- magpie Pica pica. The magpie is often perceived as a bird of ill-omen:
"A pyat! That's an ill sign," she said.
(ROBERT MACKENNA Through Flood and Fire 1925)
Still more ominous was the 'peat' when it appeared with one or three companions. An old rhyme about this bird runs "One is joy, two is grief, Three's a bridal, four is death"
(J. M. BARRIE Auld Licht Idylls 1888).
Given the uneasy relationship of the Clan Campbell with some of the other Scottish clans, there may also be a sense of the unwelcome messenger in the expression:
The pyet... is called 'the messenger of the Campbells'
(JOHN CAMPBELL Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands 1900)
Where English has the tell-tale-tit, Scots has the tale-pyot or clash-pyot as used by Sir Walter Scott in The Antiquary (1816):
I am no talepyet; but there are mair een in the world than mine.
The reaction to telling tales may depend on whether one is an authority figure or a member of a peer group amongst whom solidarity is a matter of honour. Ian MacLaren shows the teacher's ambiguous feelings towards an informant in Young Barbarians (1901):
He hated a 'tell-pyet', and yet knew that discipline must be maintained.
But clypes (as tale-pyots are perhaps more often called in Scotland) take note; in Samuel Crockett's The Smugglers (1911):
The tongues of 'tale-pyets', or tellers of tales, were scraped ungently with a piece of broken slate, and thereafter washed.
An early example of tale-telling, recounted by Jean White in Moss Road (1932), took place in the Garden of Eden, when
That gabbin' pyot, Adam, clypit to the Almighty about Eve.
See also Kae.