More Wordcrime: Solving Crime with Linguistics 9781350029644, 9781350029675, 9781350029668

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Tables
Part One Toolkit
1 How to do forensic linguistics
The role of the expert
Preliminary steps
Beginning the analysis
The examination
Overall approach
Observations of linguistic phenomena
Spelling and orthography
Grammar
Lexicon
Idiom
Identical expressions
Conclusion
Note
Part Two Confronting authority
2 The linguistic tragedy of Hillsborough
Suppressing the truth
Finding a form of words
Parallel deceptions
Notes
3 A pink-handled kitchen devil knife and other fabrications
4 I didn’t have a gun
5 All quiet at the endz
Note
References
6 Wars and words
Reason versus emotion
To make war use words
The weapons of war
Reason is not a weapon of war, but emotion works
Shifting the discourse
Define the discourse
Myth making
Notes
Part Three The authority to confront
7 Not a case of plagiarism
Illustration 1: Mid-term and final essay
8 How old? What gender?
Notes
9 Alarm and distress
10 The prosecutor of the ICC v the president of Kenya
Background
The difficulties of international criminal prosecution
Witness statements
Plagiarism
Practicalities of statement-making in the international context
Examples of some similarities across the documents
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Conclusion
Quality of evidence
Notes
References
11 The Facebook murder
12 The sting
The emails
The text messages
Part Four Life in forensic linguistics
13 Nothing is not important
14 When authorship is not authorship
Note
15 A letter for Mrs Joe
Notes
16 The strange prose of Mrs Mottle
Note
17 The love letters of Dr X
18 The invisible Bronski
Redundancy and legalistic language
Cross-textual cohesion
Note
19 Dissing the opposition
20 The concrete tomb
Kocher ­example 1
Kocher ­example 2
Kocher ­example 3
Kocher ­example 4
Kocher ­example 5
Kocher ­example 6
Kocher ­example 7
Kocher ­example 8
Christophe ­example 1
Christophe ­example 2
Questioned email excerpt 1
Questioned email excerpt 2
Questioned email excerpt 3
Questioned email excerpt 4
21 A particularly unpleasant man
Text set JMH8
Text set JMH9
Text set JMH10
Text set JMH11
22 The mysterious Mr Erdnase
Aspects of vocabulary: Very long words
Notes
Index

Citation preview

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More Wordcrime

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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Wordcrime, by John Olsson Forensic Linguistics, by John Olsson and June Luchjenbroers

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More Wordcrime Solving Crime with Linguistics John Olsson

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © John Olsson, 2018 John Olsson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image by Clare Turner All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-​party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Olsson, John, 1951–​author. Title: More Wordcrime: Solving crime with linguistics /​by John Olsson. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018002420 (print) | LCCN 2018006498 (ebook) |  ISBN 9781350029651 (ePuB) | ISBN 9781350029668 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350029644 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Forensic linguistics. Classification: LCC HV8073.5 (ebook) | LCC HV8073.5 .O453 2018 (print) |  DDC 363.25/​6–​dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2018002420 ISBN: PB: 978-​1-​3500-​2964-​4 ePDF: 978-​1-​3500-​2966-​8 eBook: 978-​1-​3500-​2965-​1 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To Angie and Chloe

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Contents

List of Tables  ix

Part One  Toolkit  1 1 How to do forensic linguistics  3

Part Two  Confronting authority  23 2 The linguistic tragedy of Hillsborough  25 3 A pink-​handled kitchen devil knife and other

fabrications  47

4 I didn’t have a gun  57 5 All quiet at the endz  63 6 Wars and words  75

Part Three  The authority to confront  83 7 Not a case of plagiarism  85 8 How old? What gender?  97

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9 Alarm and distress  103 10

The prosecutor of the ICC v the president of Kenya  109

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The Facebook murder  125

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The sting  135

Part Four  Life in forensic linguistics  141 13

Nothing is not important  143

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When authorship is not authorship  147

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A letter for Mrs Joe  153

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The strange prose of Mrs Mottle  163

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The love letters of Dr X  173

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The invisible Bronski  183

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Dissing the opposition  191

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The concrete tomb  195

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A particularly unpleasant man  213

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The mysterious Mr Erdnase  223

Index  259

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Tables

  7.1 Proportion of references to assignment length  91   8.1 Showing the different degrees of variation between speakers  99   8.2 Ratio of words not recycled  101 11.1 Q text measurements  132 11.2 Known text measurements  132 16.1 Common expressions  166 16.2 Frequency of expressions  167 18.1 Bronski and Wilbuthnot correspondence  185 18.2 Bronski and Wilbuthnot correspondence  185 18.3 Uses of ‘be’ in the documents  186 18.4 Use of prepositions in the case texts  187 22.1 Authorship candidates  225 22.2 Potential vocabulary sources  228 22.3 Common very long words found in Expert and in the candidate authors’ works  230 22.4 Synonyms for ‘learn’, ‘study’, etc., across the works in this inquiry  232 22.5 Showing the rarest very long words in Expert  233 22.6 American newspaper spellings of maneuver and manoeuvre  235

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newgenprepdf

List of Tables

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22.7

Variation within Expert as to the spelling of manoeuver with page numbers  236

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Instances of ‘sleight’ and ‘slight’ (n.) in the text of Expert  237

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Position of conjunctions and conjunction phrases used in Expert and by the candidates  243

22.10 Post-​conjunction comma in the inquiry texts  244 22.11 However plus comma plus conditional conjunction  244 22.12 Use of comma after the conjunction ‘and’  244 22.13 The sequence of ‘and’, plus comma plus conjunction  245 22.14 Punctuation before or/nor  245 22.15 Roterberg and Expert’s treatment of the Charlier Pass  247 22.16 Highlights from Table 22.15  248 22.17 Summary of authorship and other tests  254

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Part One

Toolkit

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1 How to do forensic linguistics In this chapter I  will give the reader some general tips on how forensic linguistics can be done. By ‘doing forensic linguistics’ I  mean undertaking an authorship analysis. If you do not know what authorship is, this is the quickest way that I know to describe it: authorship analysis is the methodology used by a forensic linguist to determine who the author of a particular document is –​whether that document is a handwritten letter or an email, a phone text message or any other electronically produced item of text. I should stress that I  am not suggesting that after reading this chapter you would be capable of carrying out a forensic linguistic analysis, or that you should even consider doing so; I  am simply showing you some aspects of how such an analysis is done. I certainly do not recommend anyone basing a legal decision, or any other type of decision, on the strength of information in this chapter, and I take no responsibility for anyone doing so or any consequences which might ensue from such an action. Consider this chapter as being similar to a video describing the actions a person takes when driving a vehicle. It is no more than that. My main aim is to pique your interest –​perhaps you will end up taking a course in forensic linguistics, either at a UK university or at the Forensic Linguistics Institute.1

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In the course of this chapter I will cite examples from previous cases, some of which are discussed in this book. What we are interested in here is a discussion and description of language, not the personalities behind that language. Regarding authorship, I  would specifically mention three things which authorship analysis is not. The first is:  anything to do with handwriting analysis. Analysing a person’s handwriting in order to determine whether the writer is Ms X or Mr Y, or somebody else entirely, is a completely different discipline. It has nothing to do with authorship. No forensic linguist would get involved with handwriting analysis in any professional capacity. The second thing that I  would exclude from authorship analysis is any form of psychological evaluation or profiling. I am sometimes asked about things like an individual’s ‘motivation’ or ‘intention’. Again, these areas have nothing to do with authorship analysis, as interesting as some people might find them. I am specifically against the idea that a linguist should attempt to draw a psychological profile of a person. It should never be attempted. Note that psychological profiling is a completely different thing from sociolinguistic profiling; this form of profiling attempts to attribute certain specific social parameters to an individual based on the language s/​he uses:  parameters include age, gender, occupation, social group and so on. It is possible, in certain cases, to use linguistic data to work out, with a high degree of accuracy, the likely occupation of an author. The third thing that I  exclude from authorship analysis is any evaluation of whether the author is ‘telling the truth’ or not. It has long been the practice in common law and civil jurisdictions that deciding whether someone is telling the truth is the sole province of the court. Indeed, that is often the whole point of a trial: the defendant is charged with an offence, s/​he denies the offence. Who is telling the truth? That is the purpose of the trial –​by examining witnesses and

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evaluating other evidence, including any statements made by the defendant, the court should be able to determine the answer to this question for itself.

The role of the expert It is not for experts to opine on the defendant’s guilt. In fact, speaking for myself, I take little interest in the trial’s outcome. It is simply not my affair. All I do is make my analysis, give my evidence as competently as I can –​which includes being cross-​examined on that evidence –​and then leave. Sometimes I get a phone call or an email from a prosecutor or, as the case may be, a defence solicitor, thanking me for my evidence, but I do not draw any conclusions as to whether the evidence played a part in the conviction or acquittal. That would be entirely inappropriate; expert testimony is only one very small part of the evidence in a trial, and the expert is nothing more than a small cog in a very big wheel. For the forensic linguist, the defendant is first and foremost an author. In case there is any doubt, it should be further stated that the expert is not an advocate; advocacy is the job of lawyers. An expert should resist the temptation of trying to be persuasive and should eschew any tricks of rhetoric in order to convey a point. It is not for the expert to try to endear himself or herself to the court. Know your evidence, know what you want to say, and say it, but be open to suggestions from counsel. If you are wrong about something, admit it. You are only human. There are no geniuses. I have made mistakes in court in the past. Once I froze completely, unable to remember a trivial detail about an email exchange. The judge rightly slammed me and said I was ‘unimpressive’. I am sure I was. I learned a lot from that case. You are an expert, and what the court most needs from you is your expertise, but at the end of the day all you are doing is giving

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an opinion. It is up to the court to accept that opinion or not. It is nothing personal. The expert’s ego does not come into it. I read some time ago about an expert who, upon hearing that the defendant in a case he had been working on was convicted, ‘punched the air’. That is triumphalist nonsense. Expert evidence is only one part of the evidence. We do the work because, aside from making a living through it, we also find it very interesting. It is intellectually and practically challenging, and we learn a lot about language. We try to be helpful –​but to the court, and only to the court, not to any particular party in the case; this is an ethical duty, a moral obligation. We owe no party in the case anything at all other than our contractual obligations under English law (or whatever jurisdiction we are working in). In English law, as elsewhere, the first and overriding duty is to the court. In English law, all that is required of the provider of a service in relation to the recipient of that service is for the work to be carried out with reasonable care and skill. There are no further expert duties to the professional client or the lay client. Carrying out the work with reasonable care and skill includes deciding whether you should undertake the assignment in the first place. Many cases involving an authorship dispute are simply not suitable for forensic linguistic analysis. For example, it sometimes happens that there is just not enough data to make an analysis or, on the other hand, there may be a question mark over the authorship of documents ‘known’ to have been produced by the defendant or some other person. There are all sorts of reasons why an analysis might not be feasible, and these are just two of them. In one case, I decided not to undertake the work for the simple reason that it would have been entirely inappropriate in the circumstances. It was because, in the course of discussions with the client, I became concerned that he might not have capacity. I  was therefore able to advise the solicitor regarding what I considered to be her client’s predicament. The solicitor confirmed

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that her client was suffering from severe mental illness and told me that a few months earlier, a person claiming to be a forensic document examiner had accepted $30,000 from the client on the pretext of testing a single sheet of paper for the type of ink used on it –​a wholly unnecessary and frivolous examination. Sadly, this person was never traced and the client was not able to regain his money. In the UK, certainly in a civil court, the court may ask the expert to justify a report and appear in court if it seems to the court that the work was not warranted. If it turns out that the client was a vulnerable person or a person whose capacity was in question, the court would take an exceedingly dim view of an expert who nevertheless went ahead and carried out unnecessary, or improperly instructed, work. It is the expert’s task to assist the court in resolving an important issue between parties. The expert needs to be aware of what that issue is before making a judgement as to whether to undertake the work or not. On occasion, I have advised lawyers that a report would not assist the court even if the judge were to accept the evidence. It is also important that the expert does not become part of the prosecution or defence team. The expert needs to keep at a distance from the lawyers in the case. A lawyer working on a case is naturally interested in the outcome; s/​he has their client’s best interests to consider. Associating too closely with a lawyer in a case exposes the expert to the possibility of being influenced, albeit unintentionally. I say this as a lawyer myself, although I do not practise law.

Preliminary steps It is important not to know too much about the case. A solicitor will sometimes want to tell the expert everything, including, of course, that their client is not guilty. This is entirely understandable and a

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very human reaction; despite its stuffy image, the law attracts people who are passionate about what they do. A  lawyer’s passion for the client’s case is understandable. In a system based on the rule of law, it is essential. By contrast, the expert needs only to know what work the solicitor is looking for and then ask the solicitor to arrange the documents into various sets, for example, Person A, Person B, Person X. You may need a little more detail in some cases, but you should always tread carefully in relation to what you ask; too much knowledge and you could contaminate the case. Let the lawyer tell you the minimum and leave it to you to ask any necessary questions. This brings us to the topic of internet research. It is critical that you do not undertake any internet research, or research in any other form, when working on a case. There are a number of reasons for this:  first, you risk contaminating the evidence and prejudicing yourself. There is usually very little reason to care about the facts of the case; in particular, you do not need to be weighed down by news stories, many of which may be inaccurate. Moreover, the internet is full of ‘experts’  –​people who have formed an opinion on the basis of scant information obtained second hand and who are anxious to prove to everyone how clever they are. The facts of the case are, with few exceptions, none of your business. Whether the defendant is charged with multiple murders or shoplifting is of no concern to you. In particular, if there is a victim, and the solicitor’s client or a police suspect is the defendant in the matter, you do not want to know how badly the victim was injured or assaulted or –​if there was a fatality –​the nature of the injuries to the deceased. The court does not need you to be sympathetic with any party, least of all the victim. This is not to say you are inhuman or unfeeling; of course, you will feel a natural sympathy for victims of crime, but the less you know about the individual case the better. So, do no research, and know little or nothing other than the nature of

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your task. Usually, nothing else is necessary. I have sometimes gone to court aware only that a certain crime was alleged to have been committed, but knowing nothing of the crime’s circumstances. In court, I avoid looking at the defendant altogether. I do not want to take the risk that I might unwittingly form an opinion as to his or her ‘character’ or ‘personality’. So, to sum up the approach which I think needs to be taken to the evidential process, whether in writing a report or giving evidence live in court, is that one is essentially a clinician carrying out an operation. Afterwards you might learn of the circumstances of the case, but it is far better not to know anything outside your own evidence before the case has been dealt with in court.

Beginning the analysis The first step in making the analysis is often transcription of the documents. Documents are usually received as paper copies or as image files. It is rare that a document is electronically readable when first received. Transcription can be a painful and lengthy process. If it is a person’s handwriting which is to be transcribed, it is important to be cautious, and to not try to guess at what has been written. In most cases there will always be several words or phrases which cannot be transcribed accurately with any degree of certainty. Even if documents are received which can be read by the computer immediately, it is important to know their history before they reached you; in particular you need to know how they were transcribed. If they were simply copied and pasted from a paper document, then the linguist needs to see the paper copy as well (either the original or a dependable facsimile). If the document was received as an email, it is important, from the court’s point of view, that the email

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headers accompany the message. In any event, the analyst should make it clear if s/​he has any doubts regarding the provenance of any of the documents received for analysis. If someone has typed the document from a hard copy, you need to see that hard copy. Usually I do not trust other people’s transcriptions. A forensic linguist might sometimes use a specialist proof reader to check the quality of the transcription (provided this has been approved by those instructing), but final responsibility for an accurate transcription remains with the forensic linguist. In a busy laboratory, the documents are prepared by technicians. The analyst will see them only after they have been transcribed and checked and coded in such a way as to prevent any identification (see reference below to the role of the technician).

The examination Assuming that you now have an accurate transcription of each document, you may proceed with the examination. Some linguists suggest you begin with the questioned document, note the features of importance and then see whether those features are present in the documents of known authorship. However, this may lead to observer bias. It is far better to examine each document as a discrete entity, independent of what you may or may not have observed in other documents, and pay no attention to who may or may not have authored it. The way to do this is to have a technician number each document with a code which can only be deciphered with a key. So, Document 1 from Person A will be labelled in such a way that when you examine it, you will not know that it is from Person A, any more than you would know that another document was authored by, for example, Person B or Person C.  With each document, observe and record what the principal features you consider to be of importance

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are, note those down, and then, only once you have examined all the documents, make your comparison. Afterwards, your colleague will be able to inform you as to how the documents are organized, in the order of, for example, Person A, Person B and so on. By taking these precautions you will avoid contaminating your evidence through reaching impressionistic or irrational conclusions. Remember, the linguist has to be able to stand up in court and relate to the court not only what observations were made, but also how and why they were made. In other words, you will need to show the court that you carried out the examination objectively, fairly, impartially and transparently.

Overall approach What you are aiming to do is to see whether any candidate is the likely author of the questioned document (let us call this document ‘Q’). You need to decide what features each of the candidates has in common with Q, and whether any of those features is distinctive enough to place any one of the candidates as more likely to be the author than any other candidate. The linguistic phenomena you observe need to be sufficiently unusual for such an observation to be valid. Linguists refer to such phenomena as ‘marked’. For example, if I spell the word ‘receive’ as ‘recieve’, that is marked (i.e. not standard). However, since many people make this particular spelling mistake, it is far from unusual and so would hardly raise the forensic linguist’s interest. In one case, an author wrote ‘riting’ instead of ‘writing’. This is both marked and highly unusual. In any inquiry, if a writer produced ‘riting’ instead of ‘writing’, I would certainly consider that as a linguistic feature worth noting, especially if it occurred more than once. If the document has been produced using a keyboard, an apparently marked form may be a typographical error.

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Observations of linguistic phenomena We may consider linguistic phenomena under a number of convenient headings, including (i) spelling and other aspects of orthography (e.g. punctuation), (ii) grammar, (iii) the lexicon and (iv) idiom. In reality, these four areas of language cannot really be separated because they are all part of the system we call language. A further area that might indicate the possibility of an authorship match (I stress might) is where identical expressions are used across known and questioned documents.

Spelling and orthography The key to identifying authorship indicators is to develop the ability to notice the smallest details, including spelling habits and the way in which a person uses punctuation. The reader may have heard of the tragic case of JonBenét Ramsey, the six-​year-​old girl who was murdered at her home in Colorado some twenty years ago. A handwritten ransom note was found (the writer claiming to be part of a ‘foreign faction’), and one curious point about that note was the misspelling of two words: ‘business’ as ‘bussiness’ and ‘possession’ as ‘posession’. Despite these two apparently basic errors, other words of equal or greater spelling difficulty were produced in their standard forms –​‘attaché’, ‘adequate’, ‘monitor’, and ‘foreign’, among others. In my opinion, the misspelled words were simply a ploy to lend weight to the claim that the author of the note was ‘foreign’. The curious thing about these misspellings, however, is that whenever I ask a group of students to transcribe the note, only a handful will notice the misspellings. The biggest obstacle to learning

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to observe what there is, is our preconception with what should be. The art in forensic transcription is to see the words, letters and punctuation marks as a set of objects devoid of meaning. In this book, you will come across a number of instances involving curious spellings, but one case that you may find interesting is the one in which the author wrote ‘staff ’ instead of ‘stuff ’: see the chapter ‘The little things’. Moving on to punctuation examples, an employee who had recently obtained a promotion at work was surprised to receive an anonymous letter criticizing her weight. The anonymous letter writer told the addressee to ‘take your arrogant, cake shop-​loving arse back to X’. While the recipient considered this letter to be childish, even abusive, it seemed to be intended as no more than an insult, and she was disposed to ignoring it. However, not much will deter a resolute hate mail writer and, not long after the first letter was received, a second letter turned up, containing the expression ‘your whining token-​arse’. The employer had, through inquiries, a reasonable idea as to who the author of the first letter was, and so the forensic linguistic question came down to whether the two letters were of the same authorship. Noticing these two phrases, I  considered the use of the hyphen in each of the examples to be interesting. As we can see, the noun phrases are structured as follows: your arrogant {-​loving) arse} your whining {token-​arse}. In each case, the entire expression is a noun phrase. The curly brackets contain a further noun phrase –​‘cake shop-​loving arse’ and ‘token-​ arse’ respectively. Each example shows an attempt at close attention to detail on the part of its author. I  would just mention in passing

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that I  was not specifically asked to give an opinion on the author’s (or authors’) occupation (or occupations), but I  would suggest this person was female, and probably working in an administrative role which required attention to detail. It has been my observation, which I confess to be somewhat subjective, that women are generally more observant when it comes to small, apparently insignificant details than men. Syntactically, hyphens are sometimes used to define phrase boundaries, but I  am not entirely sure that they work in these two instances. In the first example, the hyphen plus the word ‘loving’ appended to ‘shop’ places the emphasis on ‘shop-​loving’ and backgrounds ‘cake shop’, so that if the words were spoken, the presence of the hyphen would mean that ‘cake’ would appear, in a temporal sense at least, detached from what followed, giving us something like: cake          shop loving arse. If the second example were spoken, applying the same idea, we would get: whining        token arse. With regard to the first of these, ‘cake shop’ is a noun –​a shop where cakes are sold. However, the hyphen breaks this up, as indicated above and, instead, ‘arse’ is now qualified by ‘shop loving’ instead of ‘cake shop loving’. In other words, instead of having a ‘cake shop loving arse’ we have a ‘shop loving arse’. The hyphen alters the emphasis in the phrase such that the importance of ‘cake’ as part of ‘cake shop’ is backgrounded. The reader will appreciate that the expression in the second letter was intended as a racist insult. Hence, we see in the second example that the addressee is being referred to as a ‘token’.

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As with the previous example, however, ‘whining’ has effectively been syntactically detached from ‘token arse’ by the use of the hyphen, giving us, as noted above, the formulation: whining    token arse. In other words, a key part of the semantic content of the phrase, namely, ‘whining’, has been backgrounded in importance by the use of the hyphen, and this appears to mirror the process in the first example. These examples demonstrate the importance of attention to apparently insignificant matters such as punctuation marks. In this case, a hyphen appears to reveal a particular syntactic design common to two separate communications. While it is true that this feature is unlikely to be peculiar to a single individual, when taken in conjunction with other attributes which the two letters had in common, I concluded that the letters were consistent with regard to authorship. Throughout this book you will see other examples of punctuation and orthography which have proved useful in authorship analyses. The chapter ‘The little things’, for example, contains an odd occurrence, namely, the word ‘however’ followed by a semicolon, while the chapter ‘The mysterious Mr Erdnase’ shows a semicolon followed by ‘however’. In the chapter ‘The concrete tomb’, the author was a French native speaker. Whereas most European francophones will place a space before a colon, this individual did not. The same feature was found across documents known to have been authored by him and also within an email allegedly sent by the murder victim, a person who did not share this particular habit. Thus, whereas in Wordcrime (the first book of forensic linguistic cases I wrote), a fake suicide letter writer was caught by a full stop, here the author of an email claiming the victim was on an extended global holiday was exposed by the way in which he used a colon. Sadly, the victim was not on holiday

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at all –​he had been brutally murdered and then buried in a concrete tomb in the email writer’s garden.

Grammar Grammar is so closely associated with the school subject that most of us loved to hate, that practically everybody simply switches off when they hear the word ‘grammar’. Unfortunately, our teachers did not equip us to realize that grammar is just a set of tools used by the language to convey meaning. In language, a lot of the heavy lifting is done by ‘little’ words, things like prepositions, conjunctions and determiners. Prepositions are important because they link phrases. Without prepositions, English would have to depend on some other system  –​for example, a case system such as is found in certain languages. In the chapter ‘The prosecutor of the ICC v the president of Kenya’, a curious omission was found across two documents: ‘The XYZ told us they had been sent and were representing ABC’. Here, the preposition ‘by’ has been omitted after the word ‘sent’. Prepositions can be significant in an authorship analysis, where there is a marked construction. I would consider the absence of ‘by’ here to indicate a marked construction. Of course, on its own a finding of this nature would not be significant but, taken with other similarities between known and questioned documents, misuse of prepositions may indicate consistency between two authors. Conjunctions are also interesting. In another case, the author regularly used ‘for’ where most people would use ‘because’  –​‘for there is no reason why’, ‘for you should go’ and so on. Although ‘for’ is perfectly acceptable as a substitute for ‘because’, it is now somewhat archaic. Again, no analyst would consider this important on its own but in conjunction with other features it may be helpful in an analysis.

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Determiners can also be helpful in indicating an authorship similarity, especially in relation to authors whose first language is not English. Speakers of certain other languages are sometimes known to have difficulty with ‘the’ –​for example, speakers of Slavic languages and languages which belong to the modern Indic group. In one instance, the known author was a Hindi speaker whose use of ‘the’ was not standard. However, the questioned documents displayed competence in this area. Other determiners can also help with authorship problems. In another case, the author’s examples of difficulty with determiners included ‘I broke my both legs’ and ‘two lovely such people’. Some instances of this type of markedness might arise simply as a result of a momentary lapse on the author’s part. However, where a pattern emerges, the analyst can begin to consider disregarding that possibility.

Lexicon Dictionaries do not exist just on library shelves and on the internet. Every speaker begins to construct an internal dictionary, almost from the moment language acquisition begins. The lexicon continues to develop throughout life, or until some form of language loss occurs, for example if the individual suffers some form of cognitive damage such as a stroke, the onset of dementia or some other neurolinguistic pathology. The individual’s lexicon is a dynamic faculty; that is to say, it is constantly changing. Its content is based on a combination of social experiences, including daily interactions in relation to the individual’s home life, education, work, media (including reading, television, etc.) and other forms of entertainment. Each individual’s lexicon is unique. A person’s occupation will to some extent influence the lexicon. For example, lawyers may habitually speak legalese even on informal

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occasions, while computer specialists are on occasion given to ‘geekalese’. Forensic linguists who analysed police statements in the early miscarriages of justice cases soon noted the tendency of police officers to write in a kind of institutional register sometimes referred to as ‘police speak’ or ‘cop speak’. So, for example, an officer does not ‘drive a car’ but ‘proceeds in a vehicle’, ‘observes’ rather than ‘sees’ something, ‘forms an opinion’ instead of ‘concludes’ and what you and I might refer to as a ‘place’ is more likely, in cop speak, to be a ‘locus’. A man is always a ‘male’, which occasionally leads to such oddities as ‘the male person stated that . . .’. There is no problem with this institutional register, since it serves a purpose in police communications. However, when we find statements supposedly produced by an ordinary person in which phrases such as ‘male person’ or ‘the firearm discharged’ occur, we are entitled to be sceptical as to how those statements were produced. In Wordcrime, you may recall the case of James Earl Reed, in which Reed allegedly described the alleged murder weapon as ‘a silvery-​colored, somewhat rusty 9 mm semi-​automatic pistol’. Linguistically, it is highly unlikely that such a lengthy noun phrase would occur in speech. Not only is this a somewhat long noun phrase, it is also extremely lexically dense. If you read the chapter ‘A pink-​handled kitchen devil knife’ in this book, you will see what I  mean by ‘lexically dense’. For now, think of it as ‘too much content packed into too few words’. In Reed’s statement, he is supposed to have used the word ‘nonchalant’ to describe one of the victims, and to have referred to a vehicle as a ‘small two-​door red car’. This is also somewhat lexically dense but, in addition, if you search for that phrase on the internet (in full quotation marks), you will see that it crops up again and again in police reports. In any case, why would someone planning a murder in a house care about what type of vehicle the victims arrived at the house in? If Reed

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referred to the car at all, he is much more likely to have spoken of ‘a little red car’. As for the word ‘nonchalant’, I considered that to be a somewhat surprising member of Reed’s lexicon, given that Reed’s IQ had been measured at 77 just months before his trial. Let me digress here to say that in some states in the United States, a person will not be deemed fit to stand trial if his or her IQ is 75 or less. In my experience, defendants whose capacity is doubted rarely have an IQ at that level; it is almost always one or two points above 75. The suspicion must lie that the testing process is, in some cases at least, a charade. Moreover, it takes no account of any margin of error. In other words, a person whose IQ is measured at 77 may, in fact, have an IQ no higher than, say, 73.

