Last night we were watching TV when we caught a commercial for The Bill. “Why the heck do the English call the police department ‘the bill’ anyway?” I wondered. Snookums didn’t know, so he fired up Google. After several minutes, he found this Word Detective column (second entry from the bottom). Turns out it comes from a comic strip that ran during the First World War. It had a character named “Old Bill” who was a grumpy veteran with a big droopy mustache, and the strip was so popular that “Old Bill” became slang for any man with a walrus-like ‘tache. They’re not quite sure how it then came to be applied to policemen, but the speculation is that coppers are/were likely to sport such facial hair. Interesting, huh?
Important Note
This site features content going all the way back to 2000. The posts you’ll read reflect my views and writing style at the time. While I have gone back to clean up a few of them, I think it’s important not to sanitise too much. This site is a record of who I am and how I’ve grown. Any blog post written years ago may not reflect who I am today, nor how I would write about the same topic today.
Comments
2 responses to “The Bill”
The Met Police site has several possible origins – none definitive.
http://www.met.police.uk/history/oldbill.htm
Interesting! We should’ve thought to look there first.