or pie, subs. (printers’).—1. Type, jumbled and mixed. [Ordinarily a compositor, when distributing type, reads a line or sentence and is enabled to return it to ‘case’ with expedition: with PI, however, each ‘stamp’ has to be recognised separately.] Fr. le pâté: faire du pâté = to distribute PI; German, zwiebelfisch (= ‘fish with onions’).—BAILEY (1728). Also as verb.
d. 1790. FRANKLIN, Autobiography, 176. One night, when, having impos’d my formes, I thought my day’s work over, one of them by accident was broken, and two pages reduced to PI.
1837. CARLYLE, The French Revolution, II. ii. iv. Your military ranked arrangement going all (as the typographers say of set types in a similar case) rapidly to PIE.
2. (booksellers’).—A miscellaneous collection of books out of the ALPHABET (q.v.).
Adj. (general).—Virtuous; sanctimonious: e.g., ‘He’s very PI now, he mugs all day’; ‘He PI-JAWED me for thoking.’ Whence, PI-JAW (or GAS) = a serious admonition; PI-MAN = SIM (q.v.).
1901. To-Day, 22 Aug., 124, 2. The one blot on her staircase was an individual who … had turned ostentatiously pious. “I ’ates them PI-MEN,” Mrs. Moggs was wont to say, “as often as not it’s sheer ’ypocrisy.”