Idiom Idiom refers to the structure of an expression whose meaning does not depend on the meaning of the individual words in that expression. For example, we would not imagine that a person of whom it was said that ‘he leads a dog’s life’ is a member of the canine species, or that a friend who stated that he was ‘up a creek without a paddle’ was, at that moment, in a canoe on a river without the appropriate means of navigation. A striking example of unusual idiom occurred in the case of the Unabomber, where the author wrote ‘to eat one’s cake and have it’, rather than the more usual ‘to have one’s cake and eat it’. The author’s brother realized that he had heard that form of the idiom used only by his mother and his brother, and this single phrase was instrumental in identifying the bomber as Ted Kaczynski. Jim Fitzgerald, the FBI special agent working on the case discovered, however, that the way Ted Kaczynski used the expression had been standard up until the early modern period.

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Identical expressions In the infamous Ice Cream Wars case, several officers quoted a defendant as having used these identical words:  ‘I only wanted the van windaes shot up. The fire at Fat Boy’s was only meant to be a frightener which went too far’. In the chapter ‘A pink-​handled kitchen devil knife’, I describe why it is unlikely that this would represent an accurate record of what the defendant had said. In a nutshell, it is improbable that two speakers (or writers) acting independently of each other will produce identical expressions of more than six words in length (the above quotation is over twenty words long), excluding where the expression is a fixed phrase or part of a fixed phrase. This is aside from memory limitations. Police statements tend to contain a stock of such phrases, for example, ‘on mobile uniform patrol’, ‘smelled alcohol on his breath’, ‘cautioned and arrested the suspect’, ‘conveyed the suspect to the police station’ and many more. Politicians are probably more guilty of this type of linguistic abuse than any other section of society. Particularly loathsome are ‘lessons will be learned’ (except that they never are), ‘strong and stable’ (which always calls to mind ‘weak and wobbly’), ‘govern in the interests of the whole country’ (yes, of course), ‘proceed with moving forwards’ (a sure sign that things are about to go backwards) and scores of others. However, this phenomenon of fixed phrases aside, finding two authors who produce an identical expression of six or more words is likely to be exceptionally unusual.

Conclusion In this chapter I  have outlined some of the elements of language which may be of interest to those considering an authorship problem.

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We looked at a number of examples of the type of phenomena which might be useful to the forensic linguist. These examples are expanded on in the course of this book where you will find more details regarding the methods and techniques used in solving particular authorship and other linguistic problems. In forensic linguistics it often happens that very small clues assist in leading to an attribution. However, at no stage does forensic linguistics ever claim to identify an author. To put this in perspective, even a geneticist would not make such a claim; like any other expert witness, the geneticist does no more than offer an opinion regarding the meaning of certain observed phenomena. This applies whether the phenomena in question are linguistic in nature, chromosomal, fibrous, etymological, palynological, mineralogical or related to any other discipline.

Note 1 The leading university in the UK in this field is Aston University where Professor Tim Grant, Dr Krzysztof Kredens and Dr Nicci Macleod, among others, are often consulted on authorship matters. I understand that Professor Malcolm Coulthard has now retired. His expertise in criminal matters will be sorely missed, but he has left the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston in good hands. I teach Forensic Linguistics at Bangor Law School in North Wales as part of the Master of Laws degree (LLM), as well as the Law of Expert Evidence. I also run a number of courses in Forensic Linguistics at the Forensic Linguistics Institute (www.thetext.co.uk).

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Part Two

Confronting authority

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2 The linguistic tragedy of Hillsborough In this chapter I  want to outline some of the forensic linguistics aspects of what happened on, and as a consequence of, the events of Saturday, 15 April 1989, at the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield, England, when ninety-​ six innocent football fans died unlawfully. In addition to those fatalities, almost 800 other people were injured, many seriously. An untold number of others were traumatized through witnessing the event. Many lives, many families, whole communities, were devastated. It is no exaggeration to say that the events at Hillsborough have had a long-​term effect on the nation. If the public at large have learned anything from Hillsborough it is that when the chips are down, certain parts of the establishment will look after the establishment with no regard to people’s suffering; these elements of the hierarchy will lie to us, and will cover up the truth, for as long as possible. They will continue lying even when there is no place to hide; they will manufacture ever more lies to cover up existing ones, and they will use every weapon in their armoury to do so, including the media and elements of the public service which are bound to do their bidding. These elements will appoint plausible people to spread their lies,

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distort findings of official inquiries and use every possible stratagem to save face  –​in short, we are led to the inescapable conclusion that, according to certain layers within the establishment, all is fair in public life, where the overriding objective is the preservation of reputations. We have seen this with disasters and scandals of widely different types:  incompetently collected death statistics in the Dr Shipman murders; the causes of, and motivations for, the Iraq War; the MPs’ expenses scandal; cash for questions; the Stafford Hospital cover up and many others. What is needed now is a way of making government more accountable and transparent. What I  hope to provide in this chapter is a quick guide to how, when corrupt elements within the power hierarchy decide to cover up, we, the people, armed with a few forensic linguistic skills, can monitor what is happening, and perhaps prevent the worst from being realized, in particular the evil consequences of long delays for the truth to be revealed. Before discussing specific forensic linguistic matters, I  should make clear that I was never officially involved in the inquiry. In 2014, my students at Bangor University and I gave a presentation to lawyers representing the families of some of the victims. The presentation was about the linguistics of the Hillsborough ‘cover-​up’; it concerned not only the actions of certain senior police officers, but also the effect that those actions had on others, including some journalists of several national newspapers. The presentation also made a brief reference to the miners’ strike of the early 1980s which, as others have noted, forms part of the background to the Hillsborough cover-​up by South Yorkshire Police. That has been the extent of my association with Hillsborough. My students conducted their own research using the extensive archive of the Hillsborough inquiry team, and reached a number of important conclusions regarding what had happened. It was a powerful demonstration for the lawyers of how linguistics, an

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apparently abstract ‘academic’ university subject, can be used to solve everyday problems. Time and time again I  meet police officers and lawyers who are surprised at the power of language to solve crime; it should be no surprise at all. Close attention to the linguistic events related to a criminal offence can have a powerful effect on outcomes. This is because language itself is our most potent cognitive faculty. No computer will ever equal the capacity of the human brain to communicate, process and respond to the complexities of human social interaction. Equally, no robot or machine will ever be able to match up to the ability of a properly trained mind to analyse language. What happened at Hillsborough illustrates this power of analysis perfectly. If those who were charged with the task of investigating South Yorkshire Police’s involvement at Hillsborough had done their job properly and paid attention to the police and witness statements, then the families would not have had to endure a quarter of a century of official obfuscation and mendacity. It all comes down to ego: the ego of senior police officers at the time, determined to hide their actions from the public gaze; the ego of certain newspaper editors who claimed to be publishing the truth; the dilatoriness of civil servants; the extraordinary narcissism and vanity of politicians. Everybody who saw the footage of the then prime minister, Mrs Thatcher, a few days after the tragedy, brushing aside the concerns of a mother who had lost her son at Hillsborough, cringed with horror at Mrs Thatcher’s condescension and sheer crassness. Could this really be one of the world’s leading politicians at work? Were the public not entitled to expect that their prime minister would show a little compassion, a little understanding, instead of automatically siding with the police? The second point I need to make by way of introduction is that in commenting on the actions of those who engineered and orchestrated the cover-​up, it should be emphasized that these deceptions were

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carried out by a relatively small number of high-​ranking officers. Junior officers were, in the main, not involved –​in fact, it is a matter of record that among the officers at the stadium on the day of the tragedy, some rendered valuable, even heroic, assistance to the victims. Several police officers actually stood up to the institutional bullying and pressure placed on them by their own senior officers  –​people they had relied on to guide and lead them honourably. A  number of those police officers who did stand up for themselves and their colleagues would never see promotion; in fact, their careers would be cut short or otherwise blighted. This human tragedy affected whole communities, and set back transparency in public life by decades. When politicians, and others in power or with power, tell us that ‘lessons will be learned’, very often they are telling us something else: they are telling us that they have learned how to avoid exposure to the truth, that they have gained yet another stratagem or technique in their armoury of deception. Even as they tell us that lessons will be learned, they are looking to their own backs. In addition to being a human tragedy, I suggest that Hillsborough may be a linguistic tragedy because for decades, members of the British establishment, including high-​ranking police officers, covered up what had really happened with a plethora of lies, half-​truths, smears and evasions. That is what I mean by a linguistic tragedy –​a linguistic tragedy is what happens when officials abuse the language in order to thwart justice. By ‘abusing the language’ I mean, for example, when evidence is falsified. Public figures falsify evidence in many ways:  first, in the early stages, they flat out deny the truth, the obviousness of what everybody saw or heard; later, when that does not work, they simply divert and distract people from the facts, either by inventing new ones or by concentrating on other unimportant issues; at all stages they seek to smear the reputations of those who are trying to expose the truth.

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They even resort to manufacturing news events in order to push the truth to the back of people’s minds, or they use some other incident to do so, thus creating ‘a good day to bury bad news’. Amid all this obfuscation and deception, innocent people suffer while officials manage to avoid any form of censure or criticism. Hillsborough was a linguistic tragedy because, as a result of possibly the most infamous cover-​up of the last 100  years, relatives of the deceased and injured, as well as survivors, were denied justice for nearly three decades while the press, people in the government and, especially, certain senior officers at South Yorkshire Police, lied about them, vilified their characters and concealed the truth about the mistakes which had happened on that day in 1989. We should not imagine, just because the truth has come out at last, that Hillsborough was an isolated incident or that it will never happen again. We can be sure that Hillsborough is simply the most visible sign of high level institutional corruption –​it is far from being the only one.

Suppressing the truth Regarding Hillsborough, this determination to keep the truth suppressed was found at almost all levels of the establishment. For example, following the first inquiry into the disaster chaired by Lord Taylor, the then prime minister, Mrs Thatcher, was informed that his report found that Chief Superintendent Duckenfield had ‘behaved in an indecisive fashion’ and that Lord Taylor considered that senior officers in charge of the football match at Hillsborough on that day sought to ‘duck all responsibility when giving evidence’ to the inquiry.1 While the home secretary, Mr Douglas Hurd, considered that South Yorkshire Police’s chief constable, Peter Wright, should resign, Mrs Thatcher refused to consider any criticism of the police. One Home

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Office civil servant had suggested that the government should give its full support to Lord Taylor’s report. Mrs Thatcher replied that the government could not give its support, saying that the report’s ‘broad thrust is devastating criticism of the police. Is that for us to welcome?’ I  doubt that civil servant’s career advanced much after that. His personnel file would have been marked ‘not sound’ or with words of similar condemnatory effect. Even the prime minister’s press secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham, weighed in with his own views. He wrote to a family member in the following vein: Thank you for your letter of June 13. I am sorry you are disgusted with the uncomfortable truth about the real cause of the Hillsborough disaster. It is my unhappy experience to find that most reasonable people outside Merseyside recognise the truth of what I say. All I get from Merseyside is abuse. I wonder why. You are at least right in believing you will have to put up with my discomforting views. I cherish the hope that as time goes on you will come to recognise the truth of what I say. After all, who if not the tanked up yobs who turned up late determined to get into ground, caused the disaster? To blame the police, even though they may have made mistakes, is contemptible. It is my understanding that as late as 2016, Sir Bernard still held these views.

Finding a form of words As is so often the case in the upper echelons of British political circles (among most, if not all, of the main political parties), the

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establishment chose not to face up to the real problem –​in this case police inefficiency (at best) or police corruption (at worst). Instead, a form of words was chosen to make it look as though Lord Taylor’s report was indeed being welcomed. Mrs Thatcher wrote: ‘We welcome the thoroughness of the report and its recommendations’.2 This gave the appearance that the government was doing something. Effectively, Mrs Thatcher, buttressed no doubt by the scurrilous reports in the press, especially in the Sun newspaper, and the views of her sycophantic acolytes such as Sir Bernard Ingham, blocked any criticism of the police, and I suggest that this was one of the factors which motivated South Yorkshire Police management to carry on concealing the truth. Chief Constable Peter Wright oversaw the force’s response to criticisms and was directly to blame for ensuring that at least 164 police statements were amended to suppress or remove any criticism of the police operation. This meant that Lord Taylor did not receive truthful information regarding what had happened at the match. Despite these deceptions, Lord Taylor pierced through the armour of mendacity and laid the blame squarely where it belonged, successfully identifying Chief Superintendent Duckenfield, the officer in charge of the match, as inexperienced and incompetent and as a person incapable of admitting fault. The political failure all along is that there was not, and never has been, any mechanism to expose establishment lies; the establishment’s representations as to what happened at Hillsborough were a labyrinth of fabrication. Only now, at the time of writing, have some of those allegedly responsible been brought before the courts. Tragically, the families of the bereaved and injured have had to wait over twenty-​ seven years for justice. The youngest victim was only 10  years old. Shame does not seem to be part of the mental equipment of the politicians of that, or perhaps any other, era.

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Parallel deceptions At the time of writing, not much time has passed since the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower in Kensington, London, which resulted in the loss of, as far as is known, over seventy lives. It is very much to be feared that the path of evasion, half-​truth, falsehood and misrepresentation, which is the hallmark of certain elements within the power structures of this country, will not have ceased with Hillsborough. There will be echelons within establishment circles keen to suppress the truth of what happened at Grenfell. We have seen this type of official mendacity time and time again; for example, fourteen years elapsed before Sir John Chilcot and his inquiry team were able to uncover the fabrications relating to this country’s invasion of Iraq. Although the nation had to wait for a long time for Sir John’s report, when it came he did not spare the establishment its blushes. We need more people like Sir John and Lord Taylor at the top, and fewer like Sir Bernard Ingham and Chief Constable Peter Wright. In this chapter, I  will be analysing not just the language used to cover up what happened at Hillsborough, but also the linguistic strategies of what may properly be termed establishment evasion. Or, put more simply and directly: lies. Hopefully, linguistics can make a contribution towards holding those in power and those with power to account. In the aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy, the first objective of the South Yorkshire Police hierarchy was to save face. In this they were assisted by their own prejudices. There was a deep-​seated dislike among some senior officers towards people from Liverpool. Casting one’s mind back to the 1980s, it may be recalled that this was the period of large-​scale industrial unrest, most notably exemplified by the miners’ strikes of that decade. A battle was being fought for the

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rights of workers by the National Union of Mineworkers and other mining trade unions across the coalfields of England and Wales. In this they were resolutely opposed by the Conservative government, headed by Mrs Margaret Thatcher, prime minister. She regarded the strikers as ‘the enemy within’. This attitude was pervasive throughout the establishment. It played a part in Hillsborough too. As the reader may be aware, several years before the disaster there, Mrs Thatcher’s government had ordered the large-​scale deployment of police officers to suppress the miners’ strike. The county of Yorkshire, being a leading mining area in the UK (and also the locus of the Hillsborough stadium), was the scene of bitter pitched battles between police and the striking miners. The most famous of these encounters came to be known as the Battle of Orgreave, described by some as the police attempting to uphold the law, while others consider it to be an instance of state-​sanctioned violence. While doubtless there were many police officers there with sincere intentions, the fact is they were being used as a political tool with the sole aim of crushing ‘the enemy within’. At Orgreave, trade unionists and sympathizers from Liverpool supported the striking miners, thus incurring the wrath of the upper echelons of the police establishment in South Yorkshire. Following Orgreave, nearly one hundred miners and supporters were prosecuted by police  –​ who claimed that they had been assaulted  –​but no convictions were achieved. The prosecutions were undoubtedly frivolous and malicious. Lawyers for the defendants were able to show that many of the statements made by police officers against the striking miners and others on the picket line had been fabricated on the orders of senior officers. Some of those same senior officers were responsible for the fabrication of police witness statements at Hillsborough. In any event, the miners’ strike appears to have played a part in kindling the

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contempt shown by elements within South Yorkshire Police against the Liverpool football fans at Hillsborough. Following Orgreave, no action was taken against senior police officers for ordering statements to be fabricated  –​no lessons were learned, except that the South Yorkshire Police brass of the time now knew that they could lie and get away with it; they would not be held accountable, no matter how outrageously they behaved, and there was no requirement for transparency. In that sense, the miners’ strike, the incidents at Orgreave and the subsequent failed prosecutions based on false evidence were the incubator for what happened in response to Hillsborough. The brass at South Yorkshire Police learned one thing above all else:  they could do virtually what they liked and nobody would hold them to account. If that does not equate with corruption, what does? How dare we point a finger at other nations and call them corrupt? On the morning after the tragedy at Hillsborough, Chief Constable Peter Wright held a meeting. Ostensibly this meeting was called to find out what had happened at the stadium the day before. In reality it was nothing of the kind. It was about agreeing to a version of events which would ensure that South Yorkshire Police was not blamed for the tragedy. For Wright, the crisis was not the loss of ninety-​six innocent lives, but the potential damage to South Yorkshire Police’s reputation. Regrettably, this tendency of the establishment to cover up scandal and disaster is endemic: the NHS took more than a decade to face up to the more than 1,000 unnecessary deaths which occurred at Stafford Hospital. Time after time, establishment figures will lie, cheat and deceive, will compromise the safety and health of staff and of patients, will allow people to die, just in order to save face. If there is anything rotten with modern governance, this is it: our inability to deal with mistakes, and our resolute determination to pretend that all is well.

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On that memorable morning after the tragedy, Wright said he understood that at 2.30 p.m., half an hour before the game was due to start, the section of the stadium allocated to Liverpool fans was still almost empty and he asked for an explanation. Why were the Liverpool fans not in position? This was almost the first question Wright asked at that meeting. I  strongly suspect that someone had fed this question to him. It immediately put the focus on the fans themselves. It took no account of the inadequacy of the turnstiles allocated to the fans at the ground. Of course, it could only invite a response which would, in some way, seek to blame the fans themselves. The chief constable was told by Superintendent Marshall that it was because the Liverpool fans had been drinking outside off-​licences (in the UK an ‘off-​licence’ is a store where alcohol is sold). Superintendent Marshall said: ‘The Gateway supermarket in Kilner Way were selling four packs and bottles of wine through a hole in the door. There were hoards [sic] of people on the grass outside Halfords near Halifax Road drinking’.3 At the same meeting, the chief constable stated that the fans had ‘arrived at the ground vicinity early enough to go in the ground but instead went drinking’. One of those attending the meeting, Superintendent McKay, said that ‘at 2.55  p.m. . . . all the drunken louts appeared’. Nobody at the meeting censured him for this remark or showed any disapproval. In addition, it was claimed by police –​with, as far as I am able to tell, no supporting evidence –​ that many of the fans were not ticket holders; in other words, that a considerable number of people were trying to get into the stadium to watch the game for free. Inspector Hand-​Davies derisorily stated that ‘that would be typical for Liverpool. They are opportunists, they look for opportunities to pinch a ticket, to rob a ticket’. Later he added: ‘I think that we must make the point that drink played a big part’. This is clear evidence of prejudice but, again, nobody commented on this

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aspect. The fact that there was this association in the minds of senior officers between ‘drink’, ‘Liverpool’, and the ‘opportunism’ involved in ticket theft, clearly demonstrates an institutional prejudice against the Liverpool fans. This same prejudice fed through to contemporary press reports and, as we have seen, reached as far up the power ladder as the prime minister’s press secretary. To this point about alcohol, Chief Constable Wright said: ‘If drink played a big part that will emerge. When the police actions were central to an issue like this the last thing we want to be seen to be doing is trying to blame someone else and I think let other people find that out. I accept that completely. Everybody’s saying it and it’s true but it is really a question of how that’s used’. What Wright is saying here is that he does not want the police to be seen to be blaming the fans. That information will emerge. In this context, ‘emerge’ is one of those English euphemisms designed to hide what will really happen. Information never just emerges. Wright of all people would have known that only too well. What Wright actually means is that he, through his minions, will arrange for that information or, rather disinformation, to be ‘used’. He himself will cause it, or arrange for it, to emerge. His fingerprints will not be involved in the ‘emerging’. At the same time, Wright is telling his officers what to think and what to say regarding the tragedy:  ‘Everybody’s saying it and it’s true’. Here, ‘everybody’ means ‘South Yorkshire Police’ and, almost simultaneously, certain elements of the national press. On that day, Wright, an officer with an otherwise impeccable record of honourable, decent service, was a master of manipulation:  he steered the meeting towards the only possible conclusion that would get South Yorkshire Police off the hook, namely that it was the fans themselves who had caused the deaths. This became, and remained –​for many years –​the official narrative. The narrative was

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set right there at that meeting on 16 April 1989, the day after the disaster. That the police intended to ensure that their reputation remained intact is also clearly illustrated in a comment by Chief Superintendent Wain who said at a later meeting, on 26 April 1989, that ‘we seek only objective facts for the benefit of the force as a whole’ (my italics). The aim was to ‘present a suitable case, on behalf of the force, to the subsequent inquiries’. This is yet further evidence that the hierarchy at South Yorkshire Police saw the protection of their own reputation as being more important than finding out what happened. The clinical phrasing of expressions such as ‘objective facts’ and ‘suitable case’ are testimony to what can only have been, at the time, a deep institutional psychosis within the force. A  ‘suitable’ case in this context is one which protects the reputation of the force. The deaths of nearly 100 people, some very young, some old and frail, all innocent, was of no consequence. So, what we see here is an institution on the back foot. It is desperate to find ways to protect itself. As a result, a siege mentality is adopted. This is somewhat similar to what has happened in relation to Grenfell. There, the early culprit was the manufacturer of the cladding on the building  –​whether that is a deserved criticism or not, only time will tell. The government energetically promoted this view by having more than a hundred other, similarly clad, buildings tested. This may have been no more than a front: the government was doing something. These actions served to distract the public from the government’s own, albeit passive, role in the fire: the fact that for years, housing and other ministers avoided the opportunity of reviewing fire safety regulations. Not long before the fire, government ministers were bragging in the media about the ‘bonfire’ they would make of those and other safety regulations. The horror of this metaphor does

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not yet appear to have struck those in power. What do they think of their bonfire now? Instead, what we learn from both Hillsborough and Grenfell is that, when a major national tragedy occurs, the more enthusiastically the authorities seek to blame others, the more likely it is that they may be concealing their own role, however indirect, in the genesis of that tragedy. The Hillsborough match was the first major sporting event at which Chief Superintendent Duckenfield had officiated. Duckenfield had been promoted to the rank of chief superintendent just weeks before the match. There were other officers, both in the force and at the match, who were more qualified and experienced than he was. The best possible officer for managing the safety of over 50,000 football fans was said to have been Chief Superintendent Brian Mole but Mole had, for reasons which have been lost in obfuscation, been removed from his post just weeks before the fateful match. Duckenfield’s mistake was to order Gate ‘C’ to be opened, thus causing several hundred fans to progress into the central pen where the crushing occurred. This was a serious error, and Duckenfield concealed this error from the beginning. At the inquest, he stated: ‘Everybody knew the truth, the fans and police knew the truth that we’d opened the gates’. Asked why he had lied for all those years, he claimed that he ‘froze and did not consider the consequences of his actions’.4 I think it is fair to say that most people would consider that statement to be a terrible indictment on any police officer, let alone a very senior officer. Police officers are highly trained, highly skilled individuals. They spend years considering ‘consequences’ and ‘actions’. Police officers are among the most naturally intelligent and skilled people in our society. They have a great capacity for responding to bad situations; they have an eye for assessing developments and

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consequences and for responding swiftly. It is surely not feasible that an officer of such seniority did not ‘consider the consequences of his actions’. What Duckenfield should have said was not that he had ‘frozen’ and ‘did not consider the consequences of his actions’ but that he was trying to save his reputation. That would have been the truth. The reason that Duckenfield was lying when he said he ‘froze’ was because he and his assistant on the day of the match, Superintendent Murray, colluded with each other in the preparation of their statements and continued to tell lies about their actions. In other words, their lies were calculated, not spontaneous. We can perhaps understand someone lying in a moment of panic, if they make an honest attempt to repair the damage as soon as possible thereafter. I  am not suggesting we excuse lies, but at least we can understand how, in a moment of genuine panic, some people will seek to cover up a mistake. It is a very human response. What is impossible to overlook, however, is that these lies were carefully crafted. Worse, they were effectively sanctioned by Chief Constable Wright. I will demonstrate shortly that it is incontrovertible that Wright knew of the collusion between these two officers. At the beginning of their statements, Duckenfield and Murray try to make excuses as to why they had not postponed the start of play until all of the spectators were safely in the stadium. This was the crux of the matter. Duckenfield was in charge. He had that opportunity, but he did not take it. Instead, he and Murray between them, with the approval and cognizance of the chief constable, decided to make up a little story about what they had previously agreed upon in relation to the fact that they had failed to postpone the time for kick-​off. Duckenfield wrote in his statement: ‘We had previously agreed that if there was an identifiable problem, e.g. a serious incident, accident on the motorway or fog on the Pennines which would prevent large

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numbers of fans arriving on time we should consider a delay as opposed to those who had been brought to the area within a reasonable time but had chosen not to enter the ground as soon as possible’. Murray, his assistant, wrote as follows:  ‘We had agreed that if there was an identifiable problem, such as a serious accident on the motorway, or bad weather over the Pennines, which prevented people arriving on time, that we would delay –​but if it was merely that people had arrived in time, but decided to go elsewhere, rather than the ground and arrived at the last minute, then we would not normally delay it’. Again, as before, blame is being shifted: if the delay were ‘caused’ by the fans themselves, then the start of the match would not be postponed. Are we to believe that these two officers actually discussed the hypothetical case of fans ‘going elsewhere’ or choosing ‘not to enter the ground as soon as possible’. Why would they need to agree a delay if an identifiable problem caused that delay? The reasons would be self-​evident, thus making it unnecessary to agree a delay. From the linguistic perspective, there is no pragmatic reason to believe that this conversation ever took place. What is even more troubling about these two accounts is the fact that one of them has been altered. This can only have happened for one reason –​namely, to disguise the source of that statement: Murray:  We had agreed that if there was an identifiable problem, such as a serious accident on the motorway, or bad weather over the Pennines . . .. Duckenfield:  We had previously agreed that if there was an identifiable problem, e.g. a serious incident, accident on the motorway or fog on the Pennines . . .. Here, Duckenfield has the addition of ‘previously’ and ‘such as a serious incident, accident’ as opposed to ‘a serious accident’.

