715: magpie Nov 22, 2016

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Birds are pretty easy to hate, and even if a few individual ones might be tolerable like crows, others like pigeons and apparently magpies are not. The word 'magpie' comes dates all the way back to Latin from a word, 'pica' which is now related to 'picus' which is a green woodpecker. The former tmesis, 'mag', is from Middle English dialect 'maggot the pie' and 'maggoty-pie'. At first you might think that the 'maggot' would be the same as the larva on account of nobody liking either one much, but actually it comes from a nickname for the 'Marguerite'.

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