Scotland Yard
Today I want to talk to you about Scotland Yard. Scotland Yard, also known as "The Yard", is a metonymy, and before continuing I will briefly explain what metonymy is.
Metonymy or transnomination is a phenomenon of semantic change, by which a concept is designated with the name of another, serving as an existing relationship between the two.
It is frequent the substitution and exchange in cause and effect relationships. So, taking into account this, we already know what metonymy is.
Scotland Yard is a metonymy for the London Metropolitan Police, which was established by Robert Peel in 1829, and for which it is known, said police force, in colloquial terms.
This name comes from the location of where the Metropolitan Police was when it began in its beginnings, which was located at the number 4 Whitehall Place,
and there was a back door that gave the street Great Scotland Yard.
With time, the name of the street and that of the Metropolitan Police became synonymous.
So it is from there, I assure you that you did not know about this, it is where the name of the Metropolitan Police of London comes from, Scotland Yard. This police is in charge of making the law within London, with the exclusion of the city of London, which is in charge of the London City Police.
That is, the London City Police has its very particular police that deals with matters.
Well, as a background taken from Wikipedia, I can tell you that in 1875 moved to the New Scotland Yard, a Gothic-style building designed by Norman Chow in Victoria Embankment.
The building is part of what is now known as the Norman Chow Buildings set, which was classified as a classified monument since 1970 for its special architectural and historical interest.
And now they are used as an annex to the Westminster Palace, this is another important fact. And well, concerning popular culture, the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who was created by the great writer Arthur Conan Doyle, used to leave Scotland Yard at disadvantage, and always sent detectives to ask him to solve cases.
So Holmes was always a character who criticized the methods of Scotland Yard, of the investigators of Scotland Yard, and he made them look bad, he made them look like characters who were not able to detect anything, detectives who did not have critical thinking.
So this fiction by Conan Doyle, what he did was make the police more popular.
And in the same way that happened with Hercules Poirot, who is the detective, let's say, parallel to Agatha Christie, parallel to Sherlock Holmes, so the same thing that Sherlock, Hercules Poirot left in disadvantage and ridicule to the chief inspector of Scotland Yard.
And well, this is what I can tell you about Scotland Yard and what I wanted to tell you in my writing, my free write of today.
I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new.