I recently came across the staff report titled “What’s the origin of the piggy bank?”. (Not sure when it was published, but I gather it was sometime before 2005.) I’d like to respectfully suggest that the source that Science Advisory Board member Mac relied on for the information about the clay called “pygg” may have been inaccurate.
I wrote up the details in a blog entry, but the gist of it is that I can’t find any reliable source that supports the idea that there was a clay called pygg, nor that the idea of pig-shaped banks comes from containers made from pygg. The source that Mac drew on does say that, but doesn’t appear to give a source for that claim, and other reputable sources (such as the etymology department at Merriam-Webster) suggest that the pygg story is groundless.
I would be delighted to learn more about this, though. Do any of you have more information? As far as I can tell, most of the online discussions of the pygg story rely directly or indirectly on this Straight Dope piece, so it can be hard to find supporting evidence from other reliable sources.
Good call. The column states, on the sole authority, it would seem, of the Charles Panati book, that pygg jars had become pig banks by the 18th century yet no cites are given for this extraordinary claim. The earliest relevant cite in the OED (for pig savings bank) is 1913 and for piggy bank itself 1939. No mention is made of pygg clay and there is no trace in the OED of pygg jar.
That column certainly needs either substantiation or revision.
Having checked I see that I brought this topic up on the WordOrigins forum (the old site) in 2002. The Straight Dope column was referenced in that thread and samclem himself voiced similar misgivings there, noting the complete lack of 17th/18th century cites.
A friend also pointed out the OED’s meaning 2 of “pig,” which I hadn’t noticed; that’s definitely an interesting and useful connection. But yeah, it doesn’t provide any evidence that there was ever a kind of clay called pygg. And since the first cite for the spelling “pig” for an earthenware container goes back to 1488, not long after the first cite for “pygg”, I think that Straight Dope column’s bit about the Great Vowel Shift is probably not so relevant.
My CD-ROM copy of the OED doesn’t have the entry for “piggy bank”, so I hadn’t known about pirlie pig. Fascinating the OED now says “although a connection with pig n.2 also seems probable”; I’ll have to run that by the MW etymology editor, who said he didn’t know of any evidence connecting the two.
Yeah. And my OED has an additional quote for pirlie pig that provides further evidence that it isn’t shaped like a pig, even in the 20th century:
1905 Athenæum 28 Jan. 118 The pirley-pig or circular money-box pertaining to the Town Council of Dundee. This pewter money-box is in the shape of an orange or flattened globe.
At the suggestion of another friend, I’ve now used Advanced Google Book Search to find the pygg story in a book called How Did It Begin? by R. Brasch, published in 1965. Amazon reviewers of a more recent edition of that book complain that the author appears to have just made stuff up rather than actually doing any research. And I can’t find any other occurrences of the pygg story before that, searching back to 1800. So I kinda think that Brasch may’ve found out about the earthenware container called a pygg or pig, and assumed that it came from the name for a kind of clay, and assumed that it must be the origin of the term “piggy bank.”
For a few more details about a couple of the above items, see my followup comments on my blog entry.
elysdir. I sent you a PM yesterday afternoon showing you that the story was out there, in a newspaper ad{1964), a year before Brasch published his book(in 1966, NOT 1965).
I apologize for not having seen your PM until now; I’m new to this forum, and I almost never receive PMs on web forums so it didn’t occur to me to look for one. Thank you for sending it!
I can’t tell from your post here whether you’re upset with me; in case you are, just to be clear, I wasn’t intentionally ignoring or contradicting you, I just hadn’t seen your note.
Re the 1965 date: Google Books shows a copy of Brasch’s book (from Australia) that appears to have a copyright date of 1965. Here’s the search: (How Did It Begin? - Google Books)
The third snippet there is a little fuzzy, but I think it says “Copyright (c) 1965 by Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., Australia”. (But instead of “(c)” it has the c-in-circle copyright symbol.) There are other copies with 1966 dates, so maybe it was reprinted the following year? It’s possible that the copyright page in the 1965 copy shows the wrong date, or that it’s not the copyright line for this book (the snippet view makes it a little difficult to determine context), but it gives me the impression that that copy of the book was published in 1965.
Fascinating re the 1964 newspaper ad; thanks for telling me about that. Do you have a link I could link to from my blog?
The reason I guessed that Brasch had started the pygg story is that I did a series of Google Books searches going back from 1965 to 1800, and didn’t find any other occurrences of the word “pygg” referring to clay. So I’m really intrigued by the 1964 ad; I wonder whether there are other books that contained the story that just didn’t come up in the search (and/or that Google Books hasn’t indexed), or whether the story was circulating in other forms but hadn’t appeared in a book before Brasch.
(Edited a minute after posting to clarify the copyright symbol.)
I think you’re probably correct . He’s Aussie and it probably was published there first in 1965.
. Link not available unless subscribed to a paid newpaper database.
I’m a pretty savvy/experienced searcher. No other Google books. But, I’m also intrigued as to where the bank got the info for the ad. I’ll update you if I find anything.
I thought* pygg *was an old way of spelling pig, as seen in this old recipe for PYGGES IN SAWSE SAWGE from the Forme of Cury, originating in the 14th century.
More than one spelling there, but it’s seems strange to assume the term was derived from anything but a vessel shaped like a pig.