Other sources evoke the randomly assorted magpie's nest, which makes immediate and complete sense.
The pastry analogy is especially strong because a pied form is normally seen in a galley, which is identical to a baking pan or tray.
The Latin base for all of these is pica, which included crows and woodpeckers along with [mag]pies. The pica pole is the basic measuring tool in a printshop. And then, of course, we have the multicolored part of the trio. (Online etymologies disagree with this, but it seems to be an inevitable semantic convergence.)
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Well, what about the Pied Piper himself? Early illustrations show his costume as multicolored, not black and white. He could have been called the Harlequin Piper.
Why was he dressed in harlequin style? Do rats like multicolored surfaces? Was he trying to catch rats?
No and No.
Rats don't care about color.
They perceive colors rather like a human with red-green colorblindness, but their color saturation may be quite faint, and color appears to be far less important to them than brightness.His job was to catch children, not rats.
Although research has been conducted for centuries, no explanation for the historical event is universally accepted as true. In any case, the rats were first added to the story in a version from c. 1559 and are absent from earlier accounts.Some sources think the original Pied Piper was a fake "cause" for an epidemic that killed most of the kids in town, perhaps to distract attention from an identifiable real cause like negligence. So it all pulls together. Trump is the Pied and Pie-ing Piper, transforming orderly civilization into multicolored chaos and blaming RUSSIAN_BOTS and Deplorables for our pied nation.
Labels: #DeplorableLivesMatter, Deadthink, Language update, malign misattribution
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