"pig" as policeman

[Jonathan Lighter]

There have been a few brief exchanges about this on the list. I am surprised (nay, astounded) that no one has connected the 1960's and later use of the word to the once infamous Black Panther Party, which not only encouraged and popularized this usage, but seems to have independently coined and reintroduced it to the American vocabulary.  High-school and college kids are still using it, as are a million others.

  When the term surfaced in the news in 1968, it was first in connection with the Panthers and then other political radicals, notably Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman.

  No one who doesn't remember the period 1967-1973 in America can readily imagine the _Zeitgeist_.

  Here's the earliest ex. of the Panthers' use I've discovered - not atypical of Panther rhetoric and philosophy, esp. in the arts :

  1968 _Black Panther_ (Oakland, Calif.) (May 18), in Clayborne Carson & Philip S. Foner _The Black Panthers Speak_ (Phila..: Lippincott, 1970) 18: We draw pictures of our brothers with stoner guns with one bullet going through forty pigs and taking out their intestines along the way....pictures of pigs hanging by their tongues wrapped with barbed wire connected to your local power plant.

  A little later that year, "Yippie" "co-founder" (the organization was a hoax) Hoffman expressed his view that "pig" was the "perfect" term for police, though "not insulting enough."

  Former Panther official David Hilliard recalls that a novelty postcard received by Eldridge Cleaver satirizing the '60's catch-phrase, "Support Your Local Police," illustrated with a cartoon of a hog, suggested the use of the word (_Huey: Spirit of the Panther_, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006, p. 52).  The creator of the postcard is, of course, unknown.

  JL


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