Etymology Corner – The Sound of The Police

Words by Allen Turing. Images from the BBC, Reuters and by Thomas Lawrence.

Robert Peel was the 19^th century’s Tony Blair. He was an MP who realised his party was out of date with contemporary society and sought to reinvent them with a new, more caring attitude; the New Tory party. They called themselves the Conservatives. It didn’t work; the party later split, Peel’s followers joined others to form the Liberal Party, the Tory old guard took on the Conservative name and became the political organisation that we all know and… well, we all know them.

But Peel had always been a social reformer and it was his actions as Home Secretary that led to the topic of this article. In 1829 he brought into creation the Metropolitan Police Force, leading to some of the most pervasive slang of the next 150 years.

After the establishment of a similar authority in Ireland a decade earlier, the locals had started referring to the police as peelers, which had an added derogatory flavour as it was also a slang phrase for strippers. In England, the police became known as bobbies, from the same source, with Robert Peel being the brains behind the venture. Nowadays, peeler has fallen out of fashion and bobby is really only used with a kind of misty eyed nostalgia for a better time when a policeman would stroll around with an inane grin on his face whilst absent-mindedly twirling his baton in a strictly non-threatening manner. His main duties were nothing more than giving a young scamp a cuff round the ear for scrumping and letting pregnant women urinate in his helmet.

As far as a bobby on the beat goes, the beat element is a now lesser used term meaning the patch or area that someone patrols. It comes from the action of the feet upon the ground as they pound along step by step. That’s why you tell someone to beat it. The American term flatfoot for a policeman also derives from the incessant walking involved in the job. This may also have added to Enid Blyton’s thinking when she named the policeman character in her Noddy books Mr. Plod. Of course, plod has now become yet another name for our police that has moved into wider use, most often used to portray them as a slow-witted bunch of pencil pushers.

Cop and copper are the most common inoffensive nicknames for the police these days. There is a fanciful story that cop comes from Constable on Patrol. Let me just give you a word of warning about acronyms; people like to make them up. Acronyms are, historically, quite rare and are virtually non-existent prior to the 20^th century. Even then, most of them will be of military origin, such as radar or awol. If someone tells you an acronym, be suspicious.

Another equally untrue story is that copper comes from the bright copper buttons or even the copper badges worn by police officers. The truth is less fanciful, but much more etymologically sound; to cop is to grab or catch, as in cop a feel, from the latin capere – same derivation as capture. Therefore, when you were arrested, it was a fair cop, and the one who arrested you was the copper. Later shortened to cop as a noun.

The police being referred to as the Bill or Old Bill has no clear derivation, the Metropolitan Police’s website alone offers 13 different possible explanations. My personal favourite is that it comes from a first world war cartoon character named Old Bill who was used on government posters to give out messages with the strapline, “Old Bill says…” This later came to be associated with the police either because of Old Bill being a kind of Blimpish authority figure or possibly even because the police favoured the militaristic moustache worn by Old Bill himself. I have been unable to find any of these posters though so I have my doubts.

The Met’s website also says that they have no evidence of the police being called the Bill prior to the 1970s, which does make that source seem less likely. The name might instead derive from the Flying Squad (from where we also get the rhyming slang term Sweeney Todd), whose official police cars were all issued with registration plates beginning BYL, leading to them being known as The Bill. The police website offers this story but gives no indication as to whether it has any basis in fact (surely they would know). Would they really mark their vehicles with such an obviously recognisable form of identification?

Interestingly, Flying Squad itself started out as a nick name that was later incorporated by the police officially. Its first recorded use was in The Daily Mail in 1920 in describing the new branch of detectives as a “flying squad of detectives picked because of their mobility.”

Finally we come to the most commonly used derogatory term for the police; pig. So where does this come from? Simple, referring to someone as an animal suggests particular qualities, usually negative. That’s why you call someone a bitch or a cow. The use of pig as an insult goes back many centuries but the first example of it referring to a policeman is in 1811 in regards to a member of the Bow Street Runners, a pre-cursor to what became the Metropolitan police.

So the boys in blue have been pigs for longer than they have been bobbies…