Wednesday, August 22, 2012

A New Addition to Police Lingo: \'Easy, Peasy, Lemon Squeezy\'

By MICHAEL WILSON

There are all sorts of things police officers are known to say when they arrest someone. “Freeze,” or “Police - don't move!”

So it was something of a surprise to hear, from a suspect arrested on burglary charges earlier this month, what one of the arresting officers said as they slapped on the handcuffs.

The suspect in recent East Village burglaries, Piotr Pasciak, told Crime Scene in a jailhouse interview that, upon his arrest, he heard an officer say, “Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.”

Mr. Pasciak said he never heard the phrase before. No one has ever called him “Lemon Squeezy.” Perhaps the officer refers to everyone he arrests as “Lemon Squeezy,” and this is his way of saying, “relax, take it easy.” Or maybe the officer was commenting to his fellow officers on the ease of the arrest, conducted as it was while Mr. Pasciak lay barely awake in bed. Look how easy this was, boys.

Or maybe the officer is fond of a particular brand of British dish soap.

In the late 1950s, a new soap called Sqezy was introduced “as the world's first washing up liquid in a plastic squeezy bottle,” according to StarBrands, its current distributor.

What Sqezy lacked in conventional spelling wisdom it more than made up for in its catchphrase: “Easy Peasy Lemon Sqezy.” The soap's container was redesigned in 2010 to include the phrase on the label.

It's not for everyone, at least not on this side of the pond. In 2009, a writer in the Dayton Daily News added it to her list of phrases that no one should repeat “unless you're old enough to tell stories about the Depression.” The writer Lewis Grossberger, in an online piece titled, “Caution! Do Not Read the Words ‘Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy,'” investigated its origins, arriving at that little plastic bottle from 50-odd years ago.

The path from 1960s England to a poli ce officer arresting someone in Brooklyn half a century later remains unclear. But we remain alert for other long-ago jingles to creep into police parlance.

“Freeze! Where's the beef?”

“Freeze! Give it to Mikey. He won't eat it. He hates everything!”

“Freeze! My bologna has a first name!”



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