fuzzis
01-27-2007, 11:08 PM
Given the number of law enforcement officers on this site, I thought the following article was funny. :smt118
Language sustains trauma from cop-speak (http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2007/01/27/0128metcopspeak.html)
No one can say exactly when it starts.
But somewhere between the time they enroll in the academy and their first years on the streets, police officers shed everyday English for a language that can only be described as cop-speak.
In this peculiar patois, a man is never just a man. He is a "male subject" or, if he's up to no good, a "perpetrator."
Guns are always "brandished." Wounds are "sustained," not suffered. And a crook doesn't just get out of a car and run; he "exits a vehicle" and "flees on foot."
To be sure, every profession has its own vernacular.
Doctors prefer to say a patient "admitted" to something, rather than "the patient said." Lawyers talk of "executing" a will. And computer technicians have been known to call a printer an "output device."
But we aren't exposed to this jargon as often as we are to cop-speak.
Turn on the 6 p.m. news on any given day, and you're bound to come across numerous examples.
Say, a man speeds away from officers after a road-rage incident. He loses control while trying to turn a curve on the road and crashes into trees.
This is how the police spokesman will describe it to the gaggle of reporters at the scene:
"At approximately 11:09 this morning, uniformed officers were advised that a male subject had engaged in a verbal altercation with another motorist. The suspect fled the scene in a late-model sedan-type vehicle, traveling at a high rate of speed. The vehicle failed to negotiate a curve and left the roadway, at which point it struck some trees and came to rest."....
fuzzis
Language sustains trauma from cop-speak (http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2007/01/27/0128metcopspeak.html)
No one can say exactly when it starts.
But somewhere between the time they enroll in the academy and their first years on the streets, police officers shed everyday English for a language that can only be described as cop-speak.
In this peculiar patois, a man is never just a man. He is a "male subject" or, if he's up to no good, a "perpetrator."
Guns are always "brandished." Wounds are "sustained," not suffered. And a crook doesn't just get out of a car and run; he "exits a vehicle" and "flees on foot."
To be sure, every profession has its own vernacular.
Doctors prefer to say a patient "admitted" to something, rather than "the patient said." Lawyers talk of "executing" a will. And computer technicians have been known to call a printer an "output device."
But we aren't exposed to this jargon as often as we are to cop-speak.
Turn on the 6 p.m. news on any given day, and you're bound to come across numerous examples.
Say, a man speeds away from officers after a road-rage incident. He loses control while trying to turn a curve on the road and crashes into trees.
This is how the police spokesman will describe it to the gaggle of reporters at the scene:
"At approximately 11:09 this morning, uniformed officers were advised that a male subject had engaged in a verbal altercation with another motorist. The suspect fled the scene in a late-model sedan-type vehicle, traveling at a high rate of speed. The vehicle failed to negotiate a curve and left the roadway, at which point it struck some trees and came to rest."....
fuzzis