Stool-pigeon

Kid Creole and the Coconuts, remember them? To my eternal shame, their 1982 hit Stool Pigeon persuaded me to buy their album, Tropical Gangsters, a disc which seems to have long since escaped my still impressively large collection of vinyl. The most common usage of this phrase is to Describe a police informant, usually one that spills the beans in return for charges being dropped or a reduction in sentence but where does it come from?

The phrase seems to have originated from the world of hunting where a bird, a pigeon in this case, was used as bait to attract other, more attractive game. This is how the famous lexicographer, Noah Webster, used it in his History of Animals: Designed for the Instruction and Amusement of Persons of Both Sexes, published in 1812; “in this manner, the decoy or stool pigeon is made to flutter, and a flock of pigeons may be called from their flight from a great distance.”

Some etymologists claim that stool was a variant of the French word estale which referred to a pigeon used to lure a hawk into a net and which moved via stale – used in the late 16^th century to describe a person who entrapped another – and stall – used in the vernacular of 16^th century pickpockets to describe the person who distracted the victim while the thief emptied their pockets. It may be the case but it seems quite a transformation to me. A pigeon, interestingly though, was a slang word from the same period to describe a simpleton or a fool.

What is more certain is that within a decade of Webster’s use of the phrase in a hunting context, it was being used figuratively to describe a human Decoy. A court report dating to 1821 reports the testament of a witness who asserted “that Van Ort made use of him as a kind of stool-pigeon, to decoy or persuade other blacks to go to the south with him.” In a newspaper from 1825 a stool pigeon appears to describe a Methodist priest who was acting as a decoy or as the journalist put it “to have sold himself for a tool, or rather a stool-pigeon to decoy other Methodists into the snare designed to entrap them for the Presbyterian clergy.”

In the 1830s and 1840s the phrase was being deployed to describe people who acted as decoys to catch or trick others who were often naïve or simple-minded or simply were unaware that they were being duped. Stool-pigeons at the time were on the wrong side of the law rather than acting in cahoots with the police and in the Revised Code of the District of Columbia of 1855, acting as a stool-pigeon was an offence against public policy.

But the police, who doubtless knew a good thing when they saw one, were soon using stool-pigeons to act as decoys for themselves. So common seems to have been the practice that the 1859 Dictionary of Americanisms found space to define a stool-pigeon as “a decoy robber, in the pay of the police, who brings his associates into a trap laid for them” and stool-pigeoning as “the practice of employing decoys to catch robbers.”

A decade later the phrase was used without any specific link with the police or detecting but as a general epithet for an informer, as this extract from a House of Representatives report on electoral frauds, published in 1868, shows; “I do not want to have anything to do with giving names…I do not want to be a stool-pigeon for anybody.” By 1893 it had become a pejorative epithet for a useless person; “it was the first time in his life that he had been branded (in print) as a shyster, an impecunious fraud, a lazy stoolpigeon and other such epithets.”

It still has pejorative connotations. No one likes a grass, after all.