I was enjoying this two-decade-old post about life as a printer’s devil and chuckling at dungbeattle’s comment “Never ever eat a printers pi, you may em, en or be a pica, otherwise you will be hot leaden it” when I wondered “what’s the origin of that sense of pie, anyway?” A visit to the OED (entry revised 2006) informed me that nobody knows:
Origin uncertain; probably transferred use of pie n.² [A baked pastry dish], with reference to its miscellaneous contents. Compare French pâté mass of confused type (1690), spec. use of pâté pâté n.³ [A pie or pasty usually filled with finely minced meat, fish, vegetables, etc.; A rich paste or spread made from finely minced and seasoned meat, fish, or vegetables, usually cooked in a terrine and served cold.]
But the citations are fun:
1. Printing. A mass of type in confusion or mingled indiscriminately, such as results from the accidental breaking up of a form of type.
1659 A Corrector, a proof, a revise,..pye all sorts of letter mixed, Correttore, &c.
J. Howell, Particular Vocabulary §li, in Lexicon Tetraglotton (1660)1688 Pye, when a page is broken, those broken Letters are called Pye.
R. Holme, Academy of Armory iii. ii. 1241770 Before he [sc. the young compositor] proceeds, he should be cautioned;..3. Not to distribute his case too full; because it creates pie.
P. Luckombe, Concise History Printing
[…]1845 This same Dictionary..(gone to pie,) as we may call it.
T. Carlyle in O. Cromwell, Letters & Speeches vol. I. 251869 The simple fact that they knock into pi,..about two columns of matter each week, is of no particular consequence to them.
Vindicator (Esterville, Iowa) 13 January in American Speech (1928) 2041903 There was ‘pie’ to the left of us, ‘pie’ to the right of us..and what had only taken a week to ‘set up’ took nearly a month to ‘dis’.
‘No. 7’, 25 Years in 17 Prisons x. 961996 The jumble of lead usually referred to as Printer’s Pie.
Jerusalem Post (Nexis) 13 September 312. A jumble, a mess; a state of confusion. Now rare.
1837 Your..Arrangement going all (as the Typographers say of set types, in a similar case) rapidly to pie.
T. Carlyle, French Revolution vol. II. ii. iv. 1191841 We were thrown into ‘pie’ (as printers would say,) in an instant of the most appalling alarm.
G. Catlin, Letters North American Indians vol. II. xli. 531897 To make pie of the European arrangements for securing peace.
Spectator 30 January 162/21920 The House made pie of its professions of zeal for economy in the afternoon.
Times 3 March 16/5
Sense 2 seems to have faded away around the same time as “It geed,” and I mourn the passing of both of these punchy expressions.
I started printing at about age eleven or twelve. Bought my first press, a late 19th c. Sigwalt with colorful Singer sewing machine like decals. Installed it in my mother’s basement laundry room and declared myself a commercial job printer.
I’d been taught well, so I never pied type in a job stick or galley or even a chase. Don’t ask me about a jostled elbow and a California job case. Many hours later the 6 point Goudy Old Style was unscrambled.
While in college I had part time employment as a printer’s devil for a small job shop. My first assignment was to pick up a pie of Times Roman and get it back into a job case. Tweezers were suggested. Yes, 8 point agony.
Pies and printers are also connected through William Caxton’s ca. 1477 flyer, the oldest known printed ad for a book publisher: “If it plese ony man spirituel or temporel to bye ony pyes of two and thre comemoracions of salisburi vse…” That pie (OED n.³) is the Ordinale of the Church. Its etymology is as obscure as that of the printer’s pie; OED,
Of pica, then,
probably transferred use of pie n.² [A baked pastry dish]
Itself of uncertain origin, as discussed here under (MAG)PIE (printer’s pie was also mentioned there).
I learned the printing term from this:
Slug 1 grabbed the mill and he ground out the slugs—
Etaoin etaoin shrdlu—
But sadly the floor men did waggle their mugs—
Etaoin etaoin shrdlu.
“We know what’s a-comin’,” they sadly did say;
“Every slug is a ‘pi-line’ and this is Fri-day;
We’ll be stuck sure as hell an’ we can’t git away,”
Etaoin etaoin shrdlu.
