Scutelliphily

Scutelliphily. Noun. From the Latin scutellus, meaning "little shield," and Greek phileein, to love or enjoy. "The hobby of collecting insignias, patches, medals, and the like."

The main reason I studied linguistics in college is because I love words. I love how powerful language is, how ubiquitous and how fundamental to human nature. At face value, language is simple. So simple, in fact, it's among the first benchmarkable skills acquired in early childhood. But beneath the surface, language is an infinitely complex and versatile mechanism, the inner-workings of which we have only begun to understand. This structure, so pervasive in application yet elusive in comprehension, as much a mystery as the deep sea or outer space, is made up of words. Language is a structure, so pervasive in application yet elusive in comprehension, as much a mystery as the deep sea or outer space. And yet it is made up of simple words. 

In a vacuum of context, words are nothing. Arbitrary sounds, simple utterances formed by the lips and tongue and breath, are given meaning by their contexts, by the associations we make between them and the real-world ideas they represent.

There are a lot of words for lovers of things. The suffix -philia, from Greek philios (the word for a fraternal sort of love), denotes somebody is a lover of something. Many of these terms refer to paraphilias, and the most commonly-known of these are the sorts of things we don't often like to talk about. 

But not all -philias are sexual in nature, and there are far more of these terms than the few you might hear on Dateline. I myself am a logophile and a bibliophile, a lover of words and collector of books. I am a pluviophile, a lover of rainy weather, and a ceraunophile, because thunder is the best part of a storm. 

Gabe is, definitionally, an ergophile: one who loves to work. I don't know if ergophile covers people who are wholly and utterly infatuated with their jobs or simply refers those addicted to labor in general, but either way Gabe seems to qualify. Whenever something even remotely dangerous happens, he makes the inevitable EMT joke: "Don't make me work on my day off!", I usually counter by pointing out this fact, then playfully accusing him of wanting nothing more than for his professional services to be called upon in the middle of an otherwise mundane circumstance.

available here, if you like stickers

Along with being a workaholic, Gabe is also a self-proclaimed scutelliphile. I'm not sure if that is the proper subject variation of scutelliphily, but it suits him all the same. His surplus of first responder patches made up a few of my first, and one in particular went on to take on especially significant meaning for me. First responders, like soldiers or E.R. doctors, tend to be superstitious creatures. At the height of my struggle at Reg, my good luck charm was a shoulder patch from Gabe's first EMS uniform, a token of friendship he gave me when we first started getting close.

Whenever I felt the doubts about my ability to succeed as a dispatcher start to creep in, threatening my focus and developing within me a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure, I would instead slip a hand into my pocket. As my fingers grazed the tough embroidery and cracked remnants of iron-on backing, I was reminded that somebody believed in me. Somebody with far more experience than I had believed in me, as he had believed in Kara. He believed in her and she made it, just as he said she would. Now he was telling me that he believed in me too, and there was no reason I couldn't do the same.

Gabe is far from the only one out there collecting patches. I've known avid hikers and outdoorsmen who collect rangers' patches from the National and State Parks they've traversed. Historic military enthusiasts often seek out the uniform insignias from whatever era they specialize in. And of course, every police station I've ever visited had some kind of display, often a glass case or shadowbox filled with patches from other departments. It's a sign of interoperability and cooperation, and archive meant to honor their cooperative efforts.

It's also not an uncommon practice for LEOs to personally exchange patches, and sometimes they'll extend the tradition to civilian dispatchers like me. We swap  with the fire departments and with paramedics from private EMS companies, and of course we trade amongst ourselves, too.

My first exchange happened at Reg, with the training coordinator. the interaction began when I asked her how she ended up where she was. She told me about her journey from private security to law enforcement, from law enforcement into dispatch, and from there up to Regional 911 management. She told me about one of her security jobs, working for Dunkin' Donuts Asset Protection. 

"They had these great patches," she told me. "Really funny-- they said: Defend & Serve the Donuts."

Naturally, this sent me. I'm a sucker for a good cops-love-donuts joke. "That's too perfect."

She sighed wistfully. "It's a shame I lost that patch." 

I thought so too, and so a week later, I received in the mail the $13 impulse buy I made that day. 

"This can go on my wall," she said when I presented it to her, studying the bulletin board where hung the evidence of her own scutelliphily. There wasn't a lot of room for new additions, so after a moment she reached up and took one down and replaced it with the donut patch. 

"Here," she said, offering me the one she had taken down from the wall. "I'll trade you for it."

When I saw that what she now pressed into my hand bore the insignia of the job I was so proud of, I choked. I thanked her, then bounded off like I used to as a kid, after scoring from Andy a sweet Pokémon card trade. That night, I took it home and added it to the clothesline where I pin up treasured photographs between my many bandanas.

I made this a sticker, but it was taken down for copyright

"You have a patch wall!" Gabe commented later, gesturing to where the Regional patch hung beside the good-luck one he had given me so long ago. "That's one of the signs that you really like working in this field."

He was right. I love this field, and I was realizing now that I, too, had a nerdy little scutelliphile in me, too. I was hooked. Like with the Pokémon of my childhood, I wanted to catch 'em all. And that shouldn't be hard-- I feel like I meet a lot of cops these days.

Elle's boyfriend, for example, is a cop in a nearby city. When he comes over to see Elle, we usually find something to talk about. Even though we don't have a lot in common aside from work, that's enough. 

And just this week, I also had the privilege of meeting an officer from yet another city. He was the instructor of a cert class I was taking, and I was the only one in the class who had a direct association with law enforcement. As a result, we spent the breaks swapping stories and comparing life from behind the desk to behind the wheel of a cruiser.

Regional serves six towns at a combined population of around 50 thousand. My current town is less than 10 thousand. My experiences as a small-town dispatcher is wildly different than theirs, with populations of 115 thousand and 80 thousand respectively. Yet, both of them saw fit to honor me with patch trades, and my wall now brags representation from both of their cities, the assortment of sizes and shapes and designs growing in variety with every interaction.

It's not really about the patches, though. Like words, the insignias aren't intrinsically meaningful. The honor of the stripes comes not from the value of the thread, but from the recognition by others of the rank of the solider who dons them. In the same way, the patches themselves are all but meaningless without the context, the connections made.

I was not friends with the former before he started dating my roommate. Up until a week ago, I didn't know the latter from Adam. But now, I have a connection with each of them. 

When Elle asks me if we can dog-sit during her boyfriend's trip, it is as much out of the dispatcher-to-officer loyalty as it is love for Elle that I agree, even though I'm allergic to dogs and he chews on the furniture. I take my Benadryl and wrap the kitchen chair legs in twine not because I like the dog (which, admittedly, I now do), but for the same reason that the cert instructor gave me his cell number after class, in case I ever needed anything. It's the same reason that, after I admitted I was pushing fifty hours without sleep, that he gave me a coffee, no charge:

"You're part of the first responder family."

That has to be the best feeling in the world. Working in this field, even as "just" a civilian dispatcher, I'm part of a team that spans the entire nation. My officers know that I've got their backs from behind the desk. And I know that, on or off the clock, they've got mine too.