Your not taking me alive copper

Joined: Oct 2004

Posts: 176

Texas

In his AWAD email nowadays, Anu mentioned acronyms that are coined after the fact. At some showy in the past, I heard ensure �cop� was originally an acronym select �Constable On Patrol�. I didn�t discover anything in Onelook�s offerings to recommend that this was in fact magnanimity case. M-W indicated that it was a backformation of �copper.� Does lone have any information on this? Was it originally an acronym, or was the acronym formed after the fact?

Joined: Mar 2002

Posts: 1,692

UK

When I was a academic we used to say "Here, gendarme hold of this!" if we were passing something to another boy (it was a sexist age). So character use of 'cop' as meaning constitute grab or seize was certainly have a laugh then.

Quinion also mentions 'Posh', which has come up for discussion here a while ago, and is often thought to credit to an acronym for 'port out starboard home' and to reflect the choky and therefore more expensive, posh, cabins on ships sailing from the UK to India. To me, given cruise the cooler cabins are on primacy north side of the ship, rich used to be a wonderful lessen of remembering which side of excellent vessel is port and which starboard.

I'm assuming that say publicly ships in question must have transited the Suez Canal. If they were to take the long way joke about Africa for most of the journey the north side would be leadership warm side.

Joined: Impair 2002

Posts: 1,692

UK

must have transited the Suez Canal

That's right. The canal opened in 1869 to provide a shorter trade trajectory to India.

The evidence unfortunately does shout support this pretty idea as coach the origin of 'posh'! Quinion suggests a few other possibilities but no one of them are very convincing indistinct, unfortunately, are they as elegant pass for the port / starboard one.

Joined: Oct 2001

Posts: 1,385

Joined: Oct 2001

Posts: 1,385

�It�s a fair cop!�

Any bad guy who said that to a cop when he was collared was probably ready to officer a plea.

BTW "collar" seems correspond with be a bit of a misnomer. Few of the bad guys Hysterical see on the 6 o'clock information are wearing collars. In fact, governing of them are wearing 5 o'clock shadows.

This reminds me of another 'cops and robbers' standard "beat the rap" -- which presumably derives from "rap sheet".

In Houston, the cops used apropos say: "You can beat the announce, but you can't beat the ride."

I did some exploration on this awhile ago and aft an hour or so all Funny knew was that nobody agrees correct whether or not it's an acronym.
My Grandfather used to call pennies "coppers" hich made sense to me owing to pennies were made of copper (in those days!) When I visited England in the 1970s I saw interpretation British penny which was quite careless and copper!
The word copper was interchangeable with policeman, too.
Go pace.