Some Word Origins

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You may be happy, or maybe sad, to hear that Pics Week has finished.

Time for some wordy posts amd tyjhe first is about . . .words.

I was watching the Robert Downey Jnr Sherlock Holmes film again with the subtitles on and heard him say about one of the miscreants “Put him in the moriah.” That is how the subtitles showed the comment. It reminded me that in my younger days, the police wagons were called Black Marias (pronounced as Moriah, as in They Call the Wind Maria) and also as paddy wagons. I don’t know how they are referred to these days, but it allows me to set out some police/criminal word and name origins. 

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Black Maria: 

The word “moriah” in the film was incorrect, it should have been Maria or Mariah. 

According to Wikipedia: 

Black Maria, a slang term for a police van used to transport prisoners, originally these were horse drawn and so could take some time to arrive at a crime scene. “Black Maria” was a famous racehorse of the day, born in Harlem USA in 1826. The name was sardonically applied to the police carriages (which were also usually colored black).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Maria

From the St Paul Police Police Historical Society website: 

The name "Black Maria" as applied to the closed police vans with separate locked cubicles used to convey prisoners to jail is a term of New England origin; the story connected with it being that back in the mid-1800s in Boston, Massachusetts, there lived a black woman named Maria Lee, who kept a lodging house for sailors. It was a waterfront place in the North End, where brawls were frequent. Maria, who was a large and powerful person, won a reputation for her ability to quell fights and bring offenders to jail. So successful was she in handling tough characters that the constables frequently enlisted her aid in bringing malefactors to book, and the story goes that when police wagons came into use in the 1830s, the Boston constables, remembering the great help the black woman had given them, immortalized her name in the term "Black Maria".

Black Maria was used in print publications of the period, and is still used today in parts of Britain and Australia for the vehicle that transports prisoners from "goal" to court . . . 

http://www.spphs.com/history/black_maria.php 

Most etymologists prefer the former explanation as to derivation. 

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Paddy Wagon: 

From Wikipedia: 

In Australia, specifically New South Wales and Queensland, the term used to refer to a general duties vehicle with a prisoner cage on the back is generally Paddy Wagon or Bull Wagon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_van

Wikipedia offers three theories as to the origin of the term “Paddy Wagon”: 

• In the United States, "Paddy" was a common Irish shortening of Padraig, (Patrick in English), which was most often used in the 19th century as an ethnic slur to refer to Irish people. Irishmen made up a large percentage of the officers of early police forces in many American cities. Thus, this theory suggests that the concentration of Irish in the police forces led to the term "paddy wagon" being used to describe the vehicles driven by police. The theory is weak because "paddy" was never a term used for police in general, and the majority of Irish people were not police. 

• The most common understanding in the United Kingdom also stems from the belief that the most common occupants of the vans were Irish, though they were not driving, they were the arrested passengers. This comes from several perspectives: a) prejudice by English people that the Irish immigrants were largely common criminals; b) from the legendary stories of their fighting spirit and the fact that when arrested they were less likely to "go quietly" than other nationalities, requiring the use of the van rather than a carriage; and c) that the Irish liked to drink so much that drunken brawling would often ensue and thus the police van would be called to take them away into custody.

• A third theory holds that "paddy wagon" was originally a nickname for "patrol wagon" in the same manner police cars are called patrol cars today. 

NSW Police Paddy Wagon 

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Grass: 

I have often wondered why the term “grass” is used in England to describe an informer or as a verb eg to grass on someone. A grass may also be known in various locales as a squealer, nose, mole, snout or stool pigeon. 

There are also various theories on the origin of the term grass in the context of being an informant.

One is that it derives from “snake in the grass”, from the 17th century meaning of traitor or deviously dishonest person.

Another, and the more likely, is that its origin lies in rhyming slang. 

From The Phrase Finder: 

Farmer and Henley's 1893 Dictionary of Slang defines 'grasshopper' as 'copper', that is, policeman. The theory is that a 'grass' is someone who works for the police and so has become a surrogate 'copper'. The rhyming slang link was certainly believed in 1950 by the lexicographer Paul Tempest, when he wrote Lag's lexicon: a comprehensive dictionary and encyclopaedia of the English prison to-day: 

"Grasser. One who gives information. A 'squealer’ or ‘squeaker'. The origin derives from rhyming slang: grasshopper - copper; a 'grass' or 'grasser' tells the 'copper' or policeman."  

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/grass-up.html

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Fizzgig: 

The Oz slang term for an informer – fizzgig – is no longer commonly used, at least not in my social milieu. 

From World Wide Words: 

Fizgig principally survives in Australian slang, where it means a police informer. It turns up first in the 1870s, perhaps as an extension of the female sense, considered stereotypically as dashing about madly and gossiping indiscreetly:

Without their allies — “the fizgigs,” the police seem powerless to trace the authors of the robberies which are now of such frequent occurrence.
Victorian Express (Geraldton, WA), 15 Nov. 1882.  

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-fiz1.htm

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Stool Pigeon: 

From The Grammarist:

A stool pigeon is someone who is an informer for the police. The term first appeared in the early 1800s to mean a decoy pigeon. The word stool in the term stool pigeon comes from the sixteenth-century word stoale, which means tree stump. Presumably, the term stoale pigeon referred to a decoy pigeon that was affixed to a tree stump. By the 1800s the word stool pigeon referred to a person who was used in a sting operation to trap a criminal, a sort of human decoy. By the turn of the twentieth century, the term stool pigeon was used in American English to mean somebody who is an informant concerning a crime, usually a co-criminal who gives authorities information concerning a crime in exchange for his freedom. Stool pigeon is a compound word which is a term consisting of two words combined to take on a new, different meaning. The abbreviation of the word stool pigeon is stoolie.  

http://grammarist.com/usage/stool-pigeon/