up to it to be flat on kitty’s face. Spendy exclaims: “You magpied it!” “How?” says I. “Magpied it; took its bias off. That’s not how you should bowl; you’ve got to make use of the bias – right or left. Watch me.” I did and this time he sneaked up on the other side. “Now have another go,” says he. I did and once more my bowl wiggle-waggled right up to the jack in a straight line and lay down on the other side of kitty’s chest.

In 1938 there was a short obituary for a Mr Harry Moses.

Harry Moses had a drive of which much has been said, and written. It was the drive of a strong man, but, like that of Clive Abrams, one that was exceptionally “magpied”, owing to his old-time grip, or hold – the thumb on the side disc.

This term seems to be an Australianism, but one that is not used in lawn bowls today. That seems to be a pity.

The magpie (or maggie to its friends) is very popular among Australians, despite its swooping. Football teams with black and white colours are named after it and called ‘the Pies’, a high honour in Australian culture. Its call is loved and its intelligence respected.  The magpie can recognise up to 100 people that it trusts and it will not swoop them, so if you are worried about the swooping, just introduce yourself and make friends.

It seems, however, that it cannot escape being tarred with the same brush as the European bird.  The notion of it being a thief and a collector lingers on even though it is clear that this is a total confusion.  Indeed, in the early stages of COVID-19 when there was panic-buying of toilet paper, people were described as magpieing the toilet rolls. We need a campaign to cleanse Australian English of this transferred bit of British English that has no relevance here.