Re: COP
Posted by Bruce Kahl on February
23, 2000 In Reply to: COP posted by Mary on February
23, 2000
: Hello again, Thank You for your reponse re: GOP.
: I'm not trying to be funny but I would also like to ask about
"COP" referring to a policeman.
The very earliest relation in English is cap, in sense of 'to arrest'
or 'to seize', found in two examples around 1600 and also found
in Scots. The form cop, probably a dialectal variant, first appears
in 1704 in a slangy sense, although there's a gap of 140 years until
the next known example. The word becomes relatively common in the
1850s. This long gap could mean that the 1704 example is a coincidence,
unrelated to the recent word; it more likely means that the word
was not in common written use until the nineteenth century.
The two likely possibilities for cap are that it's from Dutch kapen
'to take or steal', of Germanic origin; or that it's from dialectal
Old French caper 'to take', ultimately from Latin capere. There's
no convincing basis for preferring either of these origins.
The noun cop 'a policeman'is related to this. The 1844 example
of cop means 'to arrest', and by the 1850s we had evidence of copper
'a policeman', which surely comes from this cop and the agentive
suffix -er. Cop, also found in the 1850s, is just a clipping of
copper. The word copper does not come from the fact that policemen
had prominent copper buttons on their uniforms, and cop does not
come from "Constable On Patrol," or any other acronym.
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