The title made reference to a once-popular form of busking and fortune telling, one involving a person playing a barrel organ while a trained parrot would pick up predictions written on scraps of folded paper that were placed in an open box (the notes were known as "bilete de papagal" - "parrot tickets"). The use implied a very small format; Arghezi, who later adopted the "bilet" as an original form of short prose, explained his style choices in the editorial for the first issue (2 February 1928):