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Crucially, the myth that people had gone ‘elsewhere’ before the match (i.e. that they were elsewhere consuming alcohol) found its way into both statements, albeit indirectly: Murray:  . . . but if it was merely that people had arrived in time, but decided to go elsewhere, rather than the ground and arrived at the last minute . . .. Duckenfield:  . . . as opposed to those who had been brought to the area within a reasonable time but had chosen not to enter the ground as soon as possible . . . Note the fact that ‘drinking’ is not specified; this is clearly on the chief constable’s orders. Recall that he had said any reference to drinking was to ‘emerge’ –​the police were not to be seen to be casting blame on ‘drunken’ fans. Also apparent is how the above words reflect the chief constable’s very first comment at that meeting on the day after the tragedy, namely his question as to why Liverpool fans were not in place by 2.30 p.m. on the day of the match: they had ‘decided to go elsewhere’ (Murray), or they had ‘chosen not to enter the ground as soon as possible’ (Duckenfield). South Yorkshire Police managerial fingerprints cannot be that far from this statement  –​if not in the choice of words, then in the selection of what should be said and what should be left out. Murray’s statement was written several days before Duckenfield’s, so it is plain that it was Duckenfield who copied from Murray rather than the other way around; since junior officers’ statements were being vetted, there is no reason why those of senior officers would have escaped institutional scrutiny. There are elements within the structure of both statements which appear to confirm this sequence:  Duckenfield’s sentences are more complex, and his vocabulary more elaborate. This is not a hallmark of Duckenfield’s authorship; rather, it is an indication of plagiarism. When plagiarists

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‘mosaic’ somebody else’s writing they almost always make it more elaborate. Anybody who has marked the work of student plagiarists will know this to be true. Another similarity between the statements of Duckenfield and Murray concerns the opening of Gate ‘C’. As Duckenfield stated at the inquest, he had lied that it was the fans who had ‘burst open the gates’. The fact was that the gates were opened by the police. Although the similarities here are a little harder to detect than the previous example, the signs of collusion are definitely there, especially the phrase relating to the mounted officer. Murray: At about 1447 hours a further request was received from Superintendent Marshall to open the gates and this was followed by Police Constable Bichard, telling me that the ‘gate’s gone’ or ‘burst’. I looked at the CCTV and saw that ‘C’ gate was open and all who were immediately outside this gate  –​about one hundred –​gained access. A mounted officer recovered the situation and the gate was closed. Duckenfield:  I saw Gate C burst open and supporters enter the concourse area at the rear of the Leppings Ln stand and terrace. I remember thinking ‘the gate’s open anyway’: I had not given permission, but at that point a Mounted Officer retrieved the situation and closed the gate. At one point in their statements, both Duckenfield and Murray attempt to convey that there was no sense of panic in the area near pens 3 and 4 (where most of the crushing took place). Both officers claim that just before three o’clock a police officer opened one or two of the gates (not Gate ‘C’) and that people were walking calmly towards the pens. This extraordinary untruth is compounded by the fabrication that a female police officer was standing not yards away from them and yet was unaware of their presence.

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Murray: At about 1458 hours I  became aware of something happening behind the west stand goal. I was unable to see what it was that the Police constable was opening either gates three or four or both and a handful of people were coming out onto the track and walking calmly and slowly towards gate 1. They then appear to stand rather aimlessly on the track and the police woman standing at Gate 1, who was only a few yards away, was totally unaware of their presence. There was room at the front of this pen and it seemed obvious to open this gate and allow these people in. Chief Inspector McRobbie was present in the control room in civilian clothing and went down onto the track to assist her and draw her attention to what was happening. Duckenfield: I saw a PC opening either Gates 3 or 4 from the Leppings Ln terrace onto the perimeter track and a handful of people were coming out onto the track and walking towards Gate 1. They seemed to be calm and appeared to stand aimlessly on the track without any direction. The policewoman standing at Gate 1, who was only a few yards away, was totally unaware of their presence. There was room at the front of this pen and there was a need to open this gate and allow these people into this part of the ground. Chief Inspector McRobbie who was in the control room in civilian clothing went down onto the track to assist her and draw attention to what was happening. As before, we note in the above excerpts that a number of words and phrases have been changed –​this could only have been in an attempt to minimize the similarities between the statements. The statements follow a pattern laid down by Chief Constable Wright, following advice from the force’s legal advisers regarding the form and content of statements. In fact, strictly speaking, the force took no actual statements from police officers  –​Duckenfield’s and

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Murray’s narratives are not actually statements which can be used in court. This is because a statement made to the police, or by the police, will usually contain a header, advising the statement maker that the statement is being made subject to Section 9 of the Criminal Justice Act 1967. The header contains a declaration of truth which must be signed on the penalty of prosecution if s/​he states anything in it which s/​he knows is false or does not believe to be true. Even police officers are not exempt from the requirement to sign the declaration. In fact, a court may refuse to admit a statement made without the declaration of truth, which must always be given in the proper form. The Hillsborough statements  –​which were to be handed to the outside police force investigating the events at the stadium –​were not to be statements at all. Rather, they were to be ‘handwritten’, ‘written on plain paper (not statement forms)’, and to be ‘factual accounts only –​expressions of feelings, opinions, hearsay evidence, etc., are not required’. This would avoid any possibility of any police officer being charged with giving false evidence. It should be noted that all the statements  –​or, rather, ‘accounts’, ‘notes’ or ‘recollections’ –​they were called by various names –​were being prepared for a purpose. West Midlands Police had been appointed to investigate what had happened at Hillsborough. The statements  –​or ‘written accounts’  –​were to be submitted to them. However, before being submitted to West Midlands, the documents were first to be subjected to the above ‘vetting procedure, which would be carried out by solicitors acting on behalf of the Chief Constable, prior to their submission’. What this meant, effectively, was that statements were to be edited so that the narrative set out by Chief Constable Wright would continue to prevail and would be consistent across the force. Sadly, that ploy worked for far too long. It was only through the perseverance of the families, the dedication of their lawyers, the

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determination of the official inquiry and the thoroughness of the second inquest, that we at last discovered the truth. Only now, at the time of writing, has the solicitor who oversaw ‘statement preparation’, Peter Metcalf, been charged with intent to pervert the course of public justice. Human-​made disasters are always adversarial. The average person is caught completely off-​guard when faced with a situation as a victim of such an event. The expectation in the public mind is that ‘somebody’ will want to put the matter right –​somebody in authority. Sadly, this is very rarely the case. History has shown us that very often those who should be trying to put matters right are probably looking for ways to conceal what they did wrong. As a result, there is almost always a bitter and protracted struggle between victims and those who should be helping them. The struggle is long and hard because the rotten elements within the establishment always have access to the establishment’s weapons. These people have unlimited funds, legions of public servants at their beck and call, underlings whom they are able to intimidate and who are often too timorous to speak out for fear of losing their livelihoods. Whenever it needs to, this dark side of the establishment is able to deploy its friends in the media who, at the drop of the hat –​as the article in The Sun showed –​are ready to lie, demean and vilify, in this case by blaming the victims for their own deaths. Against such powerful forces, we, the people, often seem powerless, helpless. But we are not; we now have the internet. People are better informed than ever before and more capable than before of researching, and of networking. Moreover, we do not have the deference to those in power that we had thirty years ago; people are no longer impressed by titles or authority. A string of outrages, from the murders committed by family doctor Harold Shipman, to the MPs’ expenses scandal, to the deceptions of the Iraq war, has shown

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the public that our lords and masters often have feet made of clay, and that we have nothing to fear from them. As Thomas Jefferson noted, ‘When the people fear the government, there is tyranny’ but ‘when the government fears the people, there is liberty’. In addition to the internet, we also now have forensic linguistics, an apparently small, innocuous weapon –​but a very powerful one. Those in authority who would wish to deceive the public no longer have anywhere to hide. At the same time, on a positive note, let us not forget that there are many at the top who will always adhere to the truth and do their best to be transparent; there are plenty of Taylors, Chilcots and, among the public, solicitors, families and pressure groups and other ‘ordinary’ people’ who sound the alarm and try to get justice for others.

Notes 1 Liverpool Echo, 7 May 2013. 2 Liverpool Echo, 7 May 2013. 3 From ‘Notes from the Chief Constable’s briefing with operational staff engaged on F. A. Cup semi-​final duties’, held at 9.00 a.m. on Sunday, 16 April 1989, Hillsborough Inquiry document SYP000129200001.pdf. 4 BBC report: http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​36141618.

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3 A pink-​handled kitchen devil knife and other fabrications In this chapter I am going to look at a number of instances of evidence fabrication. The only thing I will change from the original text in each case will be people’s names or other identifying information (unless the matter is already in the public domain, in which case there is no need to change anything). The aim is to observe some of the linguistic strategies used by police officers and others when dealing with evidence which may not agree with an approved version of events. It should be stressed that police officers are not alone in fabricating evidential documents. Moreover, the motivation for fabrication is, in most instances, not dishonesty or a desire to falsify evidence, but the fear that courts will reject testimony that does not conform to legal expectations. One such legal expectation is that when two officers witness an incident, their statements must agree with each other’s. Unfortunately, the process whereby two statements are made to ‘agree’ with each other often results in word-​for-​word copying. There seems to be a view among senior police officers that there is ‘safety in numbers’, that if several officers give identical evidence then the police are being

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‘consistent’. Consistency is a virtue; a police force that is consistent is strong, effective and worth the public funds that are spent on it. Courts also like consistency. It makes judges and lawyers feel that they are doing their job properly. If ten officers say the same thing then what they say must be correct, surely? In fact, consistency between what people say is not how language works. Ten different people will give you ten different descriptions of a person walking past them. Ask them ten minutes later, and the descriptions will vary even more, because now, in addition to naturally occurring variation  –​based on the wide variety of human experience among these hypothetical ten people –​there is now that other great fabricator of social variety: fallible human memory. The police establishment’s belief that the more officers who ‘tell the same story’, the more credible that story will be is, of course, diametrically opposed to the view that any teacher or lecturer investigating a case of plagiarism would take: if several students produce significant amounts of identical text, that text has less credibility, not more. As we saw in the Hillsborough chapter, this police devotion to ‘consistency’ was the glue that held the deception together for nearly three decades. In the criminal case following the infamous ‘Ice Cream Wars’ of the 1980s, five police officers produced virtually the identical form of words said to have been uttered by one of the defendants: ‘I only wanted the van windaes shot up. The fire at Fat Boy’s was only meant to be a frightener which went too far’. The officers who reproduced these words in writing were not able to take down what was said at the time that these words were allegedly uttered. They had to wait until they got back to the police station before there was an opportunity to take out their notebooks and record the incident. To the surprise of some, despite nearly half an hour having elapsed from the alleged uttering of the words, the officers produced –​to all intents and purposes –​identical accounts.

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On the basis of the officers’ evidence –​including what was claimed to have been said –​the defendants were convicted. In due course, the matter came to appeal. The issue for the appeal court was whether a person would be able to remember a substantial number of words for such a long period of time, or whether they would be more likely to forget precisely what was said, perhaps remembering only the gist of it. You may wonder what we mean by ‘a substantial number of words’, and what we mean by ‘a long period of time’ in this context. The results may surprise you. An experiment was undertaken by Professor Brian Clifford, a psychologist dealing in memory, then Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of East London. He found that out of a group of forty people, only two could remember a short sentence of eight words after five minutes. Twelve more could remember the gist of the sentence, and twenty-​six could remember nothing at all. As those data indicate, five minutes can be a long time to remember something and even an eight-​word sentence can be ‘a substantial number of words’ to recall. As we saw in the chapter on President Kenyatta’s trial at the International Criminal Court, there are always people who will exploit a tragedy –​in that case the deaths of several thousand Kenyans –​for their own gain. Hillsborough was another illustration of fabrication on a grand scale. There, it was not only senior police officers who were censured, with justification, for massaging the truth, but one lawyer acting for the police has also been charged with perverting the course of justice because he and his staff ‘vetted’ statements by junior officers, effectively selecting what information should be made available to the first Hillsborough inquiry. There are two reasons why the phrase in the title of this chapter is significant. The first reason is a tragic one: it related to the stabbing of one person by another, a totally futile, pointless crime in which a

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well-​liked young man was stabbed to death by his best friend –​for, it would appear, no reason that anyone can understand. The second reason why this phrase is interesting is a linguistic one. What follows is a somewhat complex argument. We need to begin by remembering the grammar of our schooldays. The reader may recall the term a ‘noun phrase’. A noun phrase, as may be imagined, is any phrase whose main component is a noun –​linguists refer to the noun as being ‘the head’ of the phrase. A noun phrase can consist of as little as one word, for example ‘she’ in ‘she went to town’ or ‘him’ as in ‘I saw him’. A noun phrase can also be quite long, for example ‘the editor of the Oxford English dictionary’:  that is a noun phrase because it concerns one entity, a person, namely ‘the editor of . . .’. In speech, most noun phrases are short  –​somewhere between one and two words would be about the average length of a spoken noun phrase. In written language, noun phrases are typically much longer. If you read Wordcrime, the first casebook I wrote, you may recall the tragic case of James Earl Reed. There, Reed was supposed to have described the murder weapon as ‘a silvery-​colored, somewhat rusty 9 mm semi-​automatic pistol’. Linguistically, it is highly unlikely that such a lengthy noun phrase would occur in speech. Not only is the phrase long, it is also extremely lexically dense. I apologize for beleaguering you with so many technical terms –​ especially if you already know them. However, please bear with me; some readers may not know the technicalities of this subject. So, what do I  mean by ‘lexically dense’? In the language, there are two types of words  –​‘content words’ and ‘grammar words’. A  grammar word is something like ‘the’, or ‘it’ or ‘somewhere’. A content word has meaning in itself, for example ‘gorilla’, ‘happiness’, dilemma’, ‘sad’ and so on. Another way to think of a content word is as a picture word. When a person says a content word, like ‘gorilla’, or ‘sad’, for example, if we close our eyes we will see that person or thing or feeling in the

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form of a picture. Grammar words do not give pictures –​or if they do, they are not interesting ones. The thing about content words is that two of them sitting side by side is the exception rather than the rule; three of them next to each other is even more exceptional; when that number starts to increase to five, six, seven and so on, then we say that the phrase is ‘lexically dense’, and it is right to ask whether such a phrase would ever be uttered by a human being. This is because the language needs grammar words, and plenty of them, to tie the content words together. So, in the example of the ‘somewhat rusty silvery-​ colored 9  mm semi-​automatic pistol’, what is happening is that the phrase is being ‘stacked’ with content words; it is very lexically dense (too many ‘picture’ or content words next to each other). When we say a phrase is lexically dense, we also mean that it has more content words than grammar words  –​significantly more. In the language we usually find there are, in a text of any length, more grammar words than content words. Usually, there are only about forty content words in a text of, say, a hundred words. In elevated prose, for example in an academic paper or a textbook, we might find more or less an even number of grammar words and content words. In spoken language, the number of content words per 100 words is relatively low –​sometimes as low as about 30 per cent. So, what we have in the phrase that occurred in the James Earl Reed case I just mentioned above, namely ‘a silvery-​colored, somewhat rusty 9  mm semi-​automatic pistol’, are mostly content words. In fact, eight out of ten of the words in that phrase are content words. The grammar words (there are only two out of ten) are the ones I have italicised, namely ‘a’ and ‘somewhat’. In other words, what has happened is that the proportion of content words has gone up exponentially. This is simply not possible; it defies linguistic gravity. James Reed’s statement was supposed to have been made orally, that is, he spoke it. However, the ‘silvery-​colored’ phrase was almost certainly

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never uttered by any human being. It is an invention, a fabrication. It is far too lexically dense to be the result of natural speech. Not only is there a plethora of content words in the phrase, some of those words turn out to be specialist vocabulary, like, ‘9 mm’ and ‘semi-​automatic’. In addition, as any gun aficionado will tell you, the average person will rarely speak of a ‘pistol’; most will prefer to say ‘gun’. This brings us to the ‘pink-​handled kitchen devil knife’. Here, the defendant is alleged to have said to a friend: ‘I’m sure I stabbed him on the leg but I stabbed him a fair few times with a pink-​handled kitchen devil knife’. Aside from the clunkiness of the whole construction, the italicized phrase there does not occur anywhere on the internet and, in all probability, it does not occur anywhere else either  –​but if it occurred anywhere, it would probably be in a kitchen equipment catalogue. It is unlikely that it would ever be uttered in exactly this form. What is perhaps even more curious is the fact that it is ‘a pink-​ handled kitchen devil knife’  –​a knife. How many pink-​handled kitchen devil knives do most people possess? As with ‘a somewhat rusty silvery-​colored 9 mm semi-​automatic pistol’, the phrase ‘a pink-​handled kitchen devil knife’ is what is termed a stacked noun phrase. Just as in the case of the ‘rusty 9mm . . . pistol’, the ‘pink . . . devil knife’ example has more nouns in it than any other type of word; the nouns are, literally, stacked one on top of another. And, just as was the case with the ‘pistol’ example, this ‘pink devil knife’ exemplar does not seem to be a feasible specimen of human utterance. Again, as before, it is lexically far too dense. The fabricators of these fanciful expressions, namely the ‘pink . . . knife’ and the ‘silvery . . . pistol’ at least have imagination and, if the circumstances were not so tragic, we might be able to appreciate the poetry in these phrases. They contrast sharply with the kind of basic ‘copy and paste’ procedure that is the usual diet in fabricated police statements.

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A typical scenario is two officers out on patrol. The statements always begin the same way: On 10 March 2015 I was on uniform mobile patrol with PC1111 Smith in the Bogsville area of Marshland. As I looked out of the driver’s window (the window at the front on the right hand side of the vehicle), I observed a vehicle swerving out of the middle lane into the slow lane. The second officer’s statement, anxious to show that it is a creation of a different colour from the first officer’s statement, will sometimes attempt to make subtle changes to the text. Thus, you might get, from the second officer: ‘As I looked out of the front seat passenger window (the window on the left of the vehicle) . . ..’ The window has changed sides. Both officers will turn up at court, they will individually give their oral evidence based on their statements and the defence barrister will tear them apart. The result is that a prosecution which should have succeeded will be wasted, or a defendant considerably put out because s/​he should never have been charged in the first place. Or, what sometimes happens as well, is that the copying and pasting is so indiscriminate that we have two officers driving at the same time –​or, worse, no driver at all: both officers are sitting in the left hand front seat as passengers as the car trundles down the motorway. One does not wish to inquire whether the officers are sitting side by side or if one is seated on the other’s lap. So, moving from police cars where evidently there are two drivers, to cars with no driver at all, there have also been statements where both officers are doing the breathalysing or the handcuffing, or giving the caution. Sometimes, officers have even swapped their collar numbers, so that the PC 1111 Smith and PC 2222 Bloggs of the first statement exchange identities in the second statement, with the result that we now have PC 1111 Bloggs and PC 2222 Smith. There have

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even been gender changes in the middle of an incident, where PC 3434 Burly Sampson magically transmutes from ‘he’ into ‘she’. And, possibly the most outrageous example of all: the officer who gave a statement of what he was supposedly doing in Scotland when he was actually sipping a pina colada in his speedos 1500 miles away on the Costa Brava. Who on earth dreamed that one up? There were already four police witnesses –​was the holiday-​making officer perhaps hoping for a bit of extra overtime? Of course, many police officers do not stoop to fabricate evidence, but it is sad, post-​Hillsborough, that it happens at all. You would have thought that someone somewhere would have put a stop to it. Or, why not change procedure altogether –​let one officer write the statement and let the other officer countersign it if s/​he agrees with it, perhaps adding a few of his/​her own notes where there might be minor differences. Courts can handle those differences; they do not invalidate the evidence. Courts are fully aware that human beings are not clones, that only robots produce sentences identical to each other. If courts do not know this then it is time they did. The threat that hangs over police officers that if there is any discrepancy, however trivial, between two police statements then the court will consider that the officers’ testimony is not ‘perfect’ and might reject it, is absurd. No statement is ever perfect unless it has been fabricated. Moreover, continually demanding that police officers over-​ particularize and hyper-​specify is a terrible waste of resources, and causes thousands of officers to feel unnecessarily stressed, numberless prosecutions to be aborted and scores of trials to collapse. To be ‘proceeding in a northerly direction on foot in full dress uniform when I  observed a vehicle traversing the junction with a defective near-​side tail-​light’ is a poor substitute for ‘I was walking up the hill when I saw a car whose left side tail light wasn’t working cross the junction’. Moreover, the murder weapon in the Reed case could just

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as accurately have been referred to as ‘a rusty handgun’, while ‘kitchen knife’ would have more than sufficed for the pink-​handled article. As for the ‘frightener’ at ‘Fat Boy’s’, how did that ever pass a judge’s notice at the original trial? Was he having a doze after a particularly good lunch? Or was he at a trial on another planet? The number of scenarios in which it would be necessary to supply a convoluted expression such as that, or even a mere ten-​word noun phrase, are limited. Courts should not believe that the linguistic equivalent of levitation is possible. No harm would ensue if, instead of purporting to be a verbatim quotation, a summary in indirect speech was given, such as –​‘The suspect stated that the knife he used had a pink handle and was a kitchen devil knife’. Judges should not let these flagrant examples pass. They are creating unnecessary legal fictions; everyone in the court knows it, even the sombre-​faced court usher who, allegedly, knows ‘nothing’ about the law. In one appeal the applicant was told by a judge that –​effectively –​ such copying did not matter. It was just ‘sloppy and careless’, and that ‘judges are well-​used to being unimpressed by “identikit” statements’. On the other hand, it is true that occasionally we do see a reaction from the courts, with cases such as that of Detective Constable Carl Ryan who forged witness statements and faked forensic test results in sex crime inquiries, but this is rare and, in any case, unnecessary, because in the vast majority of cases what is required is not punitive action, but a different approach, including specific training on reporting incidents. Sadly, in the meantime, acceptance of the identikit phenomenon is still far too common and the officer in his budgie smugglers in Marbella is still going to be capable of simultaneously attending an incident 1500 miles away in full dress uniform, pencil and notebook in one hand, pina colada in the other, while he records a damning admission by a fully cooperative suspect.

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4 I didn’t have a gun Quite some years ago, a young man of about 17  years of age was walking along the High Street in a certain town in England, on his way back from a friend’s house, when he was arrested. He was taken to a local police station where he was questioned by two officers. He does not remember the questions he was asked. He states that the two officers intimidated him. He was then put in a cell until morning when he was taken out of the cell and interviewed by two officers –​he thought these were not the same officers as the night before, but he could not be sure. They kept on accusing him of having robbed a post office, which he denied. While being taken back to his cell, he was threatened with violence. He did not respond to the threat because he could not understand what he was doing at the police station in the first place. Later, he was again taken for interview. After a short time, a police officer entered the room and handed him a piece of paper with a statement on it. He was told to sign the statement. Although he felt very afraid, he nevertheless refused to sign. Many years later, the statement in question arrived on my desk. I  have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of police statements; statements in relation to all kinds of allegations, all kinds of crimes. This one was different.

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Traditionally, and by long-​ established custom, there are three ingredients common to the opening of almost all police statements taken down in writing: the date upon which the event in question is alleged to have taken place, the time of that supposed event, and the place where the event is said to have occurred. These three ingredients are often presented in the same order. However, sometimes even such innocuous elements as dates, times and places are presented in police statements in a way which is not obvious. This statement purported to be a confession. The statement maker seemed to be admitting to a robbery from a post office. It began with the usual preamble, namely that the person had asked the police officers to write down what he said, and that he understood that what he said could be given in evidence. Thereafter followed: ‘On a Wednesday near the beginning of August I was at a place in D_​_​_​_​. I left there at about 9 a.m.’. It occurred to me that ‘on a Wednesday near the beginning of August’ was somewhat vague. Why would a person, several months after the supposed event, remember that it was a Wednesday, and why would they remember that it was ‘near’ the beginning of August? It seemed a very artificial way to begin a statement. However, a cursory glance shows that these apparently innocuous words contain the three ingredients previously described as forming the beginning of a police statement: we have (i) a date, (ii) a place and (iii) a time. The phrase ‘on a Wednesday near the beginning of August’, in reference to the year in question, could only have meant one particular Wednesday, namely, the seventh of August. This is because the following Wednesday would have been the fourteenth, which is nearer the middle of August than the beginning. Therefore, although ‘on a Wednesday at the beginning of August’ sounds vague, it is in fact a precise date. It should be noted that most of us do not remember the specific date or time of an event

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which took place several months previously and that the form presented here would be very unusual for the average speaker. If the defendant said anything at all  –​which is extremely doubtful  –​he would probably have said nothing more detailed than ‘some time in about August . . .’. On the other hand, police officers rely on times, dates and places for almost all of their actions, and this is reflected in police statements which, as noted above, usually begin with reference to those matters. However, this statement is so constructed as to deliberately disguise the fact that a specific date is being mentioned. Note that the time ‘about 9 o’clock’ is stated shortly after this indirectly given date. In addition, the location is given, namely ‘at a place in D_​_​_​_​’. It may be argued that ‘at a place in D_​_​__​ ​’ is not a precise location. However, it is sufficient to place the alleged speaker ‘in D_​_​_​_​’, which may be all that was needed for prosecution purposes. D_​_​_​_​was where the robbery took place. Thus, this statement does in fact begin in a way consistent with police statements in that it mentions, albeit in an indirect way, the date, time and place at the beginning of the statement. The apparent vagueness in the phrases ‘on a Wednesday near the beginning of August’ and ‘a place in D_​_​_​_​’ may also be concealing a strategic purpose, in this instance to make the alleged speaker appear evasive or untruthful, in order to diminish his or her credibility with a jury. I have yet to come across a handwritten statement from the old days which did not find some way, however unsubtle, of discrediting the defendant. Bear in mind that statements were (and still are) written to be read aloud to a jury. If a statement appears to be vague, or even just a little confusing, this works against the defendant. This is compounded by the fact that many defendants refuse to testify in their own defence, thus denying the jury the opportunity of being able to assess whether the defendant is a reliable witness or not.

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Thus, by the date not being stated, and the address of the place in D_​_​_​_​not being given, it would not be unusual for a person listening to this statement, for example a member of a jury, to conclude that the alleged statement maker was deliberately withholding those details from the police. In reality, however, the speaker gives the date, time and enough details of the locus to place himself there on a date and at a time which would be likely to suit prosecution purposes. In the old days, it seldom occurred to a jury that the defendant was not the statement maker at all. In addition to the date, time and place mentioned above, there is a fourth element present in the statement which is often found in police statements, and that is a tendency to avoid pronouns. So, in the Derek Bentley statement, which he was alleged to have dictated to officers, there are many references to ‘Chris’ and to ‘Craig’; Craig is hardly ever referred to as ‘he’. In the present case, towards the end of the statement the speaker allegedly says: ‘The man with me had a briefcase and had one hand in his pocket. The other man stood beside me’. Bizarrely, however, it turns out that ‘the man with me’ and ‘the other man’ are one and the same person. Most speakers would say ‘The man with me had a briefcase and had one hand in his pocket. He stood beside me’. Instead of ‘he stood beside me’, we have ‘the other man stood beside me’. This is a completely counter-​intuitive third party reference. Moreover, the phrase ‘the other man’ would itself be an unusual way to refer to the person who was with the alleged speaker. It would appear to be more typical of how a police officer would describe the person who allegedly accompanied the supposed speaker of the statement on the robbery. In the James Earl Reed statement (see the original Wordcrime book), Reed is supposed to have referred to ‘four black males’. Considering Reed was himself an African American, it seems unlikely that he would have made a reference to ‘black’ individuals. Moreover, ‘males’

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is a police favourite. If Reed had made any reference to the four individuals at all, he is much more likely to have said something like ‘four guys’ or ‘four men’. In the present instance, the final sentence of the statement reads: ‘I didn’t have a gun’. It is not uncommon for a police statement to end with comments such as this. The speaker appears to be denying something spontaneously, which is highly unusual, especially in the context of a firearm. The strategic purpose in ending a statement with such a sentence, however, has nothing to do with whether the defendant had a firearm. Rather, its purpose is to leave the audience, that is, the jury, with a connection between the defendant in the dock and ‘a gun’. It does not matter that the defendant denies in his statement that he has a gun; the jury will forget all about that. What the jury will remember, however, is the fact that the defendant mentioned a gun at all. Ever after, there will be an indelible connection between the defendant and a gun. ‘A’ gun becomes ‘the’ gun –​the gun involved in the crime. And all this from a denial. However, it is not a denial because, again, the defendant may have made no reference to ‘a gun’. In all probability, he was asked: ‘Did you have a gun?’ In other words, the idea of the gun would have been introduced by the police officers who made the statement. Denials always look bad in police statements, even when the charge is considerably less serious than that of robbery –​‘Were you speeding?’ Answer: ‘No’. In the statement: The defendant denied that he was speeding. The word ‘denied’ has connotations of someone who is not cooperative, who is ‘in denial’. It is even worse when the question is asked several times, to which the answer is predictably bad:  The defendant kept denying that he was speeding. This makes the officer asking the question seem to be doing nothing more than attempting to obtain information from the defendant who, however, is being completely unreasonable because he keeps denying that he was speeding . . . or, as in the present case, that he had a gun. Crucially,

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no statement will ever show that the ‘denial’ was in answer to a direct question. In this way, an apparently frank answer to ‘Did you have a gun?’ that is, ‘No, I did not’, inculpates the defendant further. The defendant must have had a gun, mustn’t he? Otherwise why did he mention ‘a gun’ at all?

