A friend of mine from Delgany wants to know where the word cop originated. He's one himself. Well, there are many theories about this word, most of them colourful, and wrong.
One is that although it may have been a shortening of copper, a word which seems to have originated in America, the abbreviation took place because the London police of the 19th century wore large copper buttons on their uniforms. Their buttons were made of brass: so much for that theory. I've also come across such nonsense as that cop stands for Constable on Patrol, and Constable of Police; and that London bobbies signed their arrest warrants with an abbreviation of these official phrases, something like Padraig O'Loughlin, C.O.P. They never did, alas.
Partridge's A Dictionary of the Underworld says that cop, a policeman, was first seen in print in Matsell's A Hundred Stretches Hence, published in America in 1865: `And where are the buffer, bruiser, blowen,/And all the cops and beaks so knowin'?' Cop was in print on this side of the Atlantic by 1865.
But did cop really come from copper in the first place, or is the reverse true? Partridge thought cop was simply an abbreviation. Webster's American dictionary agrees. Oxford has another theory, and I like it better. It is that cop, noun, is related to cop, verb, `to catch, to arrest'; and that the verb is a broad pronunciation of the Scots cap, "to lay hold of", which represents either Dutch kapen, "to take" or, through Old French, from the Latin capere, "to capture".
Copper, noun, also meant a convict who informs on his fellow prisoners. I am not sufficiently au fait with the criminal classes to know if this noun is still in use, but Michael Davitt - not my friend, the poet, but the Land League man - has the word in his Prison Diary. Copper, used as a verb, and meaning "to inform the police", was used by Edgar Wallace in that good thriller, Room Thirteen.
Copper, meaning time taken off a sentence for good behaviour, is still in use in New York. Partridge has it from both England and America and it comes from the sense "to turn state's evidence", I suppose. I heard it used by Jake La Motta, the former word middleweight champion, in Jimmy Neary's great restaurant in New York some years back. And that's enough name-dropping for today.
