Why Police Officers are Sometimes Called “Pigs” Unlike so many other nicknames for the police, such as cops and the fuzz, this particular term has a relatively well known origin. You see, starting around the sixteenth century “pig” began being used in English as a derogatory term for people, whether police or not, as it still sometimes is used today. […]

Kayla R. asks: Why are strikebreakers called scabs? Striving to win safer working conditions, shorter hours and better pay, over the past few hundred years laborers have periodically joined together in work stoppages, called strikes. Only effective when the work needed by the “boss” (be it a single business, a whole industry or an entire nation) doesn’t get done; if […]

Mark asks: I don’t know if you’ve already covered this or not, but why do we call quitting something abruptly “cold turkey”? When you quit something “cold turkey” it means that you’re quitting smoking, drinking, a hard drug, or eating delicious chocolate cake right then and there without being slowly weaned off the addictive (possibly chocolatey) substance. What with turkeys […]

The practice of saying “o’clock” is simply a remnant of simpler times when clocks weren’t very prevalent and people told time by a variety of means, depending on where they were and what references were available. Generally, of course, the Sun was used as a reference point, with solar time being slightly different than clock time. Clocks divide the time […]

Why “Hank” is Short for “Henry” This is thought to be thanks to the one time popular suffix “-kin,” which is also how “Jack” originally derived from the name “John.” Specifically, the suffix “-kin,” simply indicated “little,” so Robin Hood’s “Little John” would have been aptly named “Jockin,” which later gave rise to “Jenkin,” then “Jakin,” and then “Jack,” with […]