Pacos vs Pigs

Chile's a big winner when it comes to archaic formality, let's focus on a specific example that contrasts to the United States, wherein the devolution of "respectfulness" when referring to peace officers has advanced by three gradations:

Police --> Cops --> Pigs

But only two in Chile:

Carabineros --> Pacos

Upon repeating "Paco! Paco! Paco!" 19 times one may notice a sort of bleeding into "coppah...coppah" I need some watah.

The paco-cop "equivalence" is further backed up by my hard-core historical linguistics skillz. It's a phenomenon called metathesis, where the sounds that occur in a word switch places over time. Did you know that "horse" used to be something like "hrose" and "bird", "brid"? It's true.

Actually, my skillz are not so hardcore, I haven't put together a 7-language chart of the word for cop to determine the proto-european/quech'uan word for "cops" or sought to determine if it isn't just a case of a borrowed word from English which then got metathesized, or not metathesized. I'm not gonna research it, I'm just pointing out that there's a lot of similarities and there'd be a lot of ways to attack this if I weren't so lazy and/or unqualified.

Side note: If anyone here reads Ryan Greenberg's Chile "blog", I am not influenced nor amused by his inane "linguistic" entries which would amount to hrose tranquilizer for any lower-division ling student. Horse tranquilizer for the rest of us.

That aside, the whole point of this is to say that in various conversations with cops here in Chile - unfortunately nothing so fascinating like running from the law or being arrested, in fact, usually just encouraging them to do their jobs - the word "pacos" always slips out because to me it's just normal, what cop in the States would really get offended by that? There's a whole TV show glorifying them as such.

Anyway, in the Year of our Lord 2007, saying "Pacos" is as powerful and offensive as "Pigs" is in the United States. They usually puff their chests out and give a stern lecture about "respect". I usually counter that by saying "respect" would be enforcing the laws that have been put on the books by the taxpayers who bankroll your existence. Unfortunately, the Law tends to win those arguments.

But I'm not saying "cerdo", as did the self-righteous Chileans who protested the Toronto police vs. Chile brawl were apt to yell and write on their cardboard signs, in Spanish, although a safe distance from any carabineros. A mini-(Chilean)9/11 in Toronto, except that 18 years after the coup you can't say "paco" in Chile, but you can say "cerdo" in Canada. Tell you what, I'd take a coup in Canada over the Concertación in Chile any day.

Anyway, I never got off on "pig". Maybe I should have, I just didn't. But if you wanna talk about disrespect, or fuckit, human rights, I'd say forcing a native speaker of North American English to throw together a string of five hispanic syllables in which the letter "r" appears twice approximates a violation.

And it's more than just the "r", it's the fact that when I was living in a low-income neighborhood in Santiago I felt compelled to call the emergency number 2-3 times a week, usually prompted by the sound of a lone female voice screaming amidst a handful of male attackers. The one time the cops did roll up was when a couple guys shot themselves in front of my apartment building. They came fast, and in droves, but the ambulance ambled on over about...half an hour later. Meanwhile the cops didn't demonstrate any first aid skills apart from repeating a request for the guy's nat'l ID number, but his pain had rendered him speechless so the cops ended up giving up and told me it was against the law to take pictures. (Absolutely not true).

I honestly don't mean any disrespect by saying "pacos", it comes naturally to me as the perceived equivalent of "cops". Yes, yes, I should be sensitive to local customs, bla bla bla. But five syllables of sensitivity? Tell you what, I'll say "ca-ra-bi-ne-ros" when the cops get a salary raise (at least twice the pitiful $500 bucks a month they receive currently for putting their lives on the line), when the emergency number works 99% of the time (not the hit-or-miss embarrassment that it is now), when I see evidence that the cops respond to calls alerting them of a possible rape in the neighborhood and maybe throw in some paramedic skills and aikido training per T-Dog's recommendation for good measure.

Till then, five syllables is a tall order. I'll stick with pacos.

UPDATE: Here's an article on the English etymology of "cop"