Police

Until the comparatively recent past, there were no formal police. Cities were walled for their own protection; by order the gates were closed and a curfew was maintained all night. Rudimentary protection was supplied by the Watch , a term dating from the fourteenth century.Even in eighteenth-century London there were savage gangs like the Mohocks roaming the streets and burglary was rife. Highwaymen presented a continuing threat in fact and in literature. Consequently, ordinary law-abiding citizens welcomed the passing of the New Metropolitan Police Act in 1828. From the name of its prime mover, Mr. (later Sir) Robert Peel came the affectionate names peeler (1817) and bobby (1851). However, since peeler originally referred to the Irish Constabulary, the name was less popular: the slogan “Kill all Peelers” is still current in Northern Ireland. In general the informal terms for the Police, such as copper (1846), were in the past neutral, polite, or affectionate. However, underground slang was not complimentary: Pig is defined as “a police officer” in the anonymous Lexicon Balatronicum (1811), a recycling of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) with an illustrating quotation: “Floor the pig and bolt” for “knock down the officer and run away.” Amazingly, the term seems to have lain dormant for nearly two centuries until its resuscitation in the social and political upheavals in America during the 1960s, although Stuart Berg Flexner gives 1848 as the date of the first American instance.

“Kill the Pigs!” became an inflammatory slogan in the United States, first of the Civil Rights Movement and then of radical students. The rioting surrounding the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 was reported by the New York Times in these terms: “Chants of ‘?the pigs’ and ‘dirty pigs’ drowned out exhortations from the speaker’s stand to ‘sit down.’” (The U.S. Government Printing Office refused to print the Walker Report Rights in Conflict (1968) covering these events because of the Chairman’s insistence on faithfully transcribing the terminology verbatim.) Norman Mailer’s “informal history” of the two conventions, Miami and the Siege of Chicago traces the development of pig as a term of political insult with slogans like “VOTE PIG IN 1968” (1969, 133).

As with many terms of insult, the word has become used loosely of any authority figure. In the buildup to the tragic shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, according to James A. Michener, “Girls were particularly abusive, using the foulest language and taunting the Guardsmen [the Ohio National Guard] with being ‘shit-heels, motherfuckers, and half-ass pigs’” (cited in Rawson 1991, 2). In the United Kingdom the radical alternative magazine Oz carried an article on the administration of justice by one “Ned Ludd” defining “piggies”: “pigs are sexually repressed, politically ignorant, psychologically stunted persons who do a very good job of being automations [ sic ] of state repression” ( Oz 38, 23). In general the term has become less current in Britain in recent decades.

Also predominantly American in usage is the less provocative term fuzz , which the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang marks as “origin unknown,” but recorded from 1929 in Irwin, Tramp and Underground Slang (1931): “a detective, prison guard or turnkey.” There are, of course, many slang terms for the police: Jonathon Green gives over sixty in his Slang Thesaurus (1986). But most of them are underground argot or code words used by particular groups, rather than terms of insult.