pig

   Used as an offensive term of address in various meanings. It is commonly used by children of someone who eats more than his fair share or who eats in a bestial manner. It is then extended to someone who behaves in a generally selfish way. ‘You selfish pig’ is used by a young girl to her brother in G.B.Shaw’s Pygmalion. ‘Selfish’ again suggests ‘pig’ to a man in The Sleepers of Erin, by Jonathan Gash, who calls another man ‘you selfish fucking pig’.

   In A Kind of Loving, by Stan Barstow, a woman calls her son-in-law ‘you filthy pig’ when he vomits because he has drunk too much. She then expands the term to ‘you filthy disgusting pig’. In Room at the Top, by John Braine, the term becomes an intimacy in ‘you slant-eyed Mongolian pig’. ‘Pig’ itself is an intimacy in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, by Alan Sillitoe, but these examples merely demonstrate the general rule that almost any insult can be turned into a covert endearment. Since the 1960s ‘pig’ has again become a derogatory slang term in both Britain and the USA for a policeman. The Oxford English Dictionary has an 1812 example of such usage, but marked this as ‘obsolete’ when the dictionary was published at the turn of the century.

   ‘Pig’ addressed to a policeman would be intended as an insult, but American policemen appear to have taken the sting out of the term by accepting it themselves. Thus the football game played in Miami in January 1989 between the Los Angeles Police Department Centurions and the Miami and Metro-Dade County Magnum Force was known to everyone, including those who took part, as the Pig Bowl.

   In modern times a man who expresses views associated with male chauvinism is likely to be called ‘male chauvinist pig’, or simply ‘pig’. In The Front Runner, by Patricia Nell Warren, male chauvinism is slightly reinterpreted as meaning an unreasonable belief that males should always be heterosexual. Thus the insulting ‘you whore’, addressed by a heterosexual man to a homosexual colleague is answered with ‘you straight pig’.