I was muttering the abbreviation API (a, pee, eye) under my breath, and shifted over one phonetic stop to “ape pee eye”. The puerile interpretation is right up front, which did make me giggle, but it also made me question if there was anything that actually existed with that sound.
I searched Kagi for “Ape PI”, and the first result was the ancient Egyptian ruler Apepi. I didn’t find a pronunciation guide, but my guess is the name is pronounced closer to “Ah pep ee”. The most interesting thing I found in his bio was that, instead of building his own monuments, he would write his name on ones built by previous pharaohs. Rich and sleazy goes way back, am I right? There was also another Apepi who ruled lower Egypt about a century earlier, and seemingly nothing of interest survived about him. Or was he just a bore? History may never know, and, likely, never care.
Egypt is interesting, but I felt there was more out there. I thought maybe searching for “Ape P.I.”, or “Ape Private Investigator” would be fruitful.
It wasn’t.
However, I did find a thematically related item on that search, the DC comics hero Bobo T. Chimpanzee, otherwise known as Detective Chimp. A chimp detective is an Ape P.I. by another name, so I’ll belatedly call that fruit.
And that was about all I found searching around for some version of “Ape PI”. However, I thought there might be something in an almost homophone, so I looked up “Ape Pie”. I was prepared to be horrified, but of course, all I found was weed.
Thank you all for your attention to this important matter.