How did it ever get started that police always spend their free time in the donut shop eating donuts? How did they get the tag “pig” or “fuzz”?
Ah. Life mysteries. Hopefully solved, right here.
Ringo
July 15, 2000, 10:57pm
2
A WAG on the donut shops: Until recently, in most communities, if you had a break to take @ 3:00 AM, there wasn’t much of anyplace to go besides coffee shops and donut shops (I don’t know why, but there were 24 hour donut shops around quite a while ago).
From Wilton’s Etymology Page :
Pig
The OED2 has pig being used as a term for a contemptuous person as early as 1546. The earliest cite for a police officer in particular is from the Lexicon Balatronicum of 1811, which defines pig as “a China Street Pig, a Bow Street officer.” The Bow Street Runners were an early police force of London, named after the street that housed their headquarters. The Lexicon Balatronicum also offers “floor the pig and bolt,” meaning to knock the policeman down and run. According to Partridge, by 1873 the term’s usage was restricted to plain-clothes officers. The term was an underground term, part of the criminal argot, until it emerged into the mainstream in the 1960s.
More on “fuzz” from the Word Detective :
Dear Word Detective: Please, what is the origin of “fuzz” (in the sense of “police”)? – Sidney Allinson, via the internet.
That’s a good question, but before we begin I have a question of my own. Where in the world are you hearing people refer to the police as “fuzz”? I know it’s supposed to be perennial youth (or as we say in New York, “yout”) slang for cops, but I have never heard a real person use it, unless you want to count Jack Webb on the old “Dragnet.” When I was growing up in the 1960’s, we called police officers many things, but mostly we just called them “cops” and we never, ever, called them “the fuzz.” As a matter of fact, anybody calling the cops “the fuzz” would have been instantly suspected of being a cop. It would have been a faux pas right up there with ironing your blue jeans.
Then again, “fuzz” apparently was genuine slang among drug users and other underworld types in the 1930’s, since it is listed in several glossaries of criminal slang compiled at that time. Unfortunately, no one, even back then, has ever been able to pin down exactly where “fuzz” came from. One hypothesis in American Tramp and Underworld Slang, published in 1931, was that “fuzz” was derived from “fuss,” meaning that the cops were “fussy” or “hard to please.” This theory seems a bit overly genteel.
Other theories aren’t much better. Etymologist Eric Partridge ventured that “fuzz” might have been rooted in the beards of early police officers, or perhaps in the idea of “mold” as a derogatory metaphor for the police. Yet another theory was that “fuzz” arose as a slurred pronunciation of the warning “Feds!” (Federal narcotics agents). None of these theories seems very likely.
My own hunch is that “fuzz” arose as a term of contempt for police based on the use of “fuzz” or “fuzzy” in other items of derogatory criminal slang of the period. To be “fuzzy” was to be unmanly, incompetent and soft. How better to insult the police, after all, than to mock them as ineffectual?
Many donut shops have a “cops eat free” policy. It’s cheap anti-holdup insurance, because most robbers will bypass a joint with uniformed cops inside.
Beatle, your WAG is very correct. The doughnut shops were the only places open way back when. It was not that cops liked doughnuts so much, but they LOVED coffee. There was only one place to get coffee at 4 in the morning- Doughnut Shop. Since there were probably not many shops in one town, all the cops on break in the area would be at the same place.
Nenno
When Houston adopted that same policy, I commented to a waitress serving some cops that they should not be driving seperate cars. Surprisingly, she talked to them and came back and told me they were in two cars.
I took a very long lunch to give time plenty of time to leave the area.