Sunday e-mail 3rd November: Content warnings

Nudity, violence, sexual content. All that stuff.

‘Come quickly! I’ve found a show with seven things in it! We have to watch it right now!’

I’m sure you hear that thrilled exclamation just as often as I do. Your partner, spouse, or flatmate has found a show that has loads of things! You can’t get to to sofa soon enough! After all, the last few shows have seemed flat, empty, a little drab…there weren’t enough things in them. Weaving speedily around the startled butler and maid, you race to your mansion’s television-parlour. It’s only a few hundred yards, after all. You’re bubbling over with excitement and popcorn-related enthusiasm. It’s bound to be a great evening. You’re going to see some things!

Of course, not all things were created equal. Some things are better than others. Some are, let’s be honest, a bit second-rate, a bit barrel-scrapy. They make you suspect Netflix or Amazon of trying to save face and redeem a chunk of bland programming with hastily-gerrymandered content warnings. ‘Smoking’, really? Who cares? Not you and not me. ‘Alcohol use’? If I wanted to watch that, I’d haul in a mirror or some hobos.

Our holy grail is a show with seven or eight things, all of them good ones. ‘Violence’ – that’s a good one, isn’t it? So are ‘Nudity’ and ‘Sexual content’. (Let’s put those hobos out of our minds.) We all like things like that.

Those streaming services have hit on an excellent advertising gimmick, haven’t they? Remember those posters and T-shirts that used to say Parental Advisory – Explicit Lyrics? Our cooler friends hung them up or wore them like badges to show the world how much cooler they really were. Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics was a thing, even before things were invented. Before things became a thing.

Click here to buy me a coffee. That’d be nice. I like coffee.

Currencies, of course, become devalued over time as greedy corporate bodies try to mine every last nugget out of the gold mine. No one needed Joker 2 any more than they needed a T-shirt that said Parental Advisory – Lyrics Needs Some Improvement & Wait, What? - They’re Still Rhyming Arms with Charms? Are You Kidding Me? It can’t be long before they start inventing new, less-exciting content warnings. ‘This Show Features Commuting’, they’ll say, or ‘A Bit of Drizzle’ or ‘Old milk’ or ‘Unbecoming hats’. If you have other suggestions, I’d enjoy reading them.

All of which is a long way round to introduce this week’s newsletter. Yes, it’s our famous, universally-adored regular feature (imitated by many, equalled by none). I can only be speaking of ‘The Dictionary of Crime’! Can you credit, we’ve reached Volume 5 already? It features lots of all-new terms drawn from…well, you just wait till Tuesday to find out!

Wait…did I say Tuesday? That’s right, dear reader, Tuesday! This week, you don’t even have to wait till Wednesday to get your regular dose of Crime & Psychology goodness! The Dictionary is getting more capacious, more generous, more joyful, with every update, so this time I’m going to schedule it over two days – Tuesday and Wednesday. How’s that?: Even more bang for the buck that I’m not even charging you! Honestly, I don’t know how I do it. But I’m glad I do. All I ask in return is that you bang a blue button below. Or just click Like. It really does help keep this newsletter going.

Content warning: This Dictionary contains adult situations from the start. There will be Violence, Nudity, Smoking, who knows what else? Maybe all three at the same time. If you are easily upset, reserve your bargepole for touching different, kinder things!

Here are links to our previous Volume: Part 1 and Part 2.

This week’s bullet list? I’m glad you asked. What could it be but five of my favourite new additions to the Dictionary? Consider them an amuse bouche, a vorspeise, a palate-tickler, or choose your own gastronomic parallel. See you on Wednesday!

Autem cackle tub - Meeting-house for dissenters; place for outlaws to meet.

Badgers - According to the New Universal English Dictionary of 1760, a ‘crew of desperate villains’ who threw the corpses of murder victims into a lake.

Elephant ears – Little-heard term for a police officer. The idea is that police officers listen so carefully to so much criminal chatter, their ears grow big through exercise.

Grippy sock vacation - Commital to a psychiatric facility. The term comes from the non-stick socks with which patients are, apparently, issued, so that they do not need shoes or slippers.

Nuremburgs - Cockney rhyming slang for haemorroids, by way of ‘Nuremburg Trial’ = piles.