“pi the type”

See .

(1) The notion that the phrase "pie (or pi or pye) the type" has anything to do with pi the number is dubious, to say the least.

(2) I doubt that "pi" as a verb was used outside the typesetting fraternity.

(3) Pi the number is irrational and transcendental (in the mathematical sense), but that has nothing to do with randomness.

Einstein said “God doesn’t play dice” but much of mother nature can be emulated with a random number generator. Is Pi a random number sequence? Are there “Physics Foibles”? Numbers are the Supreme Court of science. What would Godel say?

As one who worked for newspapers in the old hot type days, I believe to "pi the type" or "pye" was to run one's fingera down the first two rows of the liontype machine to finish off a line of type and get the machine to spit it out. Operators could not back up to fix a mistake so they "pyed the type" to get rid of the spoiled line and start a new one. The spoiled type went back into a bucket to be melted down and reused. As a metaphor I guess it would suggest giving up on a lost cause and starting over.

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism ordered that the Nouvoo Expositor and the press it was created on be destroyed. "PI the type into the street" was the ordered and the type was pied that same day in June 1844 setting off a chain of events resulting in Smith's death by angry mob. I'm not sure if Linotype was around yet. Single letters of metalized type certainly were and were not easy to sort back into neatly organized upper and lower cases.

I have read - dozens of times, about "pi"ing type, from my research on 1875-1923 newspapers. Here is the latest example I just read from the Silverton Colorado Democrat-Herald of August 15, 1885, Page 3, Column 1, and I think this adequately defines what ye seek:

"He is a sanctimonious printer who will "pi" seven lines of type and never swear about it. He works in the Democrat-Herald office."

Clearly, to pi type is to place it into a state that would make one swear. This would be a jumbled mess that would then need laborious sorting as each letter must be examined to determine what it is and then placed in the proper bin. Then, in this case, the type must be reset by the printer.

I have never seen a reference to a "Hell box" as described above, but that sure makes sense, especially when the young boy that was stuck with all the messy jobs in a print shop -- including sorting type, was called a Devil... and clearly he would spend a great deal of time "in Hell."

I always thought the phrase "pi the type" meant taking a hammer and smashing the metallic letter to prevent printing. I had thought that "pi" was "pie" and so "pie the type" meant treating the metallic letters in the press like a pie (i.e, smash).

I remember the term as "pi the case", new it well. My boss called me clumsy.

My take was that the letter pi "π" was not often used, ergo as it was pretty useless for most compositing. When the type is spilled they are all, like π, pretty useless until they are sorted back into the correct trays.

As a child hanging out and occasionally helping out in our little Blue Ridge weekly newspaper, The Floyd Press (formerly The Mountain Boomer...named after a squirrel!) where my Daddy was the Editor & Publisher and my Grandmother set the type, I heard "Pi" more than once when a somebody dropped a form. It was cussing, as far as we knew...and we'd lay low while somebody would read the type backwards and figure out where it fit again.

From my print shop days in 8th grade junior high school fifty-seven years ago, pie the type means to dump the entire printers case of organized movable type onto the ground in a heap. It would take weeks to return the type to their proper boxes in the printers case. Thus, when Joseph Smith ordered his men to pie the type of the Nauvoo Expositor, he meant dump the cases of type on the street in an unorganized mess. They also destroyed the newspaper's printing press.

From my one semester class in the print shop at Olive Vista Junior High School 58 years ago, I remember that "pie the type" meant to spill the printers case containing type organized into small boxes onto the floor so that all of the type was mixed up. It would take weeks to unpie the type. Mr. Stormont would punish unruly students by having them reorganize pied, or spilled type. Thus, when Joseph Smith commanded his followers to destroy the printing press and pie the type of the Nauvoo Expositor that was printing the truth about the practice of polygamy in Nauvoo (three of my great aunts from the Johnson clan were involved in the practice and were supposedly plural wives of Joseph Smith), those followers threw the organized type onto the street in front of the newspaper office, making it virtually worthless. Usually, if type is spilled, new bundles of type are ordered and placed in their proper locations in the printers case.

I took a course in typesetting in the 1960s. We used hot-metal slugs which we pulled from a drawer. Each of the hundred compartments stored one symbol, perhaps up to 50 slugs of each. Sorting the slugs back into the compartments was an onerous but necessary task. The professor said, Whatever you do, don't pi the type (spill the drawer). Because it would take hours to re-sort thousands of tiny slugs.