Lexicolatry – Detective

The Man Himself. (photo by Dynamosquito)

DETECTIVE

As a child, I was fascinated with detectives, detective work and detective fiction; it was actually after finishing The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes that I decided it was the career for me. Of continual interest, too, was the array of terms used to describe detectives, particularly those that worked (as I did) in the private sector.

My first professional introduction to this was the question of what exactly a private detective calls himself. For example, the first company I worked for preferred the termprofessional investigator (even though private detective was the title printed on my ID), and this was the understanding of the initialism P.I, otherwise often read as private investigator. Other terms commonly used by those working in the field are inquiry agent as a general term, and tracing agent and skip tracer for those that specialise in locating people.

For what others call us, there are numerous terms. Private eye is still commonly used, though often only jocularly. An old-fashioned term is dick, a contraction of detective, something I have been called many times over the course of my career, often with a cephalic suffix tacked on for good measure. Another common descriptor in literature isgumshoe, which the OED states is another word for sneaker, and thus refers to a private detective’s supposed stealth.

Going back in time, an old-fashioned term for a PI is shamus, used in the 1920s and which Merriam-Webster suggests draws a derogatory comparison between the work of a church sexton and that of a store detective. An even older term is hawkshaw, which is a reference to a detective in the 1863 play The Ticket of Leave Man.

Finally, sleuth is often used to denote someone with a particular skill in detection, often in reference to amateur sleuths or armchair sleuths / detectives. Armchair sleuth can also be used for those that are so brilliant that they need never visit a crime scene to solve a case, as Sherlock Holmes says of his brother Mycroft in The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter. In real life, however, they’re more likely to be the type that shout at the television during episodes of CSI, and assiduously follow televised court cases before concluding that the judge did it in the library with the iPad, and the prosecutor is sleeping with the court stenographer. Case closed.

Not once did I ever burst in on a naked woman with my gun drawn. And now that I think of it, I never even had a gun. Nuts. (image by Will Hart)