The Last Straw: Six of the most damning words that can feature in anyone's obituary these days are contained in the popular crime correspondent's phrase: "He was known to the gardaí," writes Frank McNally.
Few short sentences say as much as this one, innocuous as it looks. If you saw the individual words in an identity parade, you wouldn't pick any of them as suspicious. But combined and used - as they invariably are - in reports of a death which was sudden and not of natural causes, they prompt a conclusion about the fate of the deceased involving five other words, namely: "coming", "probably", "had", "he" and "it".
No doubt there are worse things that could be said of you posthumously, in terms of colouring public perception about your life. "He was known to a wacky religious sect that worshipped goats," for example, would undoubtedly prejudice certain people against you. Yet the mere suggestion that you were known to the gardaí somehow implies that your bad end was inevitable, as surely as if the reporter had said your favourite sport was climbing ESB pylons.
It's an unfortunate situation. Gardaí are as sociable as any other group in society, and need human contact like the rest of us. But it's got to the stage now that you'd be reluctant to get into a conversation with them, in case it developed into something deeper, and then you died suddenly.
Of course, the popularity of the "HWKTTG" phrase is not the force's fault. Whatever about the message, the language is almost certainly that of journalists. Although crime correspondents often base their reports on official briefings, it's an iron rule that no senior garda will use short, clear words if long, obscure ones are possible. So a typical superintendent would say a criminal "had a certain relationship with the law enforcement community", rather than that "he was known to the gardaí".
With the exception of the terms "seized," which is a Garda favourite, law enforcers hate monosyllabic words. Gardaí are always having seizures these days: of criminal assets, quantities of explosive, cannabis resin with an estimated street value of €1 million, and so on. But apart from finding alternatives to the word "seized", a big part of crime reportage involves shortening Garda terminology. Common examples, with the journalistic translations in brackets, are: "altercation" ("row"); licensed premises" ("pub"); "vehicular traffic" ("traffic"); "with an estimated street value of" ("worth"); "apprehended" ("seized").
Some of this may be a subconscious desire by police to dramatise their role. A life fighting crime does lend itself to drama; you notice it's always the "scene" of the crime, never the "site". And it's no surprise that senior gardaí come to sound like theatre critics eventually ("This was a dreadful act, although clearly well planned").
But it must also be remembered that gardaí are often speaking under legal constraint, and it is therefore important that nobody understands them. This should always be borne in mind when investigating police crimes against plain English ("The assailant, who is described as being a chief-superintendent in his early 50s, got away with large quantities of euphemism, including a suggestion that a man was 'helping gardaí with their inquiries'.")
The coded Garda approach to English affects even some road-signs in Ireland, which might explain why such signs are not always obeyed. I'm thinking in particular of the ones that read: "Yield right of way". "Yield" is an old-fashioned term that you would never hear in everyday conversation, except maybe a conversation between a garda and a judge. It's obvious many drivers either have no idea what it means, or think it's short for "accelerate like f***, before you get stuck behind that lorry". But whatever about their clarity, I was thrilled to read in this paper's motoring supplement this week about a new generation of "yielding" road-signs that react intelligently in the event of a collision. Yes, Ireland will soon benefit from a Norwegian-developed signpost designed to "wrap itself round" a colliding car. Or in the more basic model, to collapse in controlled fashion, "allowing the vehicle to continue on its course".
This is a sophisticated version of the policy long adopted by many Irish county councils: i.e. having no direction sign-posts at all in proven danger spots, such as cross-roads, thereby preventing possible collisions and allowing vehicles to continue on their course (even if it's the wrong one).
But the new technology must be warmly welcomed as a contribution to road safety, when certain issues are sorted out. One obvious question is this: if you have vehicles hitting road-signs all over the place and continuing on their course, how are these reckless drivers ever going to become - to coin a phrase - known to the gardaí?