Buttons:
Because it’s almost Veteran’s Day in the US, I figured I’d show you some uniforms. In this case, police uniforms, because the term we usually use for police—cops—comes from an item of their uniform. So here we go.
Button/buttons: (n) cop/cops. Shortened from “copper buttons,” referring to the buttons on early police uniforms, which were made of copper.
“Where’d you hear this line?” “Couple of buttons on the nightshift were leakin’ air.”
This specific photo shows the Seattle Police Department’s Fifth Precinct officers with their one and only car sometime in the 1920s. And if the photo were in color, you’d see that the buttons and badges are copper colored. Copper was cheap at the time—cheaper than the brass that became popular later. Alas, I couldn’t get a photo of the LAPD dress uniform of the period, but it was similar and featured a small, silver-colored hat badge that was a heart-shaped shield with wings on top—which the LAPD still uses—and an oval copper badge with a pointed bottom that featured an eagle on the top and a tiny enameled circular seal of the City of Los Angeles. The current badge with its image of the Los Angeles City Hall’s central tower didn’t come into use until 1940.
Why police in the US continue to be called “cops,” but not “buttons,” defies me, but the term seems to have faded out in the late 1930s or early 1940s. Maybe because copper ceased to be cheap during the Second World War and uniform buttons were replaced with brass or mixed metals, and the buttons no longer stood out as unusual. Most police departments had started trading in silver badges for copper or brass around 1900, but the buttons held on little longer.
One other note: the uniforms of most police departments in the US at the time were made of wool. Los Angeles police uniforms are still made of wool—including the shirt—to this day. Can you imagine walking a beat in Los Angeles in the summer wearing a black wool shirt and hot copper buttons? Holy cow!
Mark Alan Miller says:
Brass was almost universal for buttons by the early 1800s, and copper extremely rare, being not as strong (it’s fairly soft). Brass is typically about two thirds copper, and sometimes more, and the rest is tin, which has generally been cheaper than copper. If police buttons were copper, they were probably just copper plated, and it was strictly for traditional reasons, not because they might have been a few cents cheaper (which I doubt they were). Buttons simply weren’t very expensive from the Industrial Revolution onwards.
kat_richardson says:
Cool. did not know that.