PICA

[Dr. Goodword]

• 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.)

[Perry]

"During her pregnancy, May O'Naise developed a case of pica for ice cream garnished with dill pickles."

Perhaps she picaed a peck of pickled ice cream.

[Stargzer]

Pica is also an unit of measurement in typesetting:

A pica is a typographic unit of measure corresponding to 1/72nd of its respective foot, and therefore to 1/6th of an inch. The pica contains 12 point units of measure.

The pica originated around 1785, when Françoise-Ambrose Didot (1730–1804) refined the typographic measures system created by Pierre Simon Fournier le Jeune (1712–1768). He replaced the traditional measures of cicéro, Petit-Roman, and Gros-Text with “ten-point”, “twelve-point”, et cetera.

To date, in printing these three pica measures are used:

The French pica of 12 Didot points (also called cicéro) generally is: 12 × 0.376 = 4.512mm (0.177in.)

The American pica measure of 0.013837in. (1/72.27in.), thus, a pica is 0.166044in. (4.2175mm)

The contemporary computer pica is 1/72nd of the Anglo-Saxon compromise foot of 1959, i.e. 4.233mm or 0.166in. Notably, Adobe PostScript promoted the pica unit of measure that is the standard in contemporary printing, as in home computers and printers.

...

Note that these definitions are different from a typewriter's pica setting, which denotes a type size of ten characters per horizontal inch.

Most typewriters, those old-fashioned printers where the word-processing was resident in wetware, had either a Pica (10 characters per inch) or an Elite (12 characters per in) typeface.

A Pika is something else altogether.