Piet Piet, Magpies and Toast

My sister-in-law forwarded to me an OED word of the day email, with a note: "Hey! Do you know this word?"

The word was "piet", and as I scrolled through the various definitions, I was delighted to find that one of them was "the magpie, Pica pica."



I loved learning that a piet was a magpie. The only other piet I knew of was Piet Hein, a Danish polymath whose poetry I'd been given by my sixth grade teacher, one Mrs. Gordon. They're tiny little poems, snips of wisdom perilously close to doggerel, but fun none-the-less.

That book of poetry is somewhere in my house; I know not where. Happily, his "grooks" are scattered hither and yon about the intertubes. Here's one, silly but full of truth:

TIMING TOAST

There's an art of knowing when.
Never try to guess.
Toast until it smokes and then
twenty seconds less.