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5 All quiet at the endz I received several videos seized by police following a violent scene at a pub. The videos were described as containing a number of rap songs, some of which were alleged to contain references to criminal acts. The people from whom the videos were seized had all been involved in the scene at the pub. Pending criminal proceedings, police needed to know whether the rap songs were connected with the violence at the pub and other crimes in the area. Specifically, the police wanted to know whether I  would be able to give an interpretation of the language used on the videos, and to indicate whether the language used showed an intention to commit criminal acts, either on the part of individuals depicted in the videos or on these individuals acting together as a ‘gang’. I had a number of concerns relating to this task. Linguistics distinguishes between what we may informally call ‘utterance meaning’ and ‘speaker meaning’. We can normally state what an utterance is likely to mean –​the particular formulation of words used –​but this does not mean that we necessarily know what an individual intends to communicate on a given occasion. Linguistics cannot ascribe intentionality to a speaker, but it may be able to examine the kinds of interpretation placed on particular utterances and the linguistic means by which those interpretations

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are constructed. The branch of linguistics that does this is known as pragmatics. Pragmatics works by taking context into account. The context of an utterance is both linguistic and situational. Linguistic context concerns what speakers and hearers know about their language and how they apply this knowledge to interpreting the meaning of a given utterance. Situational context concerns what speakers know or believe about the world. We can use some of the insights of pragmatics to show how language can be performative in particular contexts, what kinds of interpretation can be placed on utterances and what kinds of constraints need to be taken into account in making such interpretations. However, in doing so we need to bear in mind the limitations of what linguistics can achieve, particularly with reference to the interpretation of speaker intentions. Additionally, I would express concern about the word ‘gang’. This is a word that should be used with some care because it carries with it associations that imply criminality and illegality. It is the task of the court to establish if the participants in these videos were involved in criminal activity, and therefore only the court can actually state whether the people depicted in these videos were part of a ‘gang’. What I may, however, be able to show is any extent to which the individuals in these videos appear, from the language they use, to be acting together and, judging from the context, what factors those who received these videos might consider in constructing an interpretation of them. At an early stage, I expressed concerns about how useful such an analysis would be, but I was encouraged to undertake the assignment as, at the time, approximately ten years ago, there was an increasing focus on antisocial behaviour. There were three types of exhibits to work with: videos filmed in the DVD format, audio files and mobile phone videos. Transcribing the videos and the audio files in their entirety was a massive task.

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The DVD videos depicted a number of youths in various settings such as the outside of a building on a housing estate, in a bedroom and in a lounge, apparently engaged in the practice of ‘rapping’, sometimes to the accompaniment of music and sometimes not. The bulk of the language heard on the videos was in the form of ‘rap’, but some was in the form of ordinary speech. I refer to the group on this estate as the ‘home’ group: the group to whom many of the rap songs and other messages were apparently directed were located in another housing estate. I refer to this other group as the ‘target’ group. The audio files were also examples of what appeared to be rap, usually to the accompaniment of music. The mobile phone videos include two such songs. The reader may judge the quality of the lyrics from this excerpt: We are da guvmint we ain’t sit in no parliament we run da roads we own da hood we ain’t got no plan to be good The first part of these songs depicts several scenes of violence. In the first, a male assaults a young female, apparently quite brutally, while the second shows a fight between two youths on the forecourt of a petrol station. Another video shows a male being encouraged to assault another male in a park at night, and apparently actually assaulting him though the video quality is poor. It was not clear whether these events were staged for the benefit of the camera or whether they were actual assaults. As is well known, rap is a contemporary musical and cultural activity which has its origins in a number of different musical, cultural and social phenomena. There are, moreover, several different kinds of rap, including ‘gangsta rap’, ‘hiphop’ and so on.

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The linguistic content of rap music is often violent, denigrating to others (especially to women) and frequently containing threats of maiming, murder and robbery. This is true even of the work of some well-​known rap artists. The underlying themes of rap are a sense of social alienation, the supremacy of the rapper over other rappers and claims of physical invincibility. However, in some respects rap has a great deal in common with the poetry of oral cultures, which valued the art of spontaneously produced verse. For example, oral poetry competitions were found in ancient Greece as part of the Olympic Games, while in Anglo-​ Saxon culture poets exchanged verbal insults with each other in a process known as ‘flyting’. Several scholars have compared ‘gangsta rap’, which is what the rappers in these videos appear to be emulating, to performances of Anglo-​Saxon poetry.1 African American origins of rapping include sources as diverse as blues music and the ‘dozens’ tradition, where verbal wit functions almost as a weapon. A great deal of rap is performed live between rival artists, in a form of competition known as the ‘rap battle’. Some hazing traditions in military training establishments have certain features in common with rap. The rap battle is a contest between performers who attempt to outdo each other using forms of generic insult, but couched in rhymes which are strong in their rhythmic structure. Such contests are judged on whether the contestant’s work is really impromptu or prepared, the quality and humour of the insults and the ability of the contestant to withstand, and respond to, verbal attacks from other contestants. An important component of the rap battle format is the presence of the audience. However, it occurred to me that the context of the rap videos in the present case did not really contain the ingredients of a rap battle. First, the performers are not competing with each other and do not insult each other. In fact, they cooperate to produce insults, epithets

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and threats against others. There is a lack of spontaneity as, clearly, some of the verses have been rehearsed on a number of occasions. Also, the people who are gathered around the rapper are not the intended audience of the rap; the intended audience are those who are going to receive the video. The whole point about a rap performance is that it is live –​by definition, sending the material by video along with other unrelated material runs counter to the concept of rap being a spontaneous performance. The audience is being warned to stay away from the rapper’s ‘hood’ or ‘endz’ (neighbourhood). The rapper is not striving for any artistic quality, but focuses solely on the issue of territory. Effectively, the recipients of the video are being warned to keep away from the territory of those making the video. I also considered whether the word ‘gang’ could apply to the participants in the video. There are, as can be imagined, several meanings to the word ‘gang’, including the fact that the word is sometimes applied loosely to different social groupings. It can simply mean a group of people who associate together on a regular basis. It is also used, usually pejoratively, in reference to groups of (young) people who are perceived to be behaving in an antisocial manner. Historically, the word ‘gang’ has associations with infamous organizations of criminals such as the Kray brothers in the UK or Mafia ‘families’ in the United States. The word ‘organization’ also needs elucidating. The word gang is often used in connection with perpetrators of organized crime. Organized crime includes such activities as people trafficking, prostitution and the smuggling and selling of narcotic substances. In these senses of the word ‘gang’, it does not seem that the group depicted on these videos constitute a gang. We do not see them discussing crimes, and –​ at this moment in time –​we do not know with any certainty if any crimes were committed by any of the participants in the video.

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Even if this group were to describe itself as a ‘gang’, it does not necessarily follow that they fulfil the definition of ‘gang’ in the above senses. However, they do appear to cooperate to produce intimidating language behaviour to others, and –​as seen from the mobile phone footage  –​they do seem to organize events and situations which contain violence and, to some extent, combine that violence with the rap music they produce. As mentioned above, however, it is up to the court to determine whether the participants in these videos committed any crimes and to what extent they acted as a group in the planning and carrying out of any such crimes. From a legal perspective, it concerned me that the video material might simply be used as bad character evidence, even if there was no actual evidence of the defendants having committed any criminal offence. The videos themselves cannot be used as part of the evidence that these youths committed particular crimes just because they talk about activities of a similar nature. It could be stated in their defence that the discourse of these videos is really no more than fantasy on the part of the young people involved. The videos have to be seen from the perspective of the people who received them: Did they interpret them as threatening, intimidating and insulting? Did they, in turn, act on those beliefs as a group and, as a result, take action against the participants in the video? In UK urban youth culture, a strong motivating factor behind the formation of groups or ‘gangs’ is location, that is, the group’s ‘hood’ or ‘endz’. An ‘end’ is often a housing estate or part of a housing estate. The plural of these words is formed by adding ‘-​z’  –​‘hoodz’, ‘endz’. Cities throughout the UK have groups based on location, with the location often adding ‘Boys’, (‘boyz’), or ‘thugs’ (‘thugz’). Generally, the intention of such groups is to associate, to make and play music

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together and simply to ‘hang out’. For like-​minded youths in an ‘end’, it is relatively easy to join a group. In fact, sometimes it is necessary for an individual to join a group, simply out of the need to survive in a hostile environment. On other occasions, youths are pressurized to join a group and have to complete some kind of initiation test. However, membership is strictly local. It would be inconceivable for someone from another hood or end to either want to join or to be admitted to a group or kru (from the word ‘crew’). Many rap artists discourse about taking drugs and committing violence. We know that not all rap artists, however, are drug addicts or criminals, though some may be. Probably very few of them belong to gangs. What someone raps about, therefore, is not necessarily what they believe in. For example, on the videos in this case we frequently see that the participants rap using violent language. Does this mean that these rappers committed violent crimes? Without further evidence we could not establish a direct answer to this question. We can note that the mobile phone video exhibits described above depict scenes of violence, and some of these scenes appear to be organized. Some of the references in the rap poetry do relate to the kinds of violence depicted in the mobile phone videos. It may be useful to compare traditional ‘gangsta rap’ with the kind of rap we have on the videos in question. It is possible for someone to rap on very violent acts but then disclaim any participation in violence. The discourse of traditional ‘gangsta rap’ is replete with images of violence, including vicious assaults and murder. Nonetheless, it is highly likely that very few professional rap artists engage in these activities. However, I suggest that the rap seen on the videos in this case does not correspond to ‘gangsta rap’ in a number of important ways, but that it may be the case that rap is being used in these videos as a vehicle to communicate intended acts of violence. We cannot,

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however, propose a correspondence between a linguistic act and its counterpart in the non-​linguistic world. What we do see from the exhibits is that the content of the rap videos is violent, threatening and abusive. We also see some activities in which violence takes place. This violence appears to be organized, or at least pre-​planned. I will now compare, in more detail than previously, the rap in these videos with what is termed ‘gangsta rap’. As stated above, the basic structure of the rap videos in this case bears superficial similarities to an entertainment phenomenon known as the rap battle. The rap battle has its origins in the poetry of oral cultures where poets would compete with each other for prizes or fame. The videos in this case, though bearing superficial similarities to rap contests, differ from them in a number of significant ways. The first difference between traditional rap and the case videos is that, unlike traditional rap battles, the rappers in these videos do not appear to be competing with each other as rap artists. Members of the group cooperate linguistically by assisting each other with verses, by applauding well-​phrased insults and by implementing strategies of ‘conversational repair’ when a particular rhyme or ‘beat’ does not work out. This is distinct from traditional rap battles, where the aim is to impress an audience with one’s ability to be witty at the expense of other competitors. The second difference is that in traditional rap, competitors have to produce work spontaneously. This grew out of the jazz tradition where solo contributions expand on, or develop, a musical theme, but have to do so impromptu. However, in the present instance, the rappers have prepared and rehearsed many of their deliveries; for example, they often chorus each other, or take up rhymes from each other where it is clear the rhyme is known to several of the participants.

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The third difference between traditional rap and the case videos is that there is no audience except the opponent. Everything, therefore, is being said for the benefit of the target group, which is in every respect referred to, or addressed, as an enemy. It is a feature of the case videos and audio files that the target is a particular group who live in a different district from those making the videos. Numerous insults relating exclusively to that group and where they live are given in the videos, and a strong motivation for the videos appears to be one of intimidation with regard to issues of territory. In other words, the hostility being displayed appears to relate to territorial issues. There are specific references to what the home group do, as opposed to the target group. The home group are somewhat derisory of the target group, whom they appear to consider as somewhat puerile:  they are still ‘jacking mobile phones on the street’ and busying themselves with ‘dem little razors in parks and fings’. The home group, on the other hand, ‘ain’t in on dat, we into making some big bucks’. The target group are warned that they should ‘start stacking your account . . . start making some dough before you come running to us’. This is a direct warning to the ‘enemy’ to stay off the home group’s territory –​‘Come to the endz you’ll get napped, an’ your stash, your stash will be jacked’. Another way in which the videos in this case are different from traditional rap relates to issues of humour and boundaries. This is in line with the object of the attack not being merely to win over an audience, but also to humiliate and provoke the opponent. When rappers enter a public competition, it is accepted that insults will be freely traded. However, nowadays most competition organizers will lay down rules which must not be transgressed. These always include the demand that all work displayed is impromptu, and sometimes there are ‘boundaries’ on what can be said, such as the avoidance of

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very personal issues, the use of certain epithets. Moreover, insults are mostly generic, and even predictable. They centre around the opponent’s mother, his appearance, the way he walks, his car and so on. Misogyny and homophobia are staples of the diet. The elements of the insult (also known as the ‘diss’) are as predictable as those found in the Commedia del’Arte. It is frequently the wittiest rapper who wins the contest, especially if he displays humour in the face of insults to himself. Wit is seen as a form of bravery, with the successful rapper a kind of gladiator who fights on despite being wounded. In the present case, there are no examples of genuine humour in the language, and no boundaries to what the rappers say to their enemy. It is a complete free-​for-​all. As evidence of this, when the rapper runs out of rhyme or rhythm and no assistance is forthcoming from any of the other participants, common swear words and other insults, such as ‘wanker’, ‘crackhead’ and so on are used. Threats of violence are frequent, and follow similar patterns, including victims being slashed with knives and being placed in body bags. The intention of these insults appears to be to provoke anger in the recipient of the message. Despite the violent content of the videos, I was unable to conclude that the language indicated that the group were engaged in criminal acts. There were no references to specific acts of violence, or any indications of hate crime. There was no linguistic evidence of the group being a gang in the sense of having been formed for the purpose of committing crime.

Note 1 McGeachy 1999 and Orchard 1997.

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References McGeachy, Margaret Gillian. ‘Lonesome Words: The Vocal Poetics of the Old English Lament and the African-​American Blues Song’. Unpublished thesis, 1999. University of Toronto. Orchard, Andy. ‘Oral Tradition’. Reading Old English Texts. Ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 101–​123.

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6 Wars and words The result of the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU) came as a surprise to many. It should not have because, for good or ill, this outcome had its roots in forms of discourse stretching back to the 1970s when Britain first entered what was then known as the common market or, more formally, the European Community. The country’s entry into the common market was chaperoned by the Conservative prime minister of the day, Edward (‘Ted’) Heath. Two previous attempts to join had been repulsed by President de Gaulle of France, but once the big beast of the European political stage had left office, the British considered that the time was ripe for a third attempt at joining. Contemporary internal documents reveal dissension within the governing party of the day as to whether Britain should join or not. Party opponents were described as consisting of, among others, ‘a hard core of right-​wingers’, some of whom ‘have always been against the Market and always will be’.1 There was also dissension among opposition MPs. However, by 1972 most Conservative Party doubters had been brought around, although the ‘hard core’ still remained implacable. A vociferous ‘Keep Britain Out’ campaign raged on the sidelines. When Britain did join, most of the national press was supportive, even celebratory, and Heath was hailed by some as a

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‘statesman’ rather than a mere politician. Even so, dire predictions continued to be voiced by opponents who claimed that membership meant ‘Death to British Democracy’ and ‘Death to freedom’. Enoch Powell, famous for his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, was a notable anti campaigner. There can be little doubt that from the outset moves were afoot to destroy the ‘European project’.

Reason versus emotion To make war use words Even after joining the market, British opinion remained divided, with a strong anti voice finding its way into all sectors of the media, including popular entertainment. The acclaimed television comedy series Yes Minister, and its successor Yes Prime Minister may have been more instrumental than almost any other cultural icon in keeping opposition alive, with the character ‘Sir Humphrey’ regularly sounding forth on those scheming continentals who were trying to tell us what to do and how to do it. The rhetoric even went as far as ‘Napoleon tried to invade, Hitler tried to invade  –​they failed; now we are letting them (i.e. ‘the Europeans’) in anyway’. This level of discourse has persisted throughout the period of Britain’s membership: Boris Johnson, former London mayor and UK foreign secretary, compared the EU to Hitler.2 European Council President Donald Tusk responded that Johnson had ‘crossed the boundaries of rational discourse’, and was simply demonstrating ‘political amnesia’.3 In political disquisition, once the temperature is raised  –​as evidenced by expressions such as ‘death to democracy’, loss of ‘freedom’ and ‘treason’, it is very difficult for those who attempt to tone down the rhetoric to have their voices heard. Everybody remembers

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Boris Johnson’s comparison to Nazi invasion, but the calming words of Donald Tusk were forgotten as soon as they were uttered. Once you inflame the language of the body politic, thoughtfulness and logical argument go out of the window. It is no exaggeration to say that throughout the debate on Europe and Britain’s position within Europe, the inflammatory voices have usually drowned out the voices of reason. All wars start as wars of words.

The weapons of war Reason is not a weapon of war, but emotion works The problem with this particular war was that those who wanted Britain to stay in the union thought that it would be enough to use reason. However, reason against emotion is like a featherweight boxer compared to a nuclear tank. Reason persuades nobody except the reasonable, and ten to one the reasonable are already persuaded anyway. Far better to appeal to emotions like fear, anger and suspicion if you want to win a political argument. You want to cut public spending? Tell the public that ‘greedy lawyers’ are making fat fees by defending ‘criminals’. Make sure you do not mention the doctrine of ‘presumption of innocence’ (i.e. ‘innocent until proved guilty’). The average person knows nothing about the presumption of innocence. If someone is on trial, it is not hard to paint that person as a criminal, even though s/​he may eventually be acquitted. Once you get the message to the public that ‘greedy’ lawyers are making ‘fat’ fees by defending ‘criminals’, you can cut the legal aid budget. What you have done is to define the discourse –​it is about ‘greedy lawyers’ and ‘criminals’. Even more effective is the jingo that ‘greedy lawyers are making fat fees by defending terrorists’. Tell

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someone earning £200 a week that they are paying for those lawyers, and they are bound to be stirred up. Be sure not to tell them that the accused is not a terrorist until s/​he is found guilty; until then, that person is only a suspect. Be sure not to tell them of the long hours a barrister would have to put in to defend someone; above all, be sure not to tell them that there is an ancient rule at the bar –​if you are asked to represent a client, you have no choice –​it is known as the ‘cab rank’ rule and is designed to ensure that no defendant, however heinous the allegation, will be undefended in a criminal action. You want to show that you are the party of law and order? Get ‘tough on crime’. Whenever a judge passes a sentence which your party considers too lenient, get your friends in the media to slam the judge as ‘soft’ on crime. Of course, you will be ignoring the fact that the judge was obliged to follow mandatory guidance as laid down by statute and that s/​he had no alternative. What you will do is to ensure that the voice of reason does not enter the debate; simply appeal to people’s emotions –​make them angry, get them hot under the collar. Want to undermine people’s human rights? Exaggerate the damage that can occur when people are given their rights. No law is perfect and of course there are always people who will abuse the provisions of human rights legislation. Eventually, when the time is right, tell the public that you are going to ‘scrap’ the Human Rights Act, citing all the ‘abuses’ by ‘foreign terrorists’. Soon thereafter, you can introduce a ‘British Bill of Rights’. It sounds so good –​a British Bill of Rights. None of that foreign stuff here! Afraid that the judges will try to thwart Brexit? Get your pals in the media to say that the judges are ‘the enemies of the people’. Could the newspaper that published that article have foreseen that judges’ lives would be threatened as a result? Perhaps not, but –​as irresponsible and puerile as that headline was –​the obtuseness of the lily-​livered Lord Chancellor in failing to realize the damage that that article did to the justice system in this county surprised many, even some in the

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government. The Lord Chancellor has a statutory duty to uphold the rule of law and, as much as we value a free press, the accusation that the judges had thwarted the ‘will of the people’ and were therefore the people’s enemies, crossed a line. The Lord Chancellor crossed another line when she refused to condemn the article. Politicians seem scarcely unaware of the potential dangers of undermining the rule of law. When senior politicians undermine the rule of law, they undermine the law itself; they send out a signal to the populace that mob rule is ‘ok’. Will we see militarization of the police as a further consequence? It should not be ruled out as a possibility. It has been a trend in the United States, and in other countries, for a long time.

Shifting the discourse Define the discourse An interesting aspect of the discourse that struck me from early on was the fact that in talking about the EU, the most commonly used term was ‘Europe’, and the phrase ‘Europe and Britain’ was frequently used. In other words, Britain was not part of Europe –​it was always, in the minds of many, ‘Europe and Britain’ or ‘Britain and Europe’. Would it be too much to speak of an identity crisis? Were ‘the British’, having formulated the concept of ‘Britishness’ in the heady days of eighteenth-​ century Empire, somewhat confused as to what they were or did confabulation rest only with ‘the English’? Were they English, were they British, were they European? Labels are not about nomenclature, they are about emotion. This ambiguity between the geographical entity, namely the continent of Europe, and the political body, the EU, was only part of the deliberate lexical muddle surrounding the dispute. Politicians on the right of the political spectrum had long sown the seeds of confusion

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regarding the role of European judiciary in British legal matters. Few members of the public ever understood clearly that the European Court of Human Rights had nothing to do with the European Court of Justice (officially ‘The Court of Justice’). Few people appreciated that the European Convention on Human Rights had been drawn up even before the common market came into existence, and that the British themselves had been the main drafters of that convention, with Winston Churchill playing a decisive role in its formation. There was, and remains, little understanding of the difference between the Council of Europe and the European Council, the former being the signatories to the Convention on Human Rights, the latter consisting of heads of the member states charged with setting EU policy. Even fewer seemed to understand that Britain always had a place and a voice in all of these institutions. The European Court of Human Rights has a judge from each nation of the Council of Europe. British opinion is valued at that court. Instead, our hysterical, immature, press, fuelled by irrational, narcissistic, self-​serving politicians, continuously clamoured that the court was thwarting ‘British democracy’. The reality was that in most cases involving the British Government at the court, the decision of British judges was upheld. British jurisprudence is famous for its fairness, balance and  –​above all  –​independence. This is not to say that our judges have not made mistakes, or that there have not been terrible miscarriages. Unfortunately, that is something that applies all over the world.

Myth making It is a sad fact that although Britain is Europe’s oldest democracy, it is not its most mature; regrettably, the media interest in stoking popular dissatisfaction with ‘Europe’ has long driven the quality of the

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discourse. Two examples illustrate this perfectly, the ‘straight banana myth’ and disputes about ‘health and safety’. Regulation 2257/​94 of the EU stated only that bananas needed to be ‘free from malformation or abnormal curvature’. Moreover, only ‘extra class’ bananas had this requirement; ordinary bananas could have certain deformities of shape. The banana myth was cited by a number of people on television as a reason to leave the EU: ‘Europe’ was trying to tell us what kind of bananas we could eat. A related fairy tale was that of the famous British sausage, which was said to have been described by EU officials as an ‘emulsified high fat offal tube’. Many people all over the UK quoted this battering of our beloved sausage as an excellent reason for having nothing to do with those diabolical people over the channel. For the love of Blighty, here they were trying to dictate to us as to what we can put in our own sausages? Quelle horreur! The only problem was that nobody from the EU had ever said any such thing; it was a myth created by the Yes Minister television series, and then subtly propagated by destructive elements within the press. Apparently, a not inconsiderable number of people in Britain came to believe that Sir Humphrey was an actual government civil servant, and that ‘Brussels’ (another name for the EU, but often said as though it were a dirty word) actually wanted to control the British sausage industry. However, we should try not to be too embarrassed by such cringeworthy myths –​perhaps the fact that we have the lowest level of literacy in the ‘developed’ world may excuse us?4 Another euromyth relates to health and safety. According to media pundits, all of ‘these regulations’ come out of Brussels: it was Brussels which ‘forbade’ children to play with conkers, Brussels which ordered employers not to allow workers to put up Christmas decorations and Brussels which banned the throwing of mortar boards into the air. The truth was somewhat different. Britain itself had pioneered health and safety legislation, with the 1974 parliamentary act of that name having

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been several years in the making, even before the UK’s entry into the common market. In addition, none of the above myths is true:  the EU never concerned itself with conkers, mortar boards or Christmas decorations. This was simply hot air generated by anti-​Europeans. But those who seek to wage war should not allow themselves to be put off by truth. Truth is no more than factual inconvenience. By all means, quote it when it agrees with your set of facts, but otherwise just ignore it, or why not just quote ‘alternative facts’? On no account let truth get in the way of raw emotion. It is ironic that of all the European nations, Britain should be so anti-​European. There is no nation more European than the British. We are descended from the Saxons and other Germanic tribes, the Normans (a French tribe itself descended from ‘Norse men’), Vikings, Celts and other European ethnic groups. There are no ‘pure British’ people. We are completely Europeans! But for Europhobes this is anathema. If you love Britain, then you must hate Europe. Wave the Union Jack, bring back the Empire. Carpe Brexit!

Notes 1 http://​blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/​archivesandmanuscripts/​tag/​edward-​heath/​. 2 http://​www.telegraph.co.uk/​news/​2016/​05/​14/​boris-​johnson-​interview-​we-​ can-​be-​the-​heroes-​of-​europe-​by-​voting/​. 3 http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​politics-​eu-​referendum-​36314814. 4 http://​www.oecd.org/​unitedkingdom/​building-​skills-​for-​all-​review-​of-​ england.pdf.

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Part Three

The authority to confront

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7 Not a case of plagiarism How do you prove or disprove plagiarism? Every case is different, and it does not always happen that you can simply compare identical expressions using an internet plagiarism service; you have to take all aspects of the language into account. In this particular case, a student was accused of having bought a contract essay from an internet essay factory. The essay in question was her end of semester work for a particular module. It was imperative that she pass this module, or she would not be allowed to progress to the next academic year. She had already written, and been marked on, her mid-​term essay for the module. The university considered that her final essay for the term was ‘too good’. How was it, they asked, that for the mid-​term essay she had scored barely 60 per cent, yet for this, the final essay, she scored nearly 80 per cent? The student had made the fatal error of posting a request for help with the essay some days before submission of the final essay  –​the university considered that this was a request to an academic factory to get someone else to write the essay for her. Since the final product was so much better than her mid-​term essay, the university reasoned that someone else must have written the essay for her. The student’s

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explanation for having made the request for assistance with the essay was that at the time she had felt somewhat stressed. Some university courses are very demanding  –​they seem to be more about testing a student’s stamina than about assessing their academic progress. The university took the view that if the student had requested help then she must have received help  –​what better evidence, they thought, than the fact that the student had achieved a much higher grade in the final essay? In addition to pointing out that the student had sought help on the internet with her essay, and in addition to the fact that the student had achieved a much higher mark for the final essay, the university also considered that the student’s bibliography for the final essay was much more extensive than for the mid-​term essay; the mid-​term work had fifteen bibliographic references, the end of term work had around fifty. This, according to the university, was proof positive that the student could not have written the essay –​she was simply not capable, they argued, of producing so extensive a bibliography. Therefore, the essay could only have come from an internet source, a paid source. As noted above, the student admitted that she had posted a request for help to write her essay, but she said that this needed to be put in context. At the time she was very close to a deadline, and the workload that semester had been very strenuous. It was late at night when she made the request, and she almost immediately regretted doing so. In any event, she did not obtain an essay from any third party and the essay she submitted was entirely her own work. At most she could be accused of foolishness, but foolishness is not dishonesty. Based on long experience of student plagiarism allegations, I  considered it unlikely that the questioned essay was plagiarized because in my experience essays obtained from so-​called essay mills are of a very inferior quality. They usually lack competence, have totally inadequate bibliographies, and are textually incoherent.

