"pig" as policeman

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

Yes, I remember it very well in connection with the Black Panthers. One of their favorite expressions was "Off  [= kill] the pigs!"
In 1968 I moved to Missouri and a year or so later gave a presentation to a Jewish discussion group consisting of university faculty.
At one point I happened to mention that bestiality is expressly forbidden, and I still remember one of the participants jumping up with a sudden burst of inspiration and declaring: "'Off the pigs' is Talmudic!"
 
Gerald Cohen
P.S. Btw, I also remember a newspaper story in the late 1960's of an attempt at one police station (perhaps more) to give a favorable interpretation to "pig" (= policeman). The interpretation was that "pig" stands for Pride, Integrity, Guts, and the sergeant at the station had a tie clasp in the shape of a little pig.  The attempt to give "pig" this new interpretation never caught on, however.

________________________________

From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Jonathan Lighter
Sent: Wed 8/9/2006 11:03 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: "pig" as policeman



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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