I haven’t seen it in dictionaries, but pie was used as a transitive verb. Pie~spill
He didn’t tighten the quoins and pied two pages worth.
Oh, it’s in the OED as pie verb⁴:
I haven’t seen it in dictionaries
Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, and dictionary.com all have the verb, spelled “pi”.
You can find that “ecclesiastical directory” sense in the preface to the first Book of Common Prayer (1549), bashing the late-medieval status quo: “Moreover the nombre and hardnes of the rules called the pie, and the manifolde chaunginges of the service, was the cause, yt to turne the boke onlye, was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times, there was more busines to fynd out what should be read, then to read it when it was faunde out.”
I just have to ask: What, if anything, is the standard pronunciation of “etaoin shrdlu”?
Merriam-Webster says “ˈet|ēˌȯinˈshərdˌlü, ˈēt|, ˈāt|, |əˌȯi-, -n(ˌ)shərdˈlü,” which seems to cover the common versions (basically ET/EET/ATE-ee-oyn SHIRRED-loo or shirred-LOO); Wiktionary gives “/ˈɛtiɔɪn ˈʃɜːrdluː/, /ˈeɪtɑːn ʃrədˈluː/,” but the second one seems stupid and I don’t believe more than a few people say it.
Why would the “a” make an “ee” sound? I’ve always mentally pronounced it /ɛˈteɪɔɪn/. And how does one stretch “shrdlu” to three syllables to fit the meter of “Tit Willow”?
To my mind, hopelessly corrupted by Continental orthographies, it’s [ˌɛtɐˈʔoin ʃɹ̩d.ˈlu].
This 30-minute video, Farewell to Etaoin Shrdlu, documents the last day of hot-type printing at the New York Times, in 1978. Linguistically, the accents are interesting. Etaoin Shrdlu is pronounced by the narrator, NYT Linotype operator Carl Schlesinger, at 21:31. He says [ei.tɑ̈ːn ʃɹd.ˈlu]. Also, I’ve never heard matrices pronounced with an /æ/, only /ei/ (5:38, 5:47). Printers vs. mathematicians?
To my mind, hopelessly corrupted by Continental orthographies, it’s [ˌɛtɐˈʔoin ʃɹ̩d.ˈlu].
Same-ish idea, but a different stress and some differences on the vowel representation; I’d tentatively write it as [ɛˈtao̯in ʃɹ̩d.ˈlu], though I’m not sure of some of the vowel qualities here.
Why would the “a” make an “ee” sound?
At a guess, for the same reason it does in karaoke? The syllable sequence a-o is unnatural in English, and tends to morph into something more familiar (when the a is unstressed and follows a stressed syllable). Similarly the letter a is often pronounced /i/ in Israel and Raphael. See comment from Bob Ladd at Language Log.
(In my head I pronounce etaoin as “Etta-oh-in”, almost like Y.)
What I write as [ɐ], my native neutral /a/, might be a little more front than what trained phoneticians usually mean by [ɐ]. Maybe I should call my pronunciation [a̽], and Schlesinger’s [ɐ] instead of [ɑ̈].
I might well use a more Continental a too, except that my pronunciation for it is an extension of the pronunciation I used for etaon rishd as a kid, when I was more likely to think of a as /eɪ/. I even thought cacao rhymed with mayo.
Matrices as homophonous with mattresses is a new one on me. One datapoint not enough to say whether it is (or rather was) the way men in that trade pronounced it versus just one man’s idiosyncrasy. “Matrix” in the singular comes up in lots of different occupational contexts other than linotype machines and math, but maybe the plural is rarer?
Why would the “a” make an “ee” sound?
At a guess, for the same reason it does in karaoke?
And, in my limited experience, Coraopolis, Pennsylvania.
MW and AHD both have TRAP as variant for FACE as first vowel in matrices. OTOH the third vowel is FLEECE, so not homonymous with mattresses.
For FLEECE a in karaoke etc., cf. PRICE a in paella, rhyming with Viyella
Cacao rhyming with mayo is in fact an approved pronunciation in most dictionaries, although in reality I’m pretty sure it’s rare. Apparently it was more common in the past: it’s the only pronunciation in the Century Dictionary.
I probably did check a dictionary for the pronunciation, and certainly no one commented when I used that pronunciation in my school presentation on cacao. But I certainly wouldn’t say it that way now.