PICA

[Slava]

Today's word of the day:

• pica •

Pronunciation: pai-kê • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun, mass (no plural)

Meaning: A craving for unusual foods without (obvious) nutritional value, including a craving for non-foods, such as clay, paint, or wood.

Notes: Pica is a lexical orphan with no derivations or variations, not even a plural. It refers to abnormal or unusual eating patterns. In parts of Africa, the rural US South, and India, pregnant women are known to develop cravings for clay, possibly as a result of iron deficiency. Poor urban children are known to suffer from pica for paint chips. Pica is the term for a catalog of "phagies": geophagy "eating of clay or dirt", trichophagy "eating of hair", xylophagy "eating of wood", among others.

In Play: Today's Good Word usually refers to an abnormal craving for things nonnutritional: "Dolly Salvador chewed on her pencils so much we began to suspect she has a case of pica for wood." However, we need stretch the sense of this word but a pinch to make it fit cravings that are simply unusual: "During her pregnancy, May O'Naise developed a case of pica for ice cream garnished with dill pickles."

Word History: Pica is the Latin word for "magpie". The association of an eating disorder with magpies results from the bird's proclivity for collecting odd objects unrelated to eggs in its nest. The pie in magpie comes from the French descendant of pica, pie "magpie". We also find it in piebald "spotted (black and white)", originally "magpie spotted" from the coloration of the magpie. The "mag" in magpie came from the nickname for Margaret, Mag, short for Maggie. The association of nicknames with birds is long-standing in English; compare Mag pie with Jenny wren and Tom tit (now simply tomtit). Wondering about pie as in apple pie? It probably originated in the English word pie "magpie", too, since the first pies were pastry shells filled with chopped meat and mixed vegetables, again suggestive of the mixed oddities found in a magpie's nest. (We are grateful for Barbara Grace's lexical pica for unusual words such as the very Good Word she suggested for today.)

[npdckrsn]

Pica is also a 12-point type size that requires 10 spaces per inch in a line of type as opposed to elite. Keyboarding instructors--retired or otherwise--would recognize this if they used the old fashioned typewriters rather than the keyboards on a computer.

[bamaboy56]

npdckrsn: The 12-point type style on a typewriter is the first thing I thought of when I saw this Goodword, too. I guess we're showing our age. Who uses a typewriter anymore? I learned to type on the old manual typwriters that you had to be careful not to jam the arms of the letters if you got to going too fast. I thought my school was really high tech when the following year we were upgraded to the brand-new IBM Selectrics with the ball element that typed the letters. They weighed a ton! If you wanted to make multiple copies of a document you had to place sheets of carbon paper between each sheet of paper. What a pain it was when you made a typo and had to erase the mistake on each sheet of paper. Those were the days!

[Perry Lassiter]

My first writing assignments called for a dozen or more pp each with six carbons. I kept the last, which was useless. When word processors came, you could just mail the floppy disc and later email the whole thing. The computer made revising much easier since you didn't hae to retype a bunch of pages if the editor wanted changes.

[LukeJavan8]

Pica is also a 12-point type size that requires 10 spaces per inch in a line of type as opposed to elite. Keyboarding instructors--retired or otherwise--would recognize this if they used the old fashioned typewriters rather than the keyboards on a computer.

Exactly what I thought when I saw it on my subscription,
and was surprised it was not in the definition.