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We only need think about how internet essays are produced to realize the validity of the above points. In the context of internet plagiarism, the production of essays, assignments and dissertations is essentially a laundry procedure. Source texts are targeted by software which searches for keywords. When a target text is identified as a possible source, it is taken through a number of ‘washes’. The first few washes are designed to replace some key expressions with synonymous ones, while later washes will rearrange the order in which phrases appear in the target. Much of the work is automatic, with the result that words and phrases are often replaced by inappropriate synonyms, nuance is lost and the reordering of a phrase or other expression often produces a verbal nonsense. In other cases, the laundry process consists of the target text being machine-​ translated into a second language, then machine-​translated back to the source language, and edited from there. Any number of variations of these two procedures is possible. Below, I will deal with the features I have found to be prevalent in internet essays in the past, namely, their lack of academic competence, the inadequacy of their bibliographic references and the absence of textual coherence in them. In my experience, all internet essays, regardless of whether they were sold as product from an essay factory (or ‘mill’), or whether they were obtained from a person posing as an expert in the essay topic, do not meet a basic competence standard. By lack of competence in this context I  mean that the purchased essay, following assessment by a course lecturer at a respectable university, whether in Britain or elsewhere, ●●

would rapidly be identified as being from an internet source because of its content;

●●

would contain an incomplete bibliography as well as irrelevant bibliographic items, items which would correspond to an

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authentic bibliography only with respect to certain obvious key terms and expressions. In addition, referencing within the essay would generally be poor; ●●

would be unlikely to achieve an adequate academic grade.

The reason that internet essays are generally not competently produced is that a profit can be achieved for the producer only if either turnover is high or if the essay product is produced in as short a time as possible. Internet essay producers are not subject specialists, despite their claims to the contrary. Not infrequently, language and research skills are poor, and the producer’s academic level is also low. It is suspected that many internet essay factories are located in Asia and Russia. Producers, whether operating within an ‘essay mill’ or on their own account, are able to work speedily because their production process itself relies on plagiarism; producers make a profit only if they use significant chunks of internet material and paste that material into the work to be sold. However, it is virtually impossible for a production process to replace all of the original content without completely destroying the meaning of that content, and so many words and expressions from the original will be retained. The result of the production process is thus often more cosmetic than substantial. There is little difference between a ‘mill’ essay and a ‘bespoke’ essay, and thus it would be a mistake to think that if a student purchases a bespoke essay after posting on a list, the level of competence would be likely to increase in proportion to the greater cost, since so-​called bespoke essays inevitably attract a higher fee. However, the purpose of the bespoke essay is not to raise the quality of its academic content, but to decrease the possibility of detection by professional academics. Bespoke essays are little more than products which have been more intensively laundered than the usual factory essay, but even

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a bespoke essay, whether produced by a factory or an individual working on his or her own, will contain identifiable internet content. The simple fact, therefore, is that almost any essay purchased on the internet will be identifiable through online plagiarism techniques, simply because of the high number of sections which will be identical, or nearly identical, to pre-​existing internet material. This applies as much to bespoke product as to off-​the-​shelf items. Finally, essay producers know that the student purchaser has no form of redress, and therefore, since factory essays are paid for in advance, the vendor need not care about quality. Moreover, essay mills rarely retain a presence for long, before they migrate to a new site or are closed down. Above, I referred to bibliographies. As any academic will readily appreciate, the bibliography is in reality the source and core of the academic essay; the true academic writer begins with a set of ideas on the topic and then expands them by diligent research, with the bibliography growing in the process. Think of the bibliography as the ‘spine’ of the essay. It cannot be an afterthought, but must grow with the essay itself. This is in complete contrast to the approach taken by essay factories and writers of bespoke essays who sometimes offer ‘free’ bibliographic references –​usually one so-​called free reference per page of the essay, with extra references incurring an additional fee. This shows the level of understanding that the average essay factory has of the importance of the bibliography in an academic essay, and why they give it so little attention. The same applies to the individual purporting to produce a bespoke essay. Such individuals often have fewer facilities, such as plagiarism software, than essay factories, and so will often supply a product which is not even up to the standard of an off-​the-​shelf factory essay.

09

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It is inevitable that a non-​specialist will struggle to produce a relevant, comprehensive bibliography, partly because of lack of knowledge of the specialist field, but principally because the motive is profit, not intellectual or academic engagement. Bibliographies accompanying a factory essay will be chosen on the basis of keywords in the essay. The essay is then ‘back-​filled’ with a sprinkling of references from the bibliography. Because of polysemy, references which are nonsensical, or otherwise essentially devoid of relevant content, will be found in almost every factory essay. Another way in which a factory essay may be detected relates to its overall coherence. Upon cursory examination, most factory essays are disjunctive. This is because such an essay, even a bespoke one, is essentially a compilation of artefacts from heterogeneous sources. The narrative is seen to be fragile; the content is unexpectedly vacuous in parts or merely vague or generic, and therefore worthless in the context of a specialist topic and, further, the essay’s conclusions are seldom warranted in the form in which they are expressed. Overall, the structure of the factory essay product lacks conceptual harmony. Thus, factory essays, whether off-​ the-​ shelf or bespoke, are generally easy to detect, usually possessed of an extremely poor or sparse bibliography, and are almost inevitably poorly written, with the style being somewhat robotic. For these reasons, it occurred to me that because the questioned essay attracted a substantial mark by highly experienced markers it was not likely to consist of internet content, whether factory-​ purchased or bespoke. Any experienced university marker will pick up on ‘internet essay traits’ such as those I have mentioned above. As noted above, the controversy centred around the fact that the student’s mid-​term essay had received a much lower mark than the end-​of-​term essay. This was a strange comparison to make because mid-​term essays are usually written in the first few weeks of the

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semester when the student is barely familiar with the topic. By the end of the semester, if the teaching is of a high quality, it is almost inevitable that the student will produce a better essay than at the beginning of the term. The university was effectively saying that it did not expect the student to improve during the course of the semester. The irony of this position did not seem to strike anyone as incongruous; it seemed to carry the message that the university did not have any faith in the quality of its own teaching. It also occurred to me that the university had not looked beyond the marks obtained for the two essays –​the mid-​term one and the end of term one. They needed to look at the essays themselves. I decided to compare the essays and see what they had in common. I first considered the respective bibliographies of the two essays. The university complained that the end of term essay contained fifty bibliographic references, while the mid-​term essay contained only fifteen. However, when the respective lengths of the essays were taken into account, there was no inconsistency. As can be seen from the Table 7.1, in the mid-​term assignment, the student wrote 72 words of essay text for each bibliographic reference. In the final assignment, she wrote 65 words of essay text per reference. These two measures are entirely consistent with each other. I next looked at the sources of the references in both essays. Each essay referenced four different sources of bibliographic references (each source being a website with a repository of academic papers and

Table 7.1  Proportion of references to assignment length Assignment

Number of references

Number of words in assignment

Number of words per reference

Mid-​term

15

1076

72

Final

50

3259

65

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references to book chapters) –​the same sources as each other. Only four individual references in the final essay were not from the four sources referred to above. However, there was nothing exceptional about these references; they were entirely respectable. Next, I considered whether the individual bibliographic references were relevant to the topic or whether any of them were spurious. I combed through a number of academic papers and other sources and was able to find that almost all of the references were routinely found in respectable academic papers and book chapters dealing with the same topic as the student’s essay. When examining the sources, I  also noticed that in each case the student had rephrased the source expressions by substituting her own wording. Moreover, in most cases, she had added further information –​in other words, there was no copying. Rather, she had consulted a number of sources and, having done so, appeared to have thought about those sources and then added her own observations and conclusions to them. In truth, far from being plagiarized, the work had all the hallmarks of originality. In one particular case in the end of term essay, I  observed that the student had quoted four different references to make a particular point. This could be why the university had complained of the references being excessive. However, close examination of her mid-​ term essay revealed exactly the same phenomenon. Clearly, this student could be accused of being over-​conscientious, perhaps even academically zealous  –​but was she to be penalized just for being thorough? The fact is that a conscientious student may wish to demonstrate, not just the references used, but also the references consulted, with the aim of evidencing the research undertaken in the course of carrying out the assignment. Multiple referencing in this way is also likely to result from extensive reading of the subject matter.

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Crucially, when a visual inspection is made of the two essays, it becomes evident that the essays share a distinctive way of referencing, as shown in the graphic below:

Illustration 1: Mid-​term and final essay The top half of the graphic relates to the mid-​term essay, the lower half to the final essay. I would draw the reader’s attention to the circled footnote references. As can be seen, in both essays multiple references are given to illustrate a single proposition. While this is not unusual

Figure 7.1 

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among students, it is unusual to see three or four references given in this way –​normally, one would not see above two adjacent footnote references to illustrate a single proposition; most students routinely give only one. However, the references themselves are recycled. Thus, in the mid-​term essay we have footnote references 2, 3 and 4 being used twice; in the final essay we have references 1, 2 and 3 used twice. In my experience, this is highly unusual in undergraduate work and I suggest it is, although not unique, certainly distinctive. Thus, regarding the referencing methods in the essays, it appeared to me that the author of the questioned essay approaches the process of referencing in a very particular way: ●●

Several references are consulted to establish evidence for a single proposition.

●●

The language used shows that all of the sources quoted are relied on, and that the author is not simply paraphrasing from the sources, but using them primarily to collect the information needed to form the basis of the essay’s structure. It does not seem that the author of the questioned essay is mindlessly parroting sources, but is evidently reading widely, processing the sourced information, combining it with information obtained on some earlier occasion, and later reassembling that processed information into an essay narrative.

●●

As noted above, the author does not cite any references which do not appear in the text itself, and nor are any references in the bibliography redundant.

●●

The use of multiple references clustered together (as shown in the above graphic) is, in my experience, unusual; from this it is apparent that the author’s method of referencing is by

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cross-​reference, and that the research process appears to be cumulative as opposed to additive. By cumulative, I mean that the author accumulates several references into one point, usually contained within a single sentence or paragraph. By additive, I am referring to a less developed reference methodology, whereby an author will obtain references piecemeal as new points emerge in the essay. The former method means there is cross-​fertilization between the essay and the references, while the latter implies that references merely support the text. I suggest that the referencing in the questioned essay overwhelmingly indicates that the author of the questioned essay takes the former approach, rather than the latter. In addition to this distinctive style of referencing, both the mid-​term and the end of term essay showed what I suggest is an idiosyncratic use of hyphenation. The mid-​term essay had these hyphenated compounds:  ‘quality-​ improvement’, ‘good-​quality’, and ‘system-​wide’. The end of term essay included ‘behaviour-​ modification’, ‘access-​ enhancing’, ‘culturally-​ sensitive’, and ‘English-​language’. Both had ‘data-​collection’. Close observation of the two essays, and other essays written by the student for other modules, led me to believe that the candidate had formulated a series of ‘hyphenation rules’, more or less on the following lines: First, a compound noun should usually be hyphenated, for example ‘long-​term’. This is by no means a universally accepted position among writers and is rare in younger writers. Second, if a compound adjective (or adjectival phrase, or phrase functioning as an adjectival) occurs before the noun (or noun phrase), it should be hyphenated:  ‘community-​ involvement

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features’. Although this rule is found to be in use with many writers, it is far from being universally applicable. Most writers will apply this rule to certain fixed expressions, for example ‘well-​educated people’. Third, if a noun phrase consists of three or more nouns, then the first two nouns should be hyphenated, for example, ‘time-​series analysis’, ‘size-​comparison photograph’. The questioned essay also contains examples of this rule, for example ‘English-​ language reading’. All in all I  found seventy-​ five hyphenated expressions in the questioned essay, of which, thirteen were identical with expressions in one or more of the student’s mid-​term essay and her other essays; thirty-​nine contain an element found in one or more of the essays of known authorship, examples of which include hyphenated compounds with the following second elements: based, centred, focused, related, month, associated, specific, improvement as well as, for the first element of the compound: community, disease, full/​fully. I therefore considered, with regard to hyphenation, that (i) the number of similarities between the questioned essay and the known work, (ii) the ways in which hyphens were used, and (iii) the overall density of hyphen usage, were consistent across the questioned essay and the known work, and for that reason the end of term essay was likely to be the student’s own work. The student spent several weeks anxiously waiting for her hearing. At the hearing, the university’s claims were dismissed; the board stating that they should never have been made in the first place.

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8 How old? What gender? In this chapter I am going to consider the question of age and gender with regard to language. Is it possible to tell from the language a person uses whether that person is a male or a female, and is it possible that a person’s use of language is capable of giving an indication of their age? The defendant was charged with a number of attempts at committing offences under various sections of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. These deal with sexual activity with a child. All such offences are indictable-​only offences. That is to say, they may be tried only in the Crown Court. As the reader will readily imagine, offences under the 2003 Act attract very heavy sentences, some for life. I was asked to comment on a number of instant messages sent and received by the defendant, who was about to go on trial. The indictment against him listed several individuals with whom or through whom attempts at arranging sexual contact were said to have been made or arranged. These messages were from two groups of people: first, individuals claiming to be females under the age of 16 and who stated that they were willing to have a sexual encounter with the defendant and,

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second, adults who said they were willing to provide access to persons under the age of 16 for the purpose of furthering a sexual encounter between the defendant and people who had not yet reached the age of consent. The question for forensic linguistics was whether it would be possible to determine the age and gender of those claiming to be females under 16 with whom the defendant communicated. It is important to stress that I am not concerned here with whether the defendant intended to commit sexual offences with children. That is a question of fact for the court to determine. As mentioned above, the data in this case consisted of instant messages (IM). These tend to be more dialogic than phone text messages because, in general, when people use IM platforms they are engaging in a live conversation where immediate or near immediate responses are expected. Phone texts may be described as tending to be more informational, in that the intent in sending a phone text is usually to request or provide information rather than to hold a conversation. Age and gender are among several social parameters of interest to linguists and others interested in sociological questions; other parameters include an individual’s occupation, ethnicity, religion and educational background. In previous work, I  found that attributing sociolinguistic parameters to an author required analysis of two aspects of language in particular, linguistic variation and lexical richness. Below I  will consider these two factors and give some examples. Linguistic variation refers to the degree to which an individual varies his or her choice of expression where more than one variant of a particular variable is available. For example, if an individual is composing a phone text and wishes to convey the meaning of the word ‘your’, several choices are possible, including ‘your’, ‘yr’, ‘ur’ and –​ indeed  –​any other configuration the texter wishes to use. Usually,

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the only constraint is whether the receiver of the message is likely to understand the particular form which the texter chooses to use on that occasion. Thus, for example, ‘xyz’ is unlikely to be a substitute for ‘your’ because, in the absence of prior knowledge of the texter’s code, very few people would equate ‘xyz’ with ‘your’. Previous research that I had carried out indicated that in electronic writing (phone texts, emails, IMs) sociolinguistic variation correlates with age and gender:  females tend to display more variation than males, and younger speakers display more variation than older speakers. In that study (some details of which are shown in Table 8.1), which consisted of fifty-​three participants, I found that variation appeared to decrease with age: texters aged 18 or less exhibited 20 per cent variation on average, those between 18 and 30 displayed 13 per cent, between 30 and 40 years of age a mere 4 per cent, while those

Table 8.1  Showing the different degrees of variation between speakers Speaker

Variants with more than one variable

A

wednes, wednesday; yer, yes; ok, kk; cool, kool, kkool; everything, everythin; sis, sister; would, wud

B

and, nd, n; ma, my; then, thn; yeah, yer; you, u; what, wht

C

says, sez; ma, my; u, ya; what, wht; that, tht; now, nw; and, n; then, thn

D

yes, yer, yeah; when, wen; the, da; being, bein; bigger, bigga; that, tht; just, jus

E

[no variation]

F

you, u

G

[no variation]

H

I, i; are, r; be, b

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aged 40–​50 exhibited 9 per cent, the figure declining to 7 per cent for those between 50 and 70 years of age. Hence, in that study at least, young females showed the highest variation in their texts of all the subgroups. Labov’s finding that females tend to adopt innovative and non-​standard forms more readily than males do (Labov 1990: 213–​ 215) may be one explanation for sociolinguistic variation among females being higher than among males. I extrapolated the following data from the different speakers in the case: In this table, we can see that the known males ‘H’ and ‘E’ exhibit, respectively, little or no variation. ‘F’ and ‘G’, who are said to be female, also exhibit little or no variation. I suggest that it is possible that ‘F’ and ‘G’ may not be female. The other linguistic factor which we are considering is that of lexical richness. Lexical richness is unlikely to assist in assessing a speaker’s gender, but it may help to indicate age. Lexical richness is a measure of the state of development of an individual’s vocabulary. In the present instance, the hypothesis is that if any of the texters are children, as claimed, their vocabularies would most probably be less lexically rich than the vocabulary of adults. This is because the size of an individual’s vocabulary correlates with age, experience of life and degree of sophistication. Kirsner and Speelman suggest that the average adult’s vocabulary consists of 32,000 words.1 On the other hand, a student about to enter university, according to Milton and Treffers-​Daller, typically has a vocabulary of about 10,000 words.2 It is accepted that these numbers represent estimates only, but it is clear that in most cases an adult will have a significantly richer vocabulary than an adolescent who, in turn, will have a somewhat richer vocabulary than a child. In the present instance, the measure of type-​ token ratio was considered to be the most practical way of testing lexical richness. It is a widely cited means of testing this factor. The type-​token ratio can be described very simply as a measure of how much an individual

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recycles words as opposed to using new words such as, for example, synonyms. The test involves counting the number of different words used in a text or message of a set length. To calculate type-​token ratio, we divide the number of different words in the text by the length of the text. So, if there are 300 different words in a 500-​word text, the type-​token will be 300/​500, or 60 per cent. The test is not ideal in the present inquiry because the messages are, individually, very short. Nevertheless, it is possible to calculate the number of recycled words within a given span, and for this reason we should perhaps refer to the test as a ‘lexical recycling’ test. For the reasons given above, what we would expect to see if any of the texters are children is a significantly lower ratio than that found for adults. The following results were obtained: Table 8.2 shows (in the last column) a range of type-​token ratios from 0.47 to 0.62. The ‘known’ adults are:  ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’ and ‘H’. Their values range from 0.47 to 0.62. Those said to be under the age of

Table 8.2  Ratio of words not recycled Speaker

Number of types

Number of tokens

Ratio of words not recycled

A

247

431

0.57

B

232

431

0.54

C

176

330

0.53

D

238

432

0.55

E

202

428

0.47

F

216

431

0.50

G

218

354

0.62

H

241

436

0.55

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16 are:  ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’. Their values range from 0.53 to 0.57. The ‘children’ in this table appear to have vocabulary levels which are not distinct from the ‘adults’. Earlier, I suggested that two of the claimed ‘females’ might not be female at all. With regard to Table 8.2, I suggest that one or more of the speakers represented in ‘A’ to ‘D’ above may not be children. Although this work was commissioned on behalf of the defence in the above matter, it is clear that findings of this nature can assist investigators and prosecutors just as much as it can assist the defence. In chat rooms and other such locations, offenders will often pretend to be female or underage and thereby attempt to lure the unwary into unwelcome encounters. If the age and the gender of the perpetrator can be stated with reasonable certainty at an early stage, there is every possibility that those interested in grooming minors can be forestalled. Once brought before the court, the fact that an attempt was made to disguise their language to simulate that of a minor might be construed as bad faith on the part of the offender since it is clearly a strategy designed to facilitate the grooming process.

Notes 1 K. Kirsner and C. Speelman, ‘Is Lexical Processing Just an Act?’ in Theories of Memory, ed. A. Collins, S. Gathercole, Martin A. Conway and P. E. Morris, 303–​326 (Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1993). 2 Vocabulary Size Revisited: The Link between Vocabulary Size and Academic Achievement. James Milton (Swansea University) and Janine Treffers-​Daller (Reading University), downloaded from: centaur.reading.ac.uk/​29879/​2/​ vocabulary%20size%20revisited_​JM_​JTD.pdf.

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9 Alarm and distress A series of letters were received by a businesswoman: let us call her ‘F’. The first letter began somewhat disturbingly: Dear F Just thought Id tell you I’m going to pay you a visit cos that’s the job I do. Visit people. It’s a bit sad for me that they don’t seem to like me visiting them. Well, not much anyway. The letter continued with the writer insisting that he and ‘F’ were ‘going to get to know each other’, allegedly because F had upset an unnamed highly placed politician and his wife some years before by refusing to give their son an internship in her company. F stated that she had no idea what this was about, and had no recollection of the company turning down any applications for internships. In any case, she said, she was not the person who made decisions about internship applicants. The letter went on to say that it was a ‘bad mistake’ to upset important people. The letter author’s task was –​it was claimed –​to convey to F ‘how upset they were’ (meaning the politician and his wife). Nothing more was heard for some time until a second letter was received, beginning with the somewhat chilling cliché:  ‘I hope you didn’t think I’d forgotten you?’

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The writer claimed that the people on whose behalf the writer was ‘working’ were ‘bigger and meaner than you’. The author described a ‘mean’ person as one who was ‘capable of hurting people beyond their wildest dreams’. The letter ended by saying that the writer was not ‘neglecting’ F, only that there were ‘other matters to attend to first’, explaining that this meant other people had to be ‘hurt’ in the meantime. The second letter also stated that the writer was ‘not in any hurry’. One line in the second letter suggested that the writer’s grievance might be a current, rather than a past, one: ‘. . . when you can annoy people like you seem able to do . . .’. The writer also made a reference to F having recently been at a particular business conference and hoping that she’d had ‘a nice trip’. This suggested either that the writer was watching F or, possibly, that the writer was sufficiently acquainted with F to know her movements. Another factor in the letters which indicates the possibility of a personal acquaintance is the presence of sarcastic content. For example, occasionally the anonymous author would make a comment and then add ‘harhar’. As the reader will be aware, ‘haha’ is the more common form, with ‘harhar’ (the ‘r’ added after the vowel in each case) designed to convey some form of sarcasm or bitterness, possibly even contempt. There seemed to me to be little doubt that the anonymous author held a deep-​seated grudge against F. The third letter began innocuously enough, at least on the surface: ‘Just thought I’d update you a little’, but then continued with the somewhat alarming:  ‘Before you know it we’ll be meeting up and having a good laugh together’. A sinister description of boiling someone in oil then followed. The writer claimed to have been involved in doing just that to another person recently, someone who had made the mistake of pretending to be ‘dead cool’. The writer also claimed to have met several of F’s friends, a number of whom had

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hinted that ‘they think you are gay’, while at the same time claiming to be ‘pretty open and liberal about stuff like that’. The letters were all signed ‘your best friend’, ‘your new best friend’ or ‘your ever caring best friend’. I suggest that the type of homophobic content noted above indicates the possibility of an older male author. It seems to me that given the wide acceptance of homosexuality among people under 50  years of age, very few within that age group would consider it necessary or appropriate to describe themselves as ‘open and liberal about stuff like that’. The writer also referred to two males ‘at the office’ who were lovers and stated that he often wondered ‘which one of them is mum’. In most of the correspondence, the writer adopts a conversational, apparently spontaneous tone; for example, ‘Just thought Id tell you I’m going to pay you a visit’, ‘Did you think I’d forgotten you?’, ‘We’ll talk more about whats going to happen soon’, ‘Your a bit closer now to paying off your debts. Its not taking long is it?’ ‘I’ve had a brainwave. Do you ever get brainwaves? Ill tell you about it’, ‘I like oil do you’, and ‘Now you won’t disappear on me, will you?’ However, there is little doubt that this tone is artificial because a significant element in the content is framed in the form of taunts; for example, the statement that the writer will ‘visit’ or ‘look after’ F, that the writer and F will ‘get to know each other’, that there is no ‘hurry’, that the recipient will not ‘go away this time’, that the writer is not ‘neglecting’ F, the hope that F ‘had a nice trip’, that it is ‘not taking long’ for F to pay off her ‘debts’, whether F likes oil (in reference to burning someone in oil), the homophobic commentary, and that it might be the recipient’s ‘lucky day’. In a number of examples, the writer omits apostrophes and misspells a number of words. I  considered that the omitted apostrophes and spelling errors were attempts at authorship disguise, because on other

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occasions the author uses apostrophes correctly, in the same words in which apostrophes were occasionally omitted. At an early stage, F identified a possible suspect, a middle-​aged businessman who had made a number of sexual overtures to F a few years previously. She had rebuffed those approaches and she thought it possible that this might have prompted the anonymous letters as revenge. Before she had rebuffed the businessman, they had exchanged a number of emails on a variety of topics to do with their respective companies. There was even talk of the companies merging. I was sent Mr X’s emails for examination. Interestingly, one of those emails began with the words: ‘F, Just thought I’d . . .’. The identical form of address had appeared in the first anonymous letter and again in the third. In addition to this similarity, there were other features in the anonymous letters which were consistent with M’s authorship, including the use of ‘cos’ for ‘because’, and sentence-​initial ‘Well’, followed by a comma. The word ‘well’ used in this way is a speech marker  –​often used to signal some form of summary or other comment. In addition, one of the anonymous letters had this, in my opinion unusual, feature: ‘D’you know I’ve had a brainwave’. This use of ‘D’you’ rather than ‘Do you’ is also a speech-​like characteristic, and is not typical of written language. The suspect used the identical construction when referring to a product his company were marketing:  ‘D’you know, with this product you can . . .’. While it is now very common for writers to use speech-​like features, especially in phone texts and social media postings, the particular feature of contracting ‘do’ and ‘you’ into one word is extremely rare. For the above reasons, I  considered that F’s suspect, the businessman, was the likely author of the anonymous letters. A report was prepared and F submitted it to the police. To her surprise, the businessman immediately confessed to the offence of harassment

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and was given a caution. He promised not to contact her again and she did not find it necessary to get a court order restraining him from doing so. Had he not accepted a caution, he would almost certainly have faced a trial and all the attendant publicity that such an event would attract.

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10 The prosecutor of the ICC v the president of Kenya This chapter concerns an attempt by political opponents of Kenya’s most powerful family, the Kenyattas, to frame the president of Kenya for the post-​2008 election violence. Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted Mr Kenyatta for alleged crimes against humanity, including the murder of innocent citizens, forced deportation, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts. I was asked to look at over fifty witness statements with a view to determining whether there had been any collusion between witnesses, as Mr Kenyatta’s lawyers suspected. After over a year of working on the case, in complete secrecy and under the strictest security, I  found signs of evidence-​tampering, collusion between witnesses and mass plagiarism. What also soon became apparent was that there were strong indications that there was one, and only one, author behind the contamination of the witness statements. The prosecution was aware of this evidence for over a year before acting to dismiss the charges against the president. In addition to exposing serious fraud on the part of the unnamed ‘witness’, the case revealed fatal flaws in

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the way in which international criminal investigations are carried out. This is not the first case involving allegations of crimes against humanity which I  have been involved in. Previously, I  was able to show that a freelance translator commissioned by the Home Office had mistranslated certain witness statements in connection with the intended deportation of a former Rwanda official. Moreover, it was clear that the provenance of the statements was extremely doubtful:  their composition combined speech, written translation from Kinyarwanda and, ultimately, mistranslation into French. Moreover, it seemed possible that they had been obtained from groups of people, rather than individual witnesses acting independently. The Republic of Kenya, an important and prosperous East African country (and an early signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court) was riven with ethnic violence in the aftermath of the 2007 presidential elections. In the course of time, Uhuru Kenyatta, when he was a minister in the government, was accused by the ICC prosecutor of being involved in the violence and, despite this allegation, he was later elected president. Charges were also brought against other persons, including William Ruto, the current vice-​president, and others. In this chapter, President Kenyatta will be referred to as ‘the defendant’.

