by Alexander Boot
A headline in today’s Mail says that “a man, 30” has been arrested for raping two teenaged girls in an alleyway.
This statement may appear straightforward, but only to an outsider unfamiliar with the intricacies of British crime reporting. As with all newspeak, what matters there isn’t denotation but connotation.
The denotation is indeed straightforward. A violent and libidinous male of the Homo sapiens species committed a heinous crime. Yes, but what kind of male?
If you live in a foreign country or, better still, on Mars, you’ll miss the wealth of information the headline conveys in a language usually credited to Aesop.
Actually, I touched on this subject indirectly the other day when commenting on the report of Ann Widdecombe’s murder. The criminal was then identified as “a white British man, 28”, an outlandish case of racial profiling if I’ve ever seen one.
However, that line gave us the end of a thread we can pull to untangle the whole cat’s cradle of today’s answer to Aesop.