James wrote:
> Huh? a plainclothes cop isn't a detective? This is,
I
>believe, the
>earliest class of investigators to use the word
detective.
According to the OED, the first recorded usage of the word
'detective'
was in Chambers Journal, 1845:
"Intelligent men have been recently selected to form a body
called the
'detective police' . . . at times the detective policeman
attires
himself in the dress of ordinary individuals."
The term 'detector' reaches back to at least 1541, but not in
the sense
of detecting crime.
The term 'dick' used for a detective does not appear in the
original
edition of the OED (I have that headache-inducing micro-small
edition),
but in the supplement, all references to 'dick' as detective
include
policeman.
The derivation is given as:
[? Arbitrary contraction of DETECTIVE] slang. A detective; a
policeman.
Earliest recorded use: J. M. Sullivan's Criminal Slang (1908)
a cop,
detective. Canadian (!) slang.
Sorry, I have no access to a dictionary of slang at the
moment.
Donna Goldthwaite, who actually researched this several years
ago for a
paper on detective fiction!
dgold@javanet.com
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