Background In the matter of Prosecutor of the ICC v Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta, the prosecutor, Ms Fatou Bensouda, withdrew all charges against the defendant, the president of the Republic of Kenya, on 5 December 2014. Nearly a year before, on 19 December 2013, the prosecutor had conceded publicly that ‘the case against Mr Kenyatta does not satisfy the high evidentiary standards required at trial’. This statement

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arose as the last remaining key factual witness had admitted in a prosecution interview that he had lied about the involvement of the defendant in the election violence. Later, Ms Bensouda averred that the government of Kenya was not cooperative in its dealings with the court and had, effectively, obstructed the prosecution by hampering access to important government documents which, it is said, would have enabled the court to form an opinion as to the daily movements of the minister (as Mr Kenyatta, now the president, then was) in regard to specific locations linked to incidents related to the incitement of violence in the aftermath of the 2007 elections. While no comment will be made by this author on those matters, there is another aspect to the case which was not mentioned by the prosecutor.

The difficulties of international criminal prosecution Before outlining that aspect of the case, the author asks the reader to note that this chapter is not in any way intended as a commentary on the correctness of the prosecution or otherwise. That is strictly a matter for the prosecutor, the court and the defendant’s legal advisers. The events in Kenya in 2007 and 2008 represent an epic human catastrophe for its people, and it is right that where there is reason to believe that oppression  –​whether by violence, forced removal of populations or through any other means of denying people fundamental rights –​may have been orchestrated or condoned by a government, organization or an individual, inquiries should be made as to who is responsible. In matters of this nature, the prosecution has the most daunting and unenviable task. Any reasonable person, and any person with democratic values would, and should, salute the

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court for attempting to provide justice for the victims of the Kenyan tragedy. That this was the prosecutor’s sole motivation in the matter is evident from her and her predecessor’s many declarations in this regard and their undoubted passion for the cause. However, previous international cases in which the author has been involved as an expert have demonstrated the difficulties of obtaining reliable, independent testimony from witnesses of mass crises. Invariably, time and the consequences of trauma vitiate human memory, and factional interests begin to prevail. In some cases, an opportunity to settle old political scores emerges. For those reasons, any prosecutor faced with the overwhelming task of attempting to collect evidence deserves credit simply for making the effort. After a team of advisers and investigators, international and national, is dispatched to carry out the task, local sources of information have to be relied on. The task is doubly complicated by the fact that even if dependable accounts can be obtained, witness statements have to be translated. In a Rwandan case some years ago, statements were translated from Kinyarwanda (in all probability standardized from a variety of local dialects and variants) into French and subsequently into English and a number of serious errors in the translation were found by the author and others. The task in Kenya in the present case was no different in linguistic complexity.

Witness statements In the present matter, a large number of witness statements and other documents were submitted to the court in connection with the post-​election catastrophe. Some of these were to be used as evidence against the defendant. It rapidly became clear to the author, however, that there were many linguistic similarities between the statements,

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and that they were not the independent eye-​witness accounts they purported to be.

Plagiarism The working hypothesis used by the author was that if two statements were of common authorship, they could bear the kinds of similarity to each other found in cases of, for example, academic plagiarism. Plagiarism has been the object of study by a number of forensic linguists in recent years, and in this connection Professor Malcolm Coulthard and Dr Alison Johnson (Coulthard and Johnson 2007) made a prescient observation, namely, that plagiarism –​unlike certain other indicators of common authorship  –​did not require large quantities of comparable language to be established: ‘We can assert that even a sequence as short as ten running words has a very high chance of being a unique occurrence (Coulthard and Johnson 2007: 198). Coulthard and Johnson give the example of ‘I asked her if I could carry her bags’, a nine-​word string. When searching for the string ‘I asked her if I could’, at the time of writing 7,700 instances were found on the internet. When the word ‘carry’ was added, only seven instances were found. This shows that when a generic-​sounding phrase ‘I asked her if I could’ is added to a lexical word with contextual potential such as ‘carry’, the frequency of the phrase’s usage diminishes exponentially, even hyper-​ exponentially. No internet instances were found when the search was for the full string, ‘I asked her if I could carry her bags’. The author had reached a similar conclusion at about the same time that Professor Coulthard published his seminal paper on the idiolect (Coulthard 2004). Thus, two forensic linguists had arrived at the same conclusion, independently of each other, at more or less the same time (see Olsson 2004: 112–​114).

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The finding was, essentially, that even a very short phrase consisting of words known to most users of the language could be unique to that person. The implications of this for the detection of authorship are stunning, and Coulthard and Johnson noted that results of this type might one day be considered to be comparable with the kinds of results produced in court by DNA experts (Coulthard and Johnson 2007: 198). In the witness statements submitted to the ICC in the Kenyatta case, many instances of the same phenomenon were found, a few examples of which are given below.

Practicalities of statement-​making in the international context It is important to emphasize that in any investigation, witness statements  –​whether written or audio or video-​recorded  –​should be quarantined from each other. This does not just involve making sure that contact between witnesses is kept to a minimum (insofar as is practicable), but also that investigators and those conducting interviews need to avoid reusing phrases and expressions previous witnesses or suspects have used. As an investigation gets underway and more information is obtained about possible involvement by suspects, the temptation is to piggyback evidence. Investigators get into a certain way of asking questions and conducting interviews, and corners are cut. One result is that words and phrases from one witness are recycled by investigators and previous items of evidence become apparently confirmed. It is all too easy to infer similarities from two apparently parallel accounts; the problem is that the accounts are probably nowhere near as similar to each other as the investigators think. All that has happened is that the investigators themselves have polluted the inquiry by, perhaps unwittingly, feeding ideas back to successive groups

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of witnesses. The evidence is not generated sua sponte by live witnesses. Rather, independent accounts are occluded by unnecessary investigator interventions, and the evidence becomes cloned. The golden rule is that statements need to be in the words of the statement maker. The interviewer’s language must be careful, sparse and neutral. This involves not only planning much more than just the information to be probed, but also the words in which the questions should be asked. Where interpreting is involved, later checks by supervising translators need to be carried out. Both investigative and translation teams need to be rotated. In rural areas in Africa, it is common for investigators to not just put together a team of translators competent in the lingua franca of the area, but also to obtain the services of interpreters of several distinct languages, as well as a possible myriad of local dialects. Gender and age are sensitive subjects because of the complex respect culture. In Bantu languages some words will be taboo in a cross-​gender interaction. The difficulties of interpreting in these circumstances are far outside the experience of those accustomed to interpreting in the European context. Once documents are sent to be typed, they should be carefully checked, but any alterations or suggestions must be recorded. It is better to have one good statement, properly obtained and recorded, than twenty or thirty poor ones. The statements in this case were low on meaningful content and high on innuendo, gossip and rumour.

Examples of some similarities across the documents Because the documents in this case are still confidential, they have been heavily redacted for identity purposes and in no case can the writer of the document be identified. The reader will appreciate that at the time of writing, it is still necessary for the author to be discreet.

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For this reason, only a few examples of similarities will be given. All names have been removed, including the names of organizations.

Example 1 This pair concerns the claim that several people were sent to see a certain prominent person to persuade that person to take part in a certain activity. A: (ABC)1 told us that they had been sent and were representing X, Y, Z and A.2 B: The XYZ3 side told us that they had been sent and were representing X, Y, Z and A.4 In the above pair, there is an identical common twelve-​word string in each example.5 Above, it was explained that a common string of this length is highly unlikely to arise by coincidence. The probability of the two sentences, and hence the statements which contained them, being by two different authors acting independently of each other, is extremely low. What makes the parallel even more compelling is the absence of the preposition ‘by’ (i.e. ‘had been sent by’), which is common to both sentences. It is accepted in academic plagiarism investigations, and in police statement fabrication cases, that an error common to two samples –​such as an error of fact, or a grammatical, spelling or idiomatic error –​diminishes the possibility of coincidence even further; even a basic error has potential significance. When the same error is found in an identical run of words greater than six or seven words (or even less), credibility about the two phrases arising independently of each other can be suspended with reasonable certainty.

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The author considered whether ‘they had been sent’ was in any sense a fixed phrase. Indeed, with many millions of results on the internet, it is certainly a very common phrase, although the use of the simple past tense, ‘was/​were’, is more common than the past perfect tense, ‘had been’. However, when preceded by ‘told us that’, and followed by ‘and’, giving ‘told us that they had been sent and’, there are only three internet results (using a well-​known search engine). The omission of ‘by’ and the inclusion of ‘and’ is what causes this dramatic reduction in frequency. This is because variations of ‘to be sent’ are about forty times more likely to be followed by ‘by’ than by ‘and’. The writer knows the reader of the statement will be seeking information about the agent of the ‘sending’, and the syntactic link to agency will be through use of the preposition ‘by’. Hence, in Example 1 above, that omission plays a crucial role in showing the common authorship of the two purportedly independent sentences (note: all phrasal searches on the internet are encapsulated by double quotation marks). Note also the identical sequence of the persons referred to (names redacted).

Example 2 In this pair, the supposedly different authors of two allegedly unconnected statements are claiming the participation of the defendant in a series of ethnic murders and other atrocities. A: I believed all the time that the revenge attacks had the blessings of X, Y, Z and A.6 B: All the time that . . . on the understanding that the revenge attacks had been authorized and had the blessings of X, Y, Z and A.7

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In this pair, the common string is ‘that the revenge attacks (. . .) had the blessings of X . . .’. No internet document was found containing both phrases ‘that the revenge attacks’ and ‘had the blessings of . . .’, either sequentially or as separate strings. Note also the identical sequence of X, Y, Z and A.  It is also interesting that the same names, in the same order as in Example 1 are given in this example. Two of these names are given with first names –​the same two names. Thus, the supposedly independently produced statements in this example are connected with the supposedly independently produced statements in Example 1. Recall that each statement, not just each pair, must be independent of every other statement. A curious detail of both examples here is that each contains a mental projection:  ‘I believed all the time that’ or ‘on the understanding that’. That is to say, both reflect an opinion or a belief or a judgment, in a separate, projected clause. Crucially, these projections are both time-​related, using the same adverbial phrase, namely, ‘all the time’.

Example 3 The third and final example in this brief chapter is a general commentary on the claim that a certain person must have known about the atrocities. A: A policy of extermination on this scale could not possibly be formulated without clearance from Z (a high-​ranking individual). In any event, Z cannot feign ignorance over the extrajudicial executions. He reads newspapers, watches television, listens to FM radio stations and receives [something] from [somebody]

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B: Extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances of youths in excess of 7,000 can only happen with a policy in place approved by Z (the same high-​ranking individual mentioned above) himself. In any event, he reads papers, watches television, listens to radio and has [something] from [somebody] and so he has been aware of the extrajudicial executions and their extent. In this pair, the collocation of (news)papers, television and radio is very common and therefore not remarkable. What makes the above sequence interesting in terms of authorship is the addition of the ‘something’ (the same ‘something’) from ‘somebody’ (the same ‘somebody’, but phrased slightly differently). Even that, however, would not necessarily be unusual until we consider several further correspondences, including the innocuous looking qualifier ‘in any event’ as well as the presence of ‘policy’, ‘Z’ (a person) and ‘extrajudicial executions’. These serve to add an authorial dimension to the parallel. Crucially, the seven-​ word string ‘he reads papers, watches television, listens to’ is not found on the internet (in this regard the difference between ‘papers’ and ‘newspapers’ is trivial and may be disregarded for the purposes of comparison  –​the phrase does not occur, even with ‘newspapers’ substituting for ‘papers’).

Conclusion In this chapter I have attempted to do no more than show some of the similarities between supposedly independently produced witness statements in a major international criminal case. Similarities of

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this nature and extent were found across more than thirty of the statements in the case. Other statements contained allegations as grave as those in the above examples. However, a feature of the case not found in police statements or witness accounts in other cases was the presence of speculation, rumour and innuendo, as noted in the examples above. In all of the world’s criminal legal systems (different rules apply to civil cases in some jurisdictions), such features are rigorously excised from allowable testimony. The opinion or belief of the witness is rarely permitted (other than, necessarily, that of the expert witness). This is for the simple reason that what any criminal court wants to know from a witness is what s/​he saw, and what s/​he heard, and what s/​he did –​not what s/​he believes, or heard about or, as in many cases in the documents, ‘heard rumours about’ (or phrases of that character). However, even in the few examples given here, four instances of this phenomenon were found:  ‘ABC told us’, ‘the XYZ side told us’, ‘I believed all the time’, ‘all the time . . . on the understanding that’. In one particular statement, a lengthy claim as to the presence of the defendant was made in the active indicative tense. It gave the clear impression of being an eye-​witness account. It was only towards the end of a description which ran to several paragraphs that the witness gave the qualification that he had only heard or been told of the events he was purporting to describe and that he had not, in fact, seen the defendant at all. The underlying claim was that the defendant was at a particular place at a particular time, and that place and that time were both connected with the atrocities. It is also important to note that where we see minor differences between ­examples –​for instance, ‘newspapers’ instead of ‘papers’, and ‘FM radio stations’ instead of ‘radio’ in Example 3 above, these will often indicate an effort on the part of the plagiarist to conceal the

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similarity. The same technique is used by persons fabricating police statements, as well as by those in academia who plagiarize. As a result of the above analysis, the author concluded that a concerted effort had been made to implicate the defendant. Certain characteristics of the documents indicated that they were linked to each other linguistically. In Examples  1 and 2 above, the sequence of names and the forms in which they are presented were nearly identical. There were many other types of semantic and lexical linking across the documents, showing the involvement of one particular individual, who was able to be profiled with considerable accuracy. The burning question is: Why was this allowed to happen? Why were these matters not picked up at an earlier stage?

Quality of evidence It is absolutely right that a suspect against whom credible evidence is available should be challenged in a criminal court, whoever he or she is. However, as is patent from even just the above examples, the evidence against the defendant in this case was manufactured. Even a cursory glance at such evidence by a competent forensic linguist would have revealed at the very least a cause for suspicion. We may ask ourselves why proper scrutiny did not take place on this occasion. The world is not immune to civilian population crises of the type experienced by hundreds of thousands of Kenyans in 2007. It is entirely understandable that the international community seeks to uncover the perpetrators. Too often, however, the clamour of the world places undue pressure on those involved in the investigation. As indicated earlier, the difficulties of gathering accurate and reliable evidence of culpability cannot be underestimated. There is a

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multiplicity of causes: it may be difficult to locate traumatized victims; infrastructure such as roads and telecommunications will have been disrupted, or even destroyed; new power dynamics may have come into force and, quite naturally, victims will be seeking redress. More widely, opportunistic individuals may seek to exploit the misery of their compatriots –​as happened in this case. The opportunities for fabricating evidence multiply  –​in proportion to the lapse of time between the event and its investigation; the number of participants involved; the various languages and dialects from which translations are required to be made; the civil disorder to the region and the numbers of persons displaced, killed or assaulted as well as many other factors. After a superhuman effort to gather evidence, a number of statements will emerge, often obtained under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The point is, no matter how hard it may have been to collect them, unless each statement is independently produced, faithfully, in the words of the statement maker, without influence or contamination by any person, it cannot be depended upon. This is a lesson not entirely learned even now in the so-​called advanced democracies, although there are fewer perversions of justice in this regard than there used to be. It is also important to ensure that, as far as evidence gathering is concerned, persons with a vested interest in the outcome must be kept out of the equation. In any international inquiry, certain local faces will keep ‘popping up’ to ‘assist’ the international investigation team, when in reality their purpose may be less than altruistic. Linguistics provides a straightforward and reliable way of testing for plagiarism, fabrication, collusion and incrimination. Bodies of the stature of the International Criminal Court, as well as national and international investigation agencies should consider seeking the assistance of professionals in forensic linguistics, a well-​respected academic subject now taught at a number of UK universities and

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online at the long-​ established Forensic Linguistics Institute. Its usefulness has proved itself in a number of courts throughout the UK, the United States and other countries. The world is not becoming a safer place. Disasters, both of the natural variety and those contrived by humans, will continue to happen. It is important that the authorities are able to weed out unreliable evidence at an early stage. Careful gathering of evidence may mean it takes longer to bring people to justice, but the international community must learn to accept that simple fact. The alternative is no justice at all.

Notes 1 Redacted. 2 Names redacted. 3 Redacted. 4 Names redacted. 5 Only ten words of the twelve-​word sequence are shown here. 6 Names redacted. 7 Names redacted.

References Coulthard, M. 2004. Author Identification, Idiolect and Linguistic Uniqueness. Applied Linguistics 25 (4), 2004, 431–​447. Coulthard, M. and Johnson, A. 2007. An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence. London: Routledge. Olsson, J. 2004. Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language, Crime and the Law. London: Continuum.

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11 The Facebook murder At just after 7  p.m. on 25 October 2009, Ashleigh Hall, a popular, vivacious teenager with a wide circle of friends left her home in Durham for the last time. She was looking forward to meeting her date for the evening, ostensibly a teenager by the name of Peter Cartwright. They had met on the social networking site Facebook. ‘Peter’ was presumably too young to drive and so could not meet her in person, but his father would be passing nearby on his way home from work, as ‘Peter’ explained in a text: Me dad’s on his way babe he said excuse the state of him lol He’s been at work lol he doesn’t have to come in and meet your mum does he lol he’ll be a mess probably lol x The reference to meeting Ashleigh’s mother appears to have amused the young girl. She replied: Okaii babe and no he doesnt lol and its okaii haha x x A little later, sure enough Peter’s ‘dad’ texted as follows: Hi hun its pete’s dad are you sure you dont mind me picking you up? Pete is really looking foreward to seeing you and yes its ok for you to stay

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Ashleigh, excited by her forthcoming date, saw nothing wrong with this. She immediately replied: No its fine i dnt mind i trust him so i trust u and thank u At the same time she sent a text to ‘young’ Peter: How long will it take him to get here babe x x What Ashleigh did not know was that the dad and ‘Peter’ were one and the same individual. Hidden behind the mask of electronic anonymity was Peter Chapman, a 33-​year-​old convicted rapist and multiple sex offender who had escaped the clutches of Merseyside Police’s offender monitoring system and headed to the northeast. Chapman, presumably as eager to meet Ashleigh as she was to meet his ‘son’, had almost sent her the following text: You’ll be safe with me when would you like me to come for you? However, this text remained in the ‘Unsent’ folder of his mobile phone. I will refer to this text again later. Instead of the ‘you’ll be safe’ text, Chapman sent the following, in his role as the ‘young Peter’: Oh should take him 20 mins or so with sat nav x The elated Ashleigh replied: Okaii babe x and haha mad u babe x x While waiting, she also texted: Cnt wait to meet u babe, lyk u loads babe x x x Unaware that Ashleigh was actually waiting on the street, Chapman then texted: He just rang to say He’s round the corner so go outside x

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Quite why Peter ‘senior’ would phone Peter ‘junior’ so that he could text Ashleigh, rather than text her himself is not known; impractical though it undoubtedly was, it probably inspired confidence in Ashleigh, who almost immediately replied: Hes here babe x x So convincing was Chapman’s ruse that Ashleigh had now totally fallen for the story that she was dealing with two people, and that it was the ‘father’ whose car she was going to get into. Once in Chapman’s vehicle, Ashleigh then began texting a close friend. She and her friend spent the next half hour or so exchanging texts about the television programme X Factor: X-​factor woop woop who do u think will go x x I liked tht ollie he was realli gd i thought, his dancin was mint haha x x There was then a long interlude before two texts were received from Ashleigh’s phone: Haha thts great tht programme i watch it all the time haha:  p x x and Haha ur mad u, ur bloody addicted to tht u, i blame nick haha: p x x After this no more texts were received from the phone. Ashleigh’s mother believed Ashleigh was spending the night with a girlfriend. That is what Ashleigh told her and she had no reason to disbelieve it. Ashleigh’s friend, who was in the know, had seen the supposed photograph of young ‘Peter’ and had also been taken in by it. When she did not receive any more texts that evening she presumed that Ashleigh had arrived at the house of young ‘Peter’ and that everything was fine.

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The following day Chapman was stopped in his car by local police. The vehicle registration number had come up on the police computer –​lack of insurance. Moreover, it appeared the driver was wanted for failing to notify a change of an address, a requirement of all sex offenders. After being taken to Durham police station, Chapman volunteered that he had killed someone the previous night. However, he claimed that he had accidentally smothered Ashleigh. He was initially charged with manslaughter. Ashleigh’s texts were sent to me for analysis. I also received those of several of Ashleigh’s friends, and those of Chapman himself –​both those in his own character and those of the assumed ‘young Peter’. The aim was to determine whether Chapman had sent the last few texts from Ashleigh’s phone. These texts, the last two quoted above, had roused no suspicions on the part of Ashleigh’s best friend, someone with whom she regularly texted. However, officers were suspicious about the time lapse between these messages and the earlier ones. I began by looking at Chapman’s style of language use. It was immediately apparent that he had several distinct styles of texting. For example, in his texts to females of his acquaintance, Chapman uses a number of abbreviations, such as the –​in abbreviation for the ending –​ing, for example, ignorin, livin, changin, comin, shoppin. On the other hand, when attempting to sell a laptop computer (which belonged to someone else), he wrote the ending in full  –​ charging. When writing to a female, he asks if he should go to her or if she will cum to him, but when writing about the computer he spells the word conventionally, stating that it comes with a carry bag. When texting other co-​texters he usually uses my as a possessive pronoun, but me as a possessive pronoun when texting Ashleigh as the allegedly ‘young’ Peter.

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When pretending to be ‘Peter’s father’ in communicating with Ashleigh, no abbreviations are used, and the full  –​ing inflection is used –​ picking, looking, seeing. Also, usually yeah is his preferred form of affirmation, but in this text he uses yes in its conventional form. In my view, this text is intended to convey a conservative use of language, such as one might associate with an older male. On the other hand, when the allegedly ‘younger’ Peter is communicating with Ashleigh, abbreviations are used –​wanna, yeah, bout, comin. One of the texts in Mr Chapman’s phone addressed to Ashleigh was the ‘unsent’ text I referred to earlier. This text reads: You’ll be safe with me when would you like me to come for you? It can be noted that this text is entirely conventional in style. For example, both ‘come’ and ‘when’ are written in full. As seen from Chapman’s other texts, he habitually writes ‘wen’ rather than ‘when’. In my view, this is clearly a text designed to convey to the reader that the sender is a conservative user of language, something which is often associated with an older texter. I suggest that using conventional language may have some of the effect that a ‘posh’ or ‘educated’ accent used to. The receiver of such a text –​just as the person listening to the ‘educated’ accent –​is intended to feel that the speaker, or in this case texter, is a safe, establishment-​like figure. Equally significant is the fact that this text was not sent. I believe this shows a highly linguistically aware individual in the sense of someone who is able to assess the potential impact of what they write on a particular recipient. In the context of a strange man, purportedly the father of a young boy about to date a girl for the first time, the word ‘safe’ could have been misconstrued by the recipient. It is clearly an inappropriate word to use in the context, since it could have motivated the recipient, in this case a young female, to wonder why

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the issue of safety was a concern when, as is evident from her own texts, she had no such concerns. Her previous text, in fact, had read: No its fine i dnt mind i trust him so i trust u and thank u Hence, it is clear that Chapman is a sophisticated user of the texting medium:  he modifies his style depending on his recipient and the message, and is able  –​apparently very rapidly  –​to determine that a particular text might be construed to his disadvantage. It is also apparent that he can imitate both older and younger text users. His age at the time was only 32. But Chapman was more than a successful disguise artist. After all, almost anybody can wear a disguise, but can they wear a disguise which would convince those who know the person whose identity is being assumed? This applies as much to language as to a physical disguise: to assume a disguised ‘voice’ and to be able to maintain it is not something most of us can do. It actually requires acute observation of language, and an understanding of how linguistics works. Chapman was able to pick up many of Ashleigh’s features in his short period of contact with his victim –​ The use of haha: Haha . . . haha        He always uses ‘hehe’ The abbreviation of that: thts that       He never abbreviates ‘that’ The abbreviation of your, you’re: ur       He always uses ‘your’ The two x’s spaced apart, x x: haha: p x x       He uses one ‘x’ The lack of apostrophe: thts        He sometimes uses apostrophes

The above illustrates Chapman’s outstanding powers of linguistic observation. How long did he have to observe these features? Probably less than ten minutes. It would probably take most linguists that amount of time to note down the features, and Chapman is working

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under real pressure. Having by now presumably killed Ashleigh, he is sitting in his car, perhaps having driven a short distance away from the scene, and is trying to buy time. At all costs he does not want a search party tonight. Having said all of this, the reader may be wondering why I considered the language of the last two texts to be, not the language of Ashleigh Hall, the victim, but of Peter Chapman, the murderer? After all, the style was apparently Ashleigh’s and not Chapman’s. How could this be demonstrated? When I  looked at Ashleigh’s other texts to her close friend, one thing was very striking. Here are some examples: Haha ur mad u x x I lyk them all at the minute lol x x Did u give tht lad my number lol x x What is interesting about these examples is their brevity. The average length of texts sent to her best friend was forty-​nine characters. The average length of the last two texts was 66.5. This is no small point. We have two young girls who regularly text each other. They practically live in each other’s houses. They know virtually everything about each other that there is to know, more than their parents could probably ever imagine. They do not need to send each other lengthy communications. Not only do Ashleigh’s usual texts to her friend consist of fewer characters, they also consist of fewer words, and these words are significantly shorter than those found in the questioned texts. The tables below illustrate this: There are two other points worth mentioning. First, note the content of one of the messages: Haha thts great tht programme i watch it all the time haha. This message contains ‘haha’ at the beginning

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and the end. At the Forensic Linguistics Institute we hold a corpus of tens of thousands of messages from many hundreds of users. It is updated constantly. Not one of the messages in our corpus has ‘haha’ at the beginning and the end. Second, this message purports to be from one close friend to another. Yet the writer is telling her friend, who knows almost as much about her as she does herself –​such is

Table 11.1  Q text measurements Q text measurements

Word length average

No of words

No of characters

Haha thts great tht . . .

4.33

15

65

Haha ur mad u . . .

4

17

68

Averages

4.17

16

66.5

Table 11.2  Known text measurements Known text measurements to friend

Word length average

No of words

No of characters

Did u give tht lad my number lol x x

3.6

10

36

Haha how cum u were gonna give him my number lol x x

4

13

52

Haha ur mad u x x

2.83

6

17

X-​factor woop woop who do u think will go x x

4.09

11

45

I lyk them all at the minute lol x x

3.6

10

36

I liked tht ollie he was realli gd i thought, his dancin was mint haha x x

4.35

17

74

Averages

3.75

11.17

43.33

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the nature and intensity of teenage friendships –​that she watches a certain programme all the time. If it were true that Ashleigh watched that particular programme ‘all the time’, she would not have to tell her close friend this. It would be completely unnecessary to do so –​ linguists refer to this as ‘given’ information. Also, I suggest that the use of ‘haha’ twice in each text is suspicious. In my view it attempts to portray the writer as being in a state of excessive enjoyment, but in reality it verges on the artificial. It is also suspicious that not only do these two texts contain two instances of ‘haha’ each, but the end ‘haha’ is followed by a smiley. It seems to me that either the second ‘haha’ is unnecessary or the smiley is unnecessary. Teenagers are nothing if not economical in their use of texting language, especially with someone with whom they communicate frequently. For these reasons I  considered that Chapman was a plausible author of the questioned texts. He was able to disguise his style, to adopt different styles and to enter into youth culture. However, he did not understand the basic mechanisms of close female relationships –​ or perhaps of any close relationships. He did not understand that young people often text each other just to show solidarity against the uncomprehending adult world, that almost all of their texts contain only the barest information about where they are, what they are doing and when they will meet. Everything else that happens in their lives they most likely discuss on their mobile phones or in person. Unfortunately, in this instance the skill of the predator outwitted even an intelligent young lady who was probably as aware as anyone else of the dangers of communicating with an unknown person across the internet, so well had he woven his own web of deceit. By the time she stepped into Chapman’s car, Ashleigh probably already felt that she knew ‘young Peter’ and was confident that she would be meeting him soon: ‘I trust him so i trust u . . .’.

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12 The sting In about 2013, a prominent businessman –​let us call him Schmitt –​ became infatuated with a successful model online; let us call her W.  They exchanged messages and photographs and eventually he was persuaded to visit her in a country far from home. It seemed like love before first sight. He duly took a flight to the far-​off country, convinced he was going to meet the love of his life. Upon arrival there he received a message from W that she was unable to meet him in that country, but was in a nearby location and he would need to fly to her there. Oh, by the way, would he kindly pick up her suitcase and bring it to her? While waiting for delivery of the suitcase and a flight out to the nearby country, the pair exchanged a number of messages, and Schmitt also sent W’s agent a number of messages. When the time came to take his flight, Schmitt proceeded through customs, but was stopped by a customs agent and the suitcase was duly examined. Upon cutting open the lining of the suitcase, the agent discovered a not insubstantial quantity of cocaine; this was seized by the authorities and Schmitt was arrested. Schmitt’s position was that he was unaware of the presence of the cocaine in the suitcase and this remains his position to the present time. It should be stressed that Schmitt is a person of good character, with not so much as a parking ticket against

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him. I should also mention that Schmitt, despite his name, is a native English speaker. This has a bearing on matters, as you will see. Shortly after his arrest, Schmitt was brought to trial and convicted of drug smuggling. His board of directors decided to fire him. They relied on the text messages given below. Initially, three emails were sent from Schmitt’s phone, presumably using a Wi-​Fi connection at the airport. The first two were sent to the model’s agent. I should mention at this stage that the real ‘W’ had absolutely no knowledge of the scam being perpetrated in her name and with the use of her photographs. The scammers were probably men anyway.

The emails To agent: I know W is very excited about her case. If I fall asleep here, it could easily be stolen. Is that your plan? This is NOT a hotel. To agent: I do not feel unconcerned about W’s special suitcase. To W:  Your case is here in a public place, a 24h restaurant, and although I will TRY to stay awake all night, it is not guaranteed. Schmitt admitted that he had probably sent these messages although he could not specifically recall them. It was late at night, he had been travelling for about thirty-​six hours, and he was not getting much sleep sitting at an airport looking after a suitcase. Given the small number of emails, it would be difficult to be able to state with any degree of certainty that Schmitt had definitely authored them. It would probably be more prudent to see if there was any linguistic evidence to suggest that he had not authored the emails. The somewhat formal language of the emails will be readily apparent to the reader. Given the circumstances, I  would have expected the emails to be less formal. One indication of style formality

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in the emails is that there are no contractions. Hence, in Message 1 ‘W is very excited’ might more usually have been written ‘W’s very excited’; while ‘this is NOT a hotel’ would more typically be rendered ‘this ISN’T a hotel’. Similarly, in an informal communication ‘I do not’ in Message 2 would more usually be given as ‘I don’t’, while ‘it is not guaranteed’ in Message 3 could have been written ‘it isn’t guaranteed’. On the other hand, since the emails were sent from a mobile phone, an extra keyboard operation is required to insert an apostrophe since the user must access certain types of characters and that may have made writing the words in full somewhat easier. Without telling Schmitt about this observation, I asked him to send me examples of any emails he had which would be contemporaneous with the events of 2013. Upon examining these emails, I concluded that Schmitt was always formal in his written language. Even when writing to friends he avoided contractions, including such examples such as:  ‘we did not look at’ (~didn’t); ‘I have not had time to’ (~haven’t); ‘it will be accepted’ (~it’ll); ‘I did not submit’ (~didn’t); ‘I have been thinking about’ (~I’ve been); ‘this is not necessary’ (~isn’t). In fact, among all of his known examples, there was only one instance of contraction use. Another indication of a more formal style is the use of passive constructions. The messages reproduced above, both to the agent and to W, the model, contain several passives, like, ‘could easily be stolen’, and ‘it is not guaranteed’. The passive was also used extensively in his known emails:  ‘should be corrected’ (~we should correct them); ‘it will be accepted’ (~they will accept it); ‘was it resubmitted’ (~ did someone resubmit it). Thus, on the face of it, it seemed not unlikely that Schmitt had in fact sent the emails attributed to him. In addition, there were a number of text messages, which I have numbered and placed at the end of this chapter. Schmitt denied sending these.

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In Message 12 there is a reference to a ‘gun’ and there is also a Spanish word ‘situaciòn’); Message 6 refers to ‘coca-​goons’, which I  take to mean people involved in smuggling cocaine. Message 1 refers to a ‘secret’ flight and a ‘secret’ hotel, and Message 17 mentions ‘sniffer dogs’. References in these messages were relied on by Schmitt’s board of directors as a reason to fire him. The board said that he must have known what was in the suitcase. However, from a discourse point of view, the type of cognitive frame associated with the theme of ‘drugs’, ‘airports’ and ‘suitcases’ is often found in popular cultural artefacts such as films about drug smuggling. There is no mention in the text messages of the suitcase, and one cannot infer, even from the emails, that Schmitt had any knowledge of the suitcase containing drugs. It is also not clear why an English native speaker would use a Spanish word, ‘situaciòn’ since W was not a Spanish speaker. Spanish is, however, the language of the country where he happened to be at the time of his arrest. This one Spanish word led me to look at the texts again. On close examination, they appeared to show signs of a nonnative author. For example, the author of the messages uses the simple past in this message (Message 4):  ‘WE DID NOT DECIDE HOW TO MEET TOMORROW IN X_​_​_​’. However, at this point neither Schmitt nor W were in X. Therefore, the present perfect tense would have been more appropriate. In Message 1  ‘you tell nobody’, the ‘you’ is unnecessary:  the imperative voice does not require the use of a pronoun in English. However, in Spanish it is usual to use the pronoun with the imperative form. On the other hand, in Message 2 ‘must come meet me’ does require a pronoun in English –​but not in Spanish. Also in Message 2 ‘are you sharing my flight plan’ is not native idiom. The texter appears to mean something like ‘are we on the same plane’. I began to be suspicious that these text messages had been fabricated, just as Schmitt had always said they were.

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At this point, I  discovered a strange thing:  the text messages, although claiming to have been downloaded from Schmitt’s phone by the prosecuting authorities, were never presented in evidence to the court. How could this be? It could be likely only if the prosecutor did not think they were of evidential value. Yet they appeared to be so incriminating that the prosecutor should ordinarily have used them in court. Or did he have another reason? Did he perhaps suspect that they may not be all that they seemed to be? There was one additional little item that I found interesting: how many people are aware that ‘coca’ is the plant from which cocaine is produced? As an internet search confirms, most nonspecialists are not aware of the correct spelling of ‘coca’ and many confuse this spelling with ‘cocoa’, a different plant altogether. The use of the spelling ‘coca’ in these messages suggests the possibility of someone with specialist knowledge. As a result, I concluded that Schmitt was not the author of the texts. At the time of writing he has not yet been reinstated by his board of directors, but they are at least talking about it.

The text messages 1 Just tell me if you can meet me at ABC afternoon, on secret flight you tell NOBODY, stay one night at secret hotel, fly tues to XYZ 2 You have not texted 3h 30m? must come meet me. Are you sharing my flight plan 3 We MUST meet Monday and go home together so we discuss. 4 WHY ARE YOU IGNORING ME? AT THIS LAST MOMENT. WE DID NOT DECIDE HOW TO MEET TOMORROW IN X_​ _​_​_​AND KEEP COCA & LIVES. AT X_​_​_​_​WE MAY LOSE BOTH!! NOT A GOOD IDEA.

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5 Where are you baby. I  trust you totally when you understand. Here I have to explain to explain to my precious jewel . . .. 6 Monday arrival changed. You must not tell coca-​goons 7 Please came back honey. Am ready to come to X_​_​_​_​AFTER one last careful discussion 8 How can discuss with beautiful wife i adore? 9 Baby, u were sending so fast!Thank you 4 text number hun. 10 Where r u? most dangerous are 24h in X_​_​_​. COME ON LINE. Are you siding with husband? 11 Did u talk with agent? 12 PLS COME ONLINE BABY. LIFE-​DEATH SITUACION WITH NO GUN? 13 Only flight departing 3:45 pm for Z_​_​_​. Full, XZA not on list. Who is correct, XYZ or you?? 14 Need to know now. Good or bad 15 Need 2 know if your total loyalty is 2 me? XYZ is suicide 16 Want to kiss u b4 i die not other way round 17 I am about to call tom. Was worried only about sniffer dogs but more

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Part Four

Life in forensic linguistics

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13 Nothing is not important It is a strange fact that close attention to punctuation can be very rewarding for the language detective. Perhaps the most striking instance was one involving a man who, it was alleged, murdered his wife, having first typed out her suicide note on their home computer. You may have read my account of that case in Wordcrime (the chapter is called ‘Betrayed by a full stop’). This gentleman, as far as I  am concerned, was fixated with full stops. In all of his letters he always wrote, for example, ‘Dear Mary.’, ‘Dear Mr Smith.’ In other words, he invariably placed a full stop after the opening salutation. This is a very rare feature in that I do not recall having seen it in any other person’s writings. In another investigation, an anonymous letter writer had the curious habit of putting a semicolon after the word ‘however’. Wherever ‘however’ appeared in his writings, the semicolon was always sure to follow. We code-​ named him ‘Mr However’. Mr However had other habits too. Readers may be familiar with the expression ‘breadcrumbs’. Breadcrumbs are the three dots a person places after a word to indicate that the idea or content of the sentence is incomplete. This punctuation mark is also known as diaeresis,

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sometimes mistakenly spelled diuresis which is, in fact, a regrettable medical condition involving the surplus production of urine. Clearly, something not to be wished upon even one’s worst enemy. Whereas most people produce three dots for a single instance of diaeresis, Mr However produced two. Moreover, he placed a space before these two dots. His third and final punctuation habit of interest was that whenever he used an exclamation mark it was preceded by a question mark, hence ‘?!’. Lastly, in an otherwise impeccable display of spelling, he deviated a little from standard orthography for just one word: he was particularly fond, it seemed, of the word ‘stuff ’, but for some unknown reason always spelled it ‘staff ’. The /​ae/​in ‘staff ’ is a low-​front vowel in a

completely different position from the mid-​central vowel, /​Ʌ/​, the conventional target vowel in ‘stuff ’. A  person who routinely writes ‘staff ’ when meaning to write ‘stuff ’ may be combining a spelling error with a misconception of pronunciation. I leave phoneticians to speculate further on that possibility, but it was certainly a singular authorship indicator. Equally interesting, perhaps, was the case where a writer frequently quoted, or purported to quote, other people’s ‘exact’ words. What was curious about his method of quoting was that he would open the quote with double quote marks, namely, “, but would either fail to close the quotation with the corresponding mark, that is, ”, or he would close it with a single quote mark, that is, ’. We code-​named this author Mr Open Quote. Like Mr However, Mr Open Quote also enjoyed a little diaeresis. However, he always placed his diaereses in brackets  –​(…). This was so unusual that I would have little hesitation in describing it as unique. Both Mr However and Mr Open Quote were said to be particularly unpleasant people. Mr However was alleged to have the nasty habit

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of blackmailing his exceedingly wealthy relatives, while Mr Open Quote, it was claimed, had personally supervised several murders. A prolific anonymous letter writer presented a number of unusual punctuation and other features, including paragraphs lacking final word punctuation, paragraphs ending in a comma, exclamations followed by either a comma or a full stop, and full stops followed by a comma, as well as sentences beginning with lower-​case letters. A tragic instance of the dying art of letter-​writing. Readers may also have observed the remark in the chapter ‘The Concrete Tomb’ in this volume that French writers usually place a space before a semicolon. For a writer who is a native speaker of English, this would be curious, although perhaps not singular. However, this was more or less what occurred in the written ramblings of a hate mail writer  –​what that author did was to place a space before two question marks. A relatively new phenomenon in written language  –​though in reality it is not new at all –​is the appearance of various iconic forms to denote emotional states  –​so-​called smilies. I  say these are not new because humans were drawing pictures to denote meaning long before we even conceived of letter shapes. Everybody reading this will, I am sure, be familiar with the sequence of a colon followed by a closing bracket thus: :). It is perhaps a small thing, but in a somewhat sad, drug-​related murder in the Manchester area, the author regularly produced a semicolon instead of a colon before the closing bracket. On its own this would not be considered sufficient to attribute authorship, but with one or two other characteristics, authorship did seem a possibility: these included spelling ‘as well’ as ‘aswell’ and ‘a lot’ as ‘alot’  –​this latter compound being more common among millennials than baby-​boomers. Even so, those three features were not enough to indicate authorship, although their presence did assist officers to focus the direction of their inquiries.

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Ordinarily, you would think that writers would notice such peculiarities. It seems they do not. Linguists refer to such phenomena as ‘low-​level’ features. A low-​level feature usually relates to a language object which is, apparently, of little or no importance –​for example, a punctuation mark. But, as can be imagined, there is nothing which is of no importance in forensic linguistics. This is one reason why I  always get students to do a lot of transcription. In the beginning they always protest at having to write letters, text messages and other documents out by hand (I specifically ban them from using a keyboard). Sometimes I get them to transcribe the same document –​ or even a single sentence in a document  –​up to ten times. What this does is to sharpen their observation of these so-​called ordinary, unimportant features. Or, I present them with something written or typed out on a sheet of paper and ask them to stare at it until they see ‘something’. That something might be no more than a lack of space after a punctuation mark, or an American spelling in what purports to be a British document or some other equally trivial phenomenon. But it can make the difference between the analyst’s ability to note an authorship indicator or not, and perhaps help the court to reach a decision, sometimes in relation to an offence of no little consequence. So, if you find yourself attracted to the idea of developing your forensic linguistic abilities, a good place to start would be the ordinary, everyday observation of how others use language, concentrating on the ‘little things’.

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14 When authorship is not authorship There are laws about what constitutes a legally made last will and testament. For a will to be valid, the signature of the testator (or testatrix) needs to be witnessed. Occasionally, it may happen that a will is not witnessed but is merely in the form of a letter or other instruction. This form of will is not legally valid and anyone who wishes to bring an action claiming property on the strength of such a will would have to argue their case in a court of equity, not a court of law. Equity is a branch of the legal system which deals, essentially, with questions of fairness. It is a very ancient system. Traditionally, law courts seek certainty when applying legal rules. This is one reason why many international companies choose to have their contracts adjudicated in English courts. The combination of statute law and the rules of equity combine to provide a balance between legal certainty and the need to achieve a fair result in a particular set of circumstances. Professor Alastair Hudson, a leading scholar in the field of equity, considers that the function of equity is to ‘mitigate the rigour of the common law’. A not untypical example would be where a person transfers his or her property to a family member on condition that the transferor is allowed to continue to reside in the property for

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life. Here, only legal ownership is transferred; the transferor retains the benefit of residing in the property. This is referred to as beneficial ownership. If the person to whom the property was transferred sought to eject the transferor of the property, the matter would be decided under the rules of equity, and not in law. This is because the transferee is, in fact, the legal owner. Nothing can alter that fact. However, the legal owner’s rights do not extend to a beneficial interest while the transferor remains alive. In this way, courts are able to protect the interests of those who have no legal rights but have rights only under equity. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, courts of equity were separate from law courts. Matters of equity were decided in the Court of Chancery, as any reader of Dickens’s Bleak House will no doubt recall. Chancery judges did not usually rule on legal matters, and ‘law’ judges stayed out of equity matters. Nowadays, equity claims may be decided in the County Court or in the High Court (in the Chancery Division), the only difference being to do with the financial value of the claim. All judges are equipped to rule on matters of both law and equity. Deciding a probate case where authorship of a will is disputed is no easy matter. The person who puts pen to paper is not always the author. This question recently cropped up in relation to a will made, or allegedly made, by an elderly widow who was not a native speaker of English. The question before the court was whether the widow herself had made the will (it was in her own handwriting) or whether her carer, also a nonnative speaker, had made it. The will was disputed and the judge called for expert evidence to assist the court in regard to the will, which was in the form of a letter. What was interesting about the judge’s order was that he had not asked for an authorship analysis. Rather, he had asked for ‘evidence . . . to address issues relating to the likelihood that the

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letter . . . represents an expression of the Testatrix’s own free will’. This was very astutely phrased because it showed that the judge understood that there might be more to the case than the question of who had written the will, or whose language had been used in its composition. At first sight, the issue in the case appeared to be merely whether the elderly widow had authored the letter herself, or whether it had been authored by her much younger carer. However, the judge broadened the question of authorship by considering the different ways in which the letter may have been composed:  Was the letter entirely of the widow’s composition? Had the carer suggested wording to her as she was writing? Had the carer perhaps dictated the letter? In the act of writing  –​by whichever means or combination of means  –​was the widow expressing her own free will, or was her will vitiated by the carer’s acts or omissions? To consider the implications of the judge’s request for expert evidence, we need to backtrack slightly and look at the work of a well-​known language philosopher by the name of Erving Goffman.1 Goffman’s observations were made in relation to spoken rather than written language, but there is no reason to suppose that what he said does not also apply to written language. Goffman considered the question of authorship in terms of participation. In his theory of participation frameworks, Goffman suggested that there were several different categories of participation, which may be summarized as follows: ●●

First, the person whose views are being expressed is the principal. In the present case, if the thoughts expressed on paper were wholly those of the widow, then she was the principal.

●●

Second, Goffman considered the person who composed the words. This person might not be expressing their own views,

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simply forming the views of another person into words. This person is the author. ●●

Third, the person who composes the words might not be the same person who writes them down on paper. The person who writes the words on paper is the animator.

To relate the present case to the above categories of authorship, any of several scenarios could be possible, including: If the will is the expression of the widow’s wishes, then she is the principal. However, she may –​because of illness or fatigue or some other reason –​have delegated the task of choosing some of the words to the carer. This would make the carer an author –​but an author working within the framework of what the widow wished to express. Thus, even though the carer might be the ‘author’, he would, in that case, be no more than a nominal author because he would not be the principal. The widow, as the person who wrote the document, would not only be the principal, she would also be the animator because she physically wrote the letter. On the other hand, if the will is not an expression of the widow’s wishes, then the carer could be the principal. However, if, for example, the carer told the widow to use her own words, then the widow would be the author, but she would still not be the principal because the ideas originated from the carer. In this case also the widow would be the animator, because, as noted above, the document is in her own hand. For the above reasons, it may be immaterial whether the actual words used were those of the carer or of the widow herself. In reality, therefore, since it cannot be stated with any certainty who the originator of the ideas in the letter was, an authorship analysis

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might not be of assistance to the court in determining whether the letter expressed the free will of the testatrix.

Note 1 E. Goffman, ‘Footing’, in Forms of Talk, ed. E. Goffman, 124–​159 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

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15 A letter for Mrs Joe Mr and Mrs Josephson live a normal, quiet life in a village in the Shires. Mr Josephson runs an insurance office in premises just down the road from their home. It would not be unkind to describe him as ‘ordinary’ since that is how he describes himself. In fact, Mr Josephson rather prides himself on his ordinariness. He confesses to experiencing a certain disquiet around people who seek excitement or who want to do something ‘different’. If people wish to describe him as naïve, he thinks, let them go ahead. He takes the view that a sparrow that imagines itself to be a hawk is in for disappointment; if you are a sparrow, he reasons, then it is better to be aware of the limitations of your species. Mr Josephson knows, so to speak, that he is a sparrow and not a hawk. Mrs Josephson, if truth be told, has more flair. She likes to entertain, takes pride in her petunias, and is ‘something’ in the crochet club. Every morning at 8.40 she sees her husband off to work, by habit dusting the shoulders of his jacket with her hand and handing him his flask of tea and his packed lunch. As he prepares to go out, Mr Josephson picks up his umbrella even though it is a bright summer’s day. You have to be an extraordinarily careful person to take an umbrella with you on a sunny day when there is not a single cloud

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in the sky, especially when your office is no more than a few hundred yards from your home. Mr Josephson is an extraordinarily careful person. He trusts little in life, and that includes the weather forecast. Mrs Josephson pecks him on the cheek and closes the door behind him with a wave. They both say ‘see you later’ almost simultaneously. To the average reader this will all seem ridiculously old-​fashioned, and the couple would be the first to admit that they are like something out of the 1950s. The 1960s and any subsequent decade, it would seem, passed them by completely. Mr Josephson did once think of learning to drive but then decided against it. As an insurance man he knew the risks. One of Mr Josephson’s few concessions to modern life is that in a moment of daring he acquired a mobile phone, one of the ‘brick’ variety, the kind that you can use to make and receive phone calls; the kind that if you want to send a text message you have to press the number keys several times for each letter. No matter how often he uses this device, he can never quite get over the fact that it does not need a cable like a ‘normal’ telephone. It is true that he does have a computer at the office, but he prefers not to get ‘too involved’ with ‘those sorts of things’. He has a vague awareness that computers are associated with viruses but he is not quite sure what that means exactly. When he gets to the office in the morning, Mr Josephson’s routine is unvarying. He hangs his jacket up, puts his umbrella in the appointed slot in the old wooden hat stand, and slides open the top drawer of his desk where he places his packed lunch and his flask. He then sits down, picks up his newspaper, and stares at the crossword puzzle through his thick-​lensed glasses for ten minutes until his assistant arrives. It is not certain that he actually makes any attempt at solving the crossword. Thus is Mr Josephson’s life. Mrs Josephson, too, is having a quiet day today. After clearing away the breakfast things she gets dressed in

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a leisurely fashion, and then goes downstairs to collect the morning mail. Among the usual crop of bills is a small, white, handwritten envelope, ‘Mrs Josephson, 14 Wilmount Street, M-​-​-​-​’. Mrs Josephson tries to recollect when she last saw a handwritten envelope, other than one containing a birthday or some other greeting card. She puts the envelopes down on the kitchen table and fills the kettle. She never opens the mail unless she has a fresh pot of tea in front of her. Standing at the kitchen window overlooking the back garden, she espies the stealthy form of next door’s cat padding noiselessly across the lawn and preparing to launch itself at her bird table. She raps the window sharply, a solitary robin at the bird bath flutters off in a panic and the scowled-​at cat, its shocked face turning momentarily towards the kitchen, vanishes into a bush. Seated at her kitchen table, Mrs Josephson removes the tea cosy from the pot, lifts the lid of the elegant porcelain vessel, inhales the Darjeeling fragrances, and commences to pour her tea through a strainer, having first warmed the cup. Finally, armed with her cup of tea, Mrs Josephson starts to open the mail, leaving the one containing the handwritten envelope to last. Eventually, her cup nearly drained, Mrs Josephson turns to the envelope in question. Peering at it closely, she sees that the handwriting is unknown to her. Carefully, she slides the letter-​opener into the flap and pulls it across in a smooth, measured, but nevertheless slightly impatient gesture. Mrs Josephson places the letter on the kitchen table and looks at it for a moment, and then picks it up. Her first reaction is one of incredulity. Surely, surely, it cannot be true. Her husband . . .? Her hand shakes as she holds the letter, as if the letter would tell her the truth. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ ‘Joliwicz here, Dr Olsson. How are . . .?’ ‘Fine, thank you Mr Joliwicz, all well with you?’

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‘Middling’. A  sound of throat-​ clearing through the phone. ‘Client down in  –​shire. Anonymous letter. Nasty. Accuses husband womanizing.’ Joliwicz always speaks a kind of telegraphese dialect when talking on the phone. ‘I see. Have you got a copy of the letter?’ ‘Yes, on way to you.’ ‘Email attachment?’ Splutters. ‘Good God no. Get it tomorrow.’ Joliwicz hates technology. I had forgotten for a moment that Jolowicz has never sent an email in his life. ‘Okay.’ ‘Call me.’ ‘Oka . . .’. The line had gone dead. He was gone before I could tell him to send me a copy, not the original. I always welcome calls from Joliwicz. He is one of those solicitors who will never try to influence an expert with his own opinion, or put pressure on you to finish a report in a hurry, and he always pays his bills on time. Just as importantly, the cases he sends me are always interesting. -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ The first few words of the letter were curious: ‘This is a letter for Mrs Joe, well I guess you are Mrs Joe, the reason I only call you Mrs Joe is because I don’t know who you are!’ The writer went on to say:  ‘. . . your husband and I  have been sleeping together for the past six months’, and that the writer had not been aware of Mrs Joe’s existence ‘. . . it has only happened since I  told Joe I  wanted to get married’. The writer describes in broad terms how she traced Mr Joe’s address but, as for details, ‘I won’t tell you how.’ The writer is ‘sick of men’ and never wants to ‘see or hear from him (Mr Joe) again’. She hopes that Mrs Joe will ‘find it in your heart to confront the (expletive deleted)’.

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Curiously, the letter continues: ‘I hope that none of this is true for your sake.’ The letter ends with a strange sequence of discourse moves: ‘I’m really sorry about this affair, but I can promise you it is over as I  now know the truth, so just be warned. Sorry again.’ Apology –​ promise –​ warning –​ apology. The first sentence may well have sent H.  P. Grice spinning in his grave. Grice was a language philosopher who made a major contribution to linguistics with a theory which he termed the ‘cooperative principle’, whereby he suggested that speakers ‘make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged’.1 By ‘contribution’ he meant any spoken or written communication. A  ‘contribution’ should be timely, appropriate, and true to its communicative intent. From the above dicta Grice formulated four maxims, summarized as follows: 1 Tell the truth. 2 Say no more than required. 3 Be relevant. 4 Be orderly and brief. In the excerpt ‘This is a letter for Mrs Joe, well I guess you are Mrs Joe, the reason I only call you Mrs Joe is because I don’t know who you are’, the writer mentions the addressee’s name three times, yet says s/​ he does not know who Mrs Joe is. To describe this as dissembling might be an understatement. It certainly appears to violate the first of Grice’s maxims which requires the speaker or writer to simply ‘tell the truth’. The second maxim is violated because, clearly, the writer says ‘too much’, much more than is in fact required. Given that the letter is addressed to Mrs Joe on the envelope, and the fact that the writer therefore knows that he or she is writing to Mrs Joe, the relevance of

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making any of the conflicting claims is not easily discernible. Finally, to state the obvious, the writer is anything but orderly and brief. It would not be unreasonable to wonder whether the above excerpt would pass a veracity test, although linguists are not usually concerned with the question of veracity, at least not for its own sake. What is interesting, however, is that if the above excerpt is an illustration of the writer being economical with the truth, then this might indicate that the writer does, in fact, know Mrs Joe, or is acquainted with her. The second thing that is interesting is the position of the word ‘only’. The writer wrote: 1 the reason I only call you Mrs Joe, instead of the more usual 2 the only reason I call you Mrs Joe The first implies ‘I don’t call you anything but “Mrs Joe” ’; the second states that there is ‘only one reason that I  call you “Mrs Joe” ’. The context suggests the second meaning, signifying that since the writer does not know the addressee, there is ‘only’ one way s/​he can address her. The word order used by the writer appears to be a distinctive word order and can be analysed in terms of what linguists term ‘markedness’. In linguistics, markedness refers to the use of a word or expression in the way in which we normally encounter it, as opposed to a less common way of encountering it. We do not notice the unmarked form ‘the only reason I’, but we do notice the marked version ‘the reason I only’. We can test this by measuring the respective frequencies of the usual, or unmarked version, as against the frequency of what seems to be the marked version. For the unmarked form ‘the only reason I call you’ we find, at the time of writing, 120,000 instances on a well-​ known internet search engine, while for the marked form ‘the reason I only call you’ there are no instances on the internet, absolutely none. For the less specific ‘the only reason I’, we find 28,800,000 instances

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on the internet and 713,000 instances of ‘the reason I only’ –​still a significant difference. It appears, therefore, that the writer’s use of ‘only’ is unusual, even idiosyncratic. This is borne out by data in the British National Corpus (the BNC) which is held at Oxford University and consists of 100 million words. There we find no instances of ‘the reason I only’ and forty-​seven of the ‘the only reason I’, again showing that the anonymous author’s use of ‘only’ is indeed a rare formulation.2 On a more discursive note, it occurred to me that the claim about sleeping with, and wanting to marry Joe, lacked detail and, given the way in which the writer referred to Joe, it seemed not unlikely that the writer’s communicative intention was to cause friction between husband and wife. In addition to the prevaricative denials about knowing who Mrs Joe was, this suggested the possibility that the writer was acquainted with both husband and wife, and not just the husband. I called Jolowicz back. ‘Ask the client to obtain writing samples,3 as discreetly as possible, from anyone who works with, or is closely acquainted with, either the husband or the wife, not necessarily female.’ I could almost hear Jolowicz raising an eyebrow, but he did exactly as I asked and a few days later I received copies of phone texts sent by employees of Mr Josephson to him relating to work. There were two employees, one male (now departed from the firm) and one female, both of them living in the same village as the Josephsons. Both were also acquainted with Mrs Josephson. In one of the texts it seemed that Mr Josephson must have complained about some envelopes that had been ordered for the office. The text read: ‘I only got in the brown envelopes because they didn’t have any white ones in stock,’ and in another text, the following occurred:  ‘I only asked Bill to fax the letter if you weren’t back by 4 p.m.’ In both these examples the adverb ‘only’ occurs in a phrase which it does not modify. In the first example, the writer is stating that she has

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‘only one reason’ for getting in the brown envelopes, and the sentence should therefore read ‘I got in the brown envelopes only because . . .’. In the second example, the writer asked Bill to fax the letter in one set of circumstances, and one only, namely ‘only if you weren’t back by 4 p.m.’. The adverb is thus preposed (i.e. placed before), in each case, to the main clause ‘I only got’, ‘I only asked’ and not as a modifier of the conditional ‘only because’, ‘only if ’. In the anonymous letter, the opposite happens  –​the writer postposes (i.e. places after) the adverb ‘only’. So, instead of ‘the only reason I call you’ we have ‘the reason I only call you’. The cognitive assumption underlying both the pre-​positioning and postpositioning of only in these examples is the fact that, in each case, the writer appears to consider ‘only’ to be a mobile element in the sentence, that is to say, an element which is flexible as to its positioning. In my opinion, the way in which this is realized in the examples is distinctive. Another feature of both the known and questioned texts in this case was the use of ‘this’: Anonymous letter: ‘This is a letter for Mrs Joe’; ‘so this is how I’ve got the letter to you’; ‘I hate to do this’; ‘I hope that none of this is true for your sake’. Known texts: ‘You text me this “The stationery bill is too high” ’; ‘Just want this all to stop’ (Mr Josephson’s complaints about high office bills); ‘This is between me and him’ (a row between the writer and another employee which Mr Josephson had commented on). What was distinctive in each case regarding the use of ‘this’ was that it was not easy to identify the reference for ‘this’ or, by contrast, that ‘this’ was so obvious that it did not need stating, for example, ‘this is a letter’, ‘you text me this’. Thus, ‘this’ appeared to be a placeholder for more specific text, sometimes stated, sometimes not.

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A third aspect which I found in common between the anonymous letter and the known texts was the use and omission of ‘I’. Anonymous letter: ‘I friend found his address’; ‘I sick of men taking advantage’; ‘Sorry to tell you but’. Known texts:  ‘I’ll apologised’; ‘and didn’t want the hassle’; ‘As couldn’t be dealing with the hassle’; ‘And can also say that she’. In the anonymous examples we have an instance of the wrong pronoun being used –​‘I’ instead of ‘my’; we have an incomplete finite element ‘I’ instead of ‘I am’, and an omitted finite (pronoun and ‘to be’ form) in ‘Sorry to . . .’ instead of ‘I’m sorry to . . .’. In the known examples, we have an instance of the past tense being used with a future modal, ‘I’ll apologised’; an instance of omitted ‘I’ after a conjunction ‘and didn’t’, and two instances of an incomplete finite, with the omitted pronoun before a modal ‘As couldn’t’ and ‘And can say’. Although it would be too strong to consider any of these as idiosyncratic in authorship terms, except perhaps ‘I friend’, the writer does, in each instance, appear to be exhibiting some syntactic ambivalence regarding the use of the first person pronoun. Finally, I  noticed that the phrase ‘I can promise you’ appears in both, the anonymous and the known texts. While on the face of it this seems to be an entirely unremarkable expression, analysis shows that the phrase ‘I can promise you’ is relatively unusual, when compared with ‘I promise you’, which is between six (according to the BNC) and twenty-​seven (according to an internet search) times more common than the form found in both the known and questioned texts, that is, ‘I can promise you’. In each case there is an overlap in meaning with ‘assure’; thus, in both cases, the phrase ‘I assure you’ would be just as semantically effective. Although I would not consider the linguistic evidence in this case irresistible, I suggest that it is often the apparently insignificant, ‘small’

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things in language which are revealing of a person’s identity, matters such as the positioning of a word –​in the present case, ‘only’, the odd examples of ‘I’ given above, the vague anaphoric references for ‘this’ and the inclusion of the word ‘can’ in ‘I can promise you’ instead of the much more frequent ‘I promise you’. I wrote back to Jolowicz, saying that although the linguistic evidence was not overwhelming I  considered that the employee in question could not be excluded from authorship of the anonymous letter, but that on its own the linguistic evidence was not likely to be sufficient for a prosecution. However, a little while later Jolowicz called me to say that Mr Josephson had just heard from ‘another party’ that the employee in question had confessed to having authored the anonymous letter. Jolowicz also tells me that Mr Josephson still leaves for the office at 8.40 every morning and, even on the sunniest days, persists in carrying an umbrella. Mrs Josephson, meanwhile, has not ceased hostilities with the neighbour’s cat, continues to win prizes for her petunias and remains ‘something’ in the crochet club. It is reassuring that certain things never change, especially in a world where an anonymous letter, thoughtlessly written, can do so much harm.

Notes 1 Paul Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, in Syntax and Semantics, ed. P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, 41–​58 (New York: Academic Press, 1975). 2 On markedness, see E. L. Battistella, The Logic of Markedness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3 Of course, this is not a reference to ‘handwriting’ but a reference to samples of the person’s written language. As a forensic linguist I have no interest in handwriting.

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16 The strange prose of Mrs Mottle I have called this writer Mrs Mottle though, as you will learn, that was an assumed name. So, pseudonyms aside, ‘Mrs Mottle’ had a complaint. It concerned ‘her husband’. She complained about the bad treatment he had received from his board, whom she repeatedly threatened to sue. In her opinion, Mr Mottle was a blameless individual who had been badly wronged by the board. Mrs Mottle had a curious way of expressing these matters, a particular style of writing, her own special literary gift. This, however, was not Mrs Mottle’s only gift. A long time ago, a very public spirited lady (she was indeed a ‘Lady’) left most of her fortune for the benefit of a charity dedicated to the protection of a particular species of wildfowl. This kindly lady had, in belated protest of the annual shoot on the estate of her late husband  –​a sad sight which she had had to endure annually for almost the entire duration of her marriage –​decided that there could be no better cause than to support the propagation of that particular species. She assigned the funds to a little-​known charity and, to ensure that the money was expended in accordance with her wishes, appointed a board of trustees to act as guardian. Those familiar with

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the law of equity and trusts will be aware of the delicate balance of power which results from such an arrangement, and the potential for conflict. Predictably, an argument arose some years after the bequest was made as to who was entitled to do what with certain moneys. It was, effectively, a dispute between the charity and the board of trustees. Mr Mottle enters the picture because he was a trustee who was accused by other trustees of mismanaging funds or, worse, misappropriating them. He complained to the board regarding his treatment at their hands on several occasions. These complaints, in the form of letters, were quite mild and did not cross the bounds of decency or professionalism. Mrs Mottle now entered the picture. She also complained to the board about the way in which she alleged her husband had been treated. However, in contrast to the correspondence generated by Mr Mottle, Mrs Mottle’s letters were more expressive, bordering on abusive. Initially, the board ignored Mrs Mottle’s correspondence, attributing her actions to someone intent on defending their spouse. They were offensive, but –​so reasoned the board –​such a reaction might be excused under the circumstances. They took no action. Mrs Mottle, apparently outraged at being ignored, wrote further letters, each one increasing in righteous indignation. At one point the board had written to Mr Mottle asking for ‘exact’ details about his wife. This occurred just before Christmas. According to Mrs Mottle, Mr Mottle had been exceedingly displeased that Mrs Mottle had communicated with the board. Mrs Mottle stated:  ‘My Christmas was ruined. Mr Mottle was furious that I had written to the Board. l will not dwell further on the repercussions’. Mrs Mottle considered the board’s conduct ‘inappropriate’ and an ‘invasion of my privacy’. Although not strictly related to the authorship question, I  considered these expressions to contain elements of parody

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bordering on farce. This in turn damaged the credibility of the complaint letters. Not obtaining a satisfactory response from Mr Mottle regarding his ‘exact’ relationship with his wife, whom he described as a ‘truly remarkable woman’, the board, upon closer examination of Mrs Mottle’s complaints considered that  –​despite Mrs Mottle’s use of language being more inflammatory in some respects than that found in Mr Mottle’s original complaints, there were nevertheless several apparent similarities to the way in which her husband used language. It was at this stage that they decided to contact a forensic linguist. After examination of the material, I  approached the problem in four stages:  common expressions, vocabulary, register/​idiom and orthography. Common expressions:  The first thing I  look for when comparing texts for authorship is phrases which are common to both texts. I begin with phrases of six or more words and work ‘downwards’–​five words, four words and so on. In my 2004 book Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language, Crime and the Law written in the course of 2002, I  proposed that two authors working independently of each other would be unlikely to produce an identical expression greater than six words in length. I  invented this six-​ word example:  ‘question may be determined by experiment’. On its face, we would not expect this phrase to be unique, for the simple reason, surely, that many ‘questions’ would be ‘determined’ ‘by experiment’. However, the fact that a particular phenomenon or concept might be very common –​it is surely the case that every day scientists all over the world are attempting to determine certain questions by experiment –​does not mean that the means of expressing such a concept are necessarily common. I found that there were at that time 4,760,000 instances of ‘experiment’ on a well-​known search engine, 26,900 instances of ‘by experiment’, 1790 instances of

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Table 16.1  Common expressions String

Words

Characters

2002 Instances

experiment

1

10

4,760,000

by experiment

2

12

26,900

determined by experiment

3

22

1,790

be determined by experiment

4

24

920

may be determined by experiment

5

27

13

question may be determined by experiment

6

35

0

‘determined by experiment’ and, as can be predicted, with each word added to the expression, fewer results were returned. The full results are given in the table below: As can be seen, the number of instances of the expression declines in proportion to the length of the expression. What is interesting is that although the number of instances of ‘experiment’, ‘by experiment’ and ‘determined by experiment’ increased considerably on the search engine in question between 2002 and now (2017), instances of the entire expression ‘question may be determined by experiment’ have not increased in the intervening years. The only instances I can find of this expression are in the form of a quote from the 2004 book. In the Mottle case there were three identical phrases: ‘I have to say that I am appalled’, ‘make a formal complaint about you’, and ‘management accounts as required by the agreement’. As we might expect, ‘I have to say that I am appalled’ is not that uncommon, and nor is ‘make a formal complaint about you’. However, the third expression, ‘management accounts as required by the agreement’, was not found in any corpus or internet search engine. The full results are given in the table above.

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Table 16.2  Frequency of expressions I have to say that I am appalled make a formal complaint about you management accounts as required by the agreement

1910000 30600 0

Thus, we have, across the known and questioned text, an identical seven-​word expression ‘management accounts as required by the agreement’. This expression is not found on any search engine at the time of writing. This may be difficult to believe at first, given that there are innumerable instances of ‘management accounts’ which are doubtless ‘required by the agreement’. Combining the two phrases, however, yields no results on the internet. The presence of the other two expressions, ‘I have to say that I am appalled’, and ‘make a formal complaint against you’, does add some weight to the comparison, even though these phrases are not in themselves unique. I  would conclude from the above that the two texts are likely to be of common authorship. Vocabulary:  The next test that I  would usually carry out for an authorship comparison would be common vocabulary items. In Mrs Mottle’s case, she was ‘appalled’ and ‘disgusted’ at the ‘insult’ to her husband, and considered that the board had brought the charity into ‘disrepute’. Mr Mottle, on the other hand, had felt ‘disgust’ at the ‘insulting’ behaviour of the board, was convinced others would think it was ‘appalling’, and stated that all charities would be considered ‘disreputable’ if they behaved in this way. Both considered the matter ‘disgraceful’. While each of these terms, on their own, might be expected in a letter of complaint and would therefore not be unusual, the combination of them was certainly distinctive. I considered that the

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writer exhibited a trait common to plagiarists, which is to paraphrase expressions in order to minimize the possibility of detection. Thus, in the present instance, ‘disgusted’ in one author’s output becomes ‘disgust’ in the other’s, ‘appalled’ becomes ‘appalling’, and ‘disrepute’ becomes ‘disreputable’. The presence of these common expressions, in my opinion, added weight to the likelihood of common authorship. Some caution is needed when comparing the language of people who live together, or who communicate with each other frequently. What happens in many cases is that over a period of time, two people in these circumstances may begin to accommodate their language to each other.1 Giles et  al. consider that elements of ‘sociolinguistic code, style, and strategy selections’ may form part of an accommodation process between two authors who interact with each other on a regular basis (Giles et  al. 1991:  1, 2). For this reason, when comparing two authors as to vocabulary, it is important to bear in mind that in the case, for example, of a husband and wife, some similarity between them may be inevitable. It would be a question of judgment as to whether the degree of similarity in such a case would be attributable to identity of authorship or to accommodation. Register: As a statement of the obvious, language can be adapted to many social purposes; in fact, there is almost no use to which language cannot be put. Given the myriad social contexts to which all of us are subject, it is essential that we are able to adapt language, otherwise its usefulness as a tool for communication would be limited. These various adaptations which each of us routinely makes relate to the phenomenon of linguistic register. We adapt our use of language to the context in which we are using it. This includes the person we are addressing, the degree of formality required, the topic we are discussing and the text type. As will be readily appreciated, a letter to a prospective employer will be in a different register from

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an academic paper, just as the register used in an email is likely to be different from that used in a diary entry. Register can be a complicating factor in a linguistic inquiry if we are required to compare texts of different types for authorship. In one case I had to compare diary entries with business letters. A business letter is usually a highly formal document. Not only is it laid out in a conventional manner, but also the vocabulary is likely to be restricted to words acceptable within the business milieu. When designing a letter seeking employment, for example, the candidate who chooses inappropriate language probably runs the risk of being excluded at an early stage in the process. Diary entries on the other hand are usually intended to be read only by the writer. As such, the writer will probably not use formal language. In a manner of speaking, a diary is simply the encapsulation of the individual’s ideas, and is not unlike, in principle at least, speaking aloud. In the Mottle case, I  found Mrs Mottle to have a tendency to archaic, even pompous expressions, such as the following: Please let me know to whom I should have addressed my complaint To whom do I complain about this –​or is the Board not interested? What I choose to write vis-​a-​vis the Board (and to whom) is my affair. Mr Mottle appeared to share this use of ‘to whom’: I have been provided with your name as the person to whom I should make complaints I therefore repeat my question  –​to whom should this mater be addressed? You will also find a copy of XXX’s Will, which specifies to whom the funds were bequeathed.

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The use of ‘to whom’ in this way has long been considered to be stylistically redundant. Nowadays, the form ‘who to’ is preferred. Both writers (if there were two) showed other examples of avoiding the use of the final preposition in a phrase or sentence. Readers may recall with amusement Churchill’s comment on final preposition avoidance. He said, ‘This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put’. In Mrs Mottle’s letters, she wrote: ‘You have no idea of what I am capable of understanding’. This was comparable to Mr Mottle’s: ‘Let us see of what you are made’. Not unexpectedly, both Mottles preferred the use of ‘shall’ to ‘will’: Mrs Mottle: I shall therefore give you one last chance. Mr Mottle:  Then I shall give you the opportunity. I considered the above similarities to be distinctive, although not idiosyncratic. It would be quite possible for two middle-​aged partners to use a similar register with respect to the positioning of pronouns and the use of ‘shall’. Nevertheless, these characteristics added weight to the possibility of identity of authorship. Orthography: Orthography, as I use the term, concerns the use of punctuation marks, and in this respect also there were similarities between Mr and Mrs Mottle. ‘Mr./​Mrs.’:  Both Mr and Mrs Mottle place a full stop after ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’ and so on. This is becoming less and less common. ‘Email’: Both Mr and Mrs Mottle write ‘email’ as ‘E-​mail’. It is always written with an initial capital and a hyphen by both authors, regardless of where the word appears in the sentence. Of course, the use of upper case ‘E’ is unnecessary unless the word appears sentence initially. Additionally, the insertion of the hyphen between ‘e’ and ‘mail’ has largely been discarded.

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Salutations:  Both Mr and Mrs Mottle place a comma after the initial salutation and after the closing, for example: Dear Mr. Smith, Yours sincerely, On its own, this latter feature is, while less common than it would have been twenty years ago, not distinctive. However, taken in conjunction with the other orthographic characteristics, I  considered it to be indicative of identity of authorship. As a result of my observations, I  considered that the same person had authored letters by both Mr Mottle and Mrs Mottle. It later turned out that Mrs Mottle had been deceased for some years. Perhaps Mr Mottle really did believe she was speaking to him from beyond the grave. In that case, his characterization of her as a ‘truly remarkable woman’ would have been most apt.

Note 1 H. Giles, J. Coupland and N. Coupland, eds, Contexts of Accommodation: Studies in Emotional and Social Interaction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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17 The love letters of Dr X Imagine you are a doctor who has spent years studying, then diligently carrying out intricate medical procedures and undertaking complex diagnoses, sacrificing time with the family and not having the leisure to meet friends –​and you are doing all this with no complaint when, one day, out of the blue, you receive a dreaded ‘white envelope’ from the national medical registration agency. In the UK this organization is known as the General Medical Council (GMC). The case which features in this chapter also took place in an English-​speaking country, but not the UK. ‘Dear Doctor’, the letter begins, ‘we are currently investigating a complaint against you . . .’. In the case we are considering here, the doctor was the equivalent of what in the UK would be referred to as a ‘senior registrar’. She had emigrated from Pakistan to that country shortly after qualifying, had completed all the formalities for registration there and had successfully practised in her specialism for about the last decade. Now she found herself staring with disbelief at an accusation that she had written love letters to a patient, an elderly male, whom she had treated about two years earlier. Copies of the correspondence were attached to the letter. Looking at the letters, she thought the

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allegation was a joke. However, it was not; she was advised that the official investigation was already under way and that she should seek legal advice. I was contacted by her lawyer who could barely control his disbelief that the regulator had even paid attention to ‘this nonsense’ as he called it. He described the letters as being ‘incoherent, confused, and full of non-​sequiturs’. He concluded, in somewhat unlawyerly language, that they had been written by a ‘deranged, cognitively challenged lunatic’ who had decided to smear Dr X. Nobody, in his view, could believe a single word in them. A few days later, I received copies of the offending letters as well as a set of the doctor’s known writings. When working on a case like this, or any case at all for that matter, it is important to ignore the temptation to theorize about the facts. One should not be asking questions such as ‘Why would a happily married, successful young woman of 36 want to have an 80-​year-​old man as her lover?’ As interesting as such questions might be, they have nothing to do with the authorship matter. Let others speculate about causes, reasons and human conduct in general. It is also important not to fall into the trap of feeling sympathetic either towards the elderly patient who received these letters and must have suffered considerable embarrassment, or towards the doctor who had been immediately suspended by the hospital, without pay because she was a locum, and who was forced to stay away from work for a period of more than eighteen months. She told her lawyer that during that time she could not bear to leave home, and she lost all interest in meeting her friends for social occasions. Statistics show that doctors who are investigated by their regulator are more prone to depression, and even suicide, than other doctors. This is through no fault of the regulator, who is obliged by law to carry out a thorough investigation into every complaint. However, these investigations can

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drag on interminably, with some taking several years to be resolved. In that time the doctor is not able to work, and their financial situation can become acute. To make matters worse, in most countries, when doctors are investigated by the medical regulator, they have to pay their own legal bills. Not only is this ruinously expensive, but, in contrast to the doctor’s situation, the regulator has the resources to employ expensive lawyers to prosecute the case, and some regulators will devote a team of investigators and other staff to assist the prosecutor. For the beleaguered doctor, it hardly feels like a level playing field. I would also point out that when a person is charged with a crime, the prosecution is required to prove guilt ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Judges often translate this for juries as ‘you must feel sure; if you do not feel sure then you must acquit the defendant’. In civil trials, a lesser standard of proof is required, namely, ‘on the balance of probabilities’. As any lawyer will tell you, it is easier to prove something to the civil standard. This is the standard which is applied in medical (and other professional regulator) disciplinary panels. The tribunal only has to prove the offence with which the doctor is charged ‘on the balance of probabilities’, not ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. This seems to me to be manifestly wrong. If a panel has the power to take a person’s living away from them, they should have to do so to the higher standard, not the lower standard. I am not suggesting for a moment that any disciplinary panel would be anything other than completely fair and scrupulous, but removing someone’s name from the medical register has lifelong consequences for that individual, consequences which are often no less serious than a criminal conviction and, for that reason, in my view, the higher standard of proof should prevail in medical, and other, disciplinary tribunals. The final point I  would make regarding the legal aspect of the matter is that in a civil court, successful litigants are awarded their

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costs. In a medical disciplinary matter, even if found not guilty, the doctor is not entitled to recover legal costs –​a fee which may often rise to tens of thousands, whether of dollars, pounds or euros. Of course, there is no legal aid for doctors under investigation. All of this comes on top of not having been able to work for perhaps up to two years, and often results in the doctor becoming bankrupt despite not being guilty of anything. The first letter was written while Mr Z was still a patient in the hospital where Dr X worked. It began: ‘You’ve just got such a handsome face’. The letter went on, in something of a non sequitur: ‘I may have some news for you when next I see you, so I will shut the blinds (when I come in)’. The letter also said: ‘If you ever get depressed, you must let me know, cos there’s medication for that’. It was hard to work out what the purpose of the letters was. They drifted from one topic to another without any apparent aim. The second letter began by saying that the writer knew it was all hopeless, but also apologized for bothering the patient:  ‘I’m sorry but you’re just so handsome’. The letter also described the patient’s condition in some detail. The writer said s/​he was sorry to tell Mr Z that he had ‘had a stroke’ and ‘could be on the verge of a bigger one’, stating that if he did have another stroke, he ‘could be gone’. Curiously, the next sentence complimented Mr Z’s ‘lovely eyes’, before going on to discuss other aspects of Mr Z’s health. It seemed to me, from an early stage, that the letters had been written by a native speaker or someone with the equivalent command of English. This is indicated by such expressions as ‘on the verge of a bigger one’, and ‘could be gone’. Both of these expressions indicate knowledge of English idiom. Although many learners of English do acquire a sound command of the grammatical and lexical structures of the language, mastering idiom is much harder. This would be especially true if the learner had only begun to learn English as an

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adult. The reason why idiom is so much harder to master is that it requires multiple encounters with each individual idiomatic expression: by definition, each idiom is unique because it is derived from the sayings of colloquial speech formed over centuries. To acquire the many thousands of idioms of English, a speaker must be exposed to each idiom, possibly several times. Idioms are thus the result of habit formation. To illustrate this point, consider the case of the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who wrote ‘to eat your cake and have it’ instead of the more usual ‘to have your cake and eat it’ on a number of occasions. His brother, seeing this expression in a document, the Unabomber Manifesto, recognized it as one his mother had always used and which his brother had copied; Kaczynski had formed this particular habit at an early age as a result of influence of his mother. Somehow, even though he would have also heard the more common form, ‘to have your cake and eat it’ many times, he was unable to shake off the version which had taken root in his speech and writing. Thus, the use of idiom is formed from long habit. An adult will not acquire it easily. The questioned letters, purported to have been written by the doctor, consistently showed native speaker–​like idiom. By contrast, an examination of the doctor’s language showed someone who barely used idiomatic expressions, and had a poor grasp of standard forms of prepositional phrases and other structures. Asked by the disciplinary panel what professional examinations she had taken in order to qualify as a medical practitioner in her new country, the doctor said that they, the examiners, had ‘certain markings’ which had to be achieved, meaning, in fact, that ‘a certain mark’ was required in order to pass the examination. Referring to the fact that on a particular occasion she was working as a member of a team which consisted of four people, she said: ‘The team is four’. On another occasion, in the context of giving some biographical information about herself, the doctor mentioned that she had once

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lost her passport. She was asked what she had done about the loss. She replied that ‘if you lost your passport then you have to make a police inform’. Referring to her contact with Mr Z, the panel asked her if she had ever mentioned antidepressants to Mr Z. She replied, ‘I am not for psychiatry, I am for general medicine’. Asked about whether a certain medical investigation was appropriate in a particular case, she replied that ‘that was appropriate investigation’. These examples indicate serious deficiencies in the use of English by the doctor. I digress for a moment to make two points: the first is that ‘good’ English is not necessarily required for effective communication purposes. As native speakers we are able to draw accurate semantic and contextual inferences from information which has not been constructed according to the rules of grammar, syntax or idiom. For example, a native speaker would not have much difficulty recognizing that the doctor’s phrase ‘make a police inform’ means ‘informing the police’ or ‘giving the police information’. We may not acknowledge the doctor’s use of English as ‘standard’ or ‘correct’ (whatever that means), but we do understand what she is saying. This brings me to the second point. When we think about it, there is no obvious reason why ‘make a police inform’ should not be standard English. Instead, however, through centuries of development in the language, it turns out that ‘informing the police’ (which dates back to 1812, according to the Google TM Ngram Viewer), ‘giving the police information’ and any one of a score of other formulations with the two words ‘inform’ and ‘police’ came to be accepted as standard forms; somehow, ‘make a police inform’ did not join the ranks of those standard forms as a way of expressing the concept. It may be argued that ‘inform’ is a verb and therefore cannot be preceded by the indefinite article ‘a/​an’. That is only partially true, because many words are both verbs and nouns. For example, the word ‘caution’ was originally a noun, but is now used as a verb; similarly ‘book’, clearly

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once just a noun, is now also used as a verb. Police officers talk of ‘evidence’, not just as a noun, but as a verb too, for example, ‘The constable must evidence that’, that is, turn it into an exhibit to be used in evidence. Equally, what was a verb sometimes becomes a noun, for example, ‘change’, ‘murder’, ‘talk’ and so on. Therefore, on the above basis, ‘inform’ could logically be a noun as well as a verb, and ‘make a police inform’ could have been accepted, at some stage in the language’s culture and history, as a standard way of saying ‘giving the police information’. The fact that it has not been so adopted is not due to some inherent logical attribute of the language but, rather, results from an accretion of culture and usage. Language structures are sometimes