A Squealer Is a Nark, not a Narc

A small hill I'm willing to die on

I was watching Season 3 of Shrinking, and in once scene the character Alice asked Sean not to nark on her to Jimmy about something she’d done. I always have subtitles on, and it was spelled “nark.” When I saw that I said, “Fuck, yes!”

If you’re unfamiliar with the show, Shrinking is not about a drug empire with Sean playing the role of an undercover DEA agent. A narc is not a rat, a squealer, a stool pigeon, a tattletale, or a fink. A narc is a cop who is doing their job; it is an abbreviation of narcotics officer. Sometimes, the job of a narc involves lying to criminals, pretending to be involved in the drug trade to gather evidence to make arrests. That’s it. If you call someone a narc, it should be because you’re a drug dealer and you suspect them of being an undercover cop. This is likely to be followed by you commanding your henchmen to dispose of said narc in a manner most unpleasant.

A nark, conversely, is anyone who rats, squeals, finks, tattles etcetera some information about you to a person you’d rather they’d have not told. Etymology backs me up on this, as do my very senior editor and copy editor at the largest publishing house in North America.

Nark predates narc by a century, arising in 1859. It has its roots in the Romani word nāk, meaning “nose,” as in being nosey or poking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. It means to inform on someone. There are both narks and narcs involved in the drug trade. The former is not a cop. They are a confidential informant for the justice system, usually also a criminal who is being paid either via cash or because they got caught and are ratting out their fellow crooks to cut a deal. A lesser used definition of nark is to be an annoying person.

The word narc didn’t arise until 1967 and has always meant narcotics officer. That being written, many have come to believe that narc should be used instead of nark to describe a squealing ratfink stool pigeon. Those people are wrong. Sometimes, they are vociferously wrong.

Recently I published a history post about the ancient Roman Kingdom. It included this line: “But those senators were discovered because an enslaved person overheard the plotting and narked.” From that single post, a bit of a “Well, actually” correctile dysfunction shitshow arose.

I’ve also written about the janitor who narked on members of the White Rose Network in Nazi Germany, leading to the resistance leaders’ deaths. That post also resulted in mass grammatical incorrecting. Some folks get rather uptight about this. One person seems to believe that since he bought a signed copy of one of my books that this entitles him to be insufferable about it, refusing to accept the evidence that he is wrong.

Anyfuckingway, I don’t give a shit if you think nark is wrong. I know I’m right and I’m not changing.

I will leave you with something else to consider: the use of past tense and gerunds.

“Narced” looks stupid, because it would be a soft c, sounding more like parsed, or arsed. Like, some people can’t be arsed to fix their fucking grammar. I will admit that sometimes people will spell it narc’d, and that looks kind of cool. But it doesn’t work for “narcing”. Narking on your friend has the obvious hard k, but narcing on them looks dumb.

In conclusion, don’t be dumb and insist I spell it with a c.

P.S. I mentioned that a lesser-used definition of nark was to be an annoying person, so someone who repeatedly insists that it should be spelled narc is in fact a fucking nark.

P.P.S. If you enjoyed this piece, check out my article about trouper vs. trooper.

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit “ai” plagiarism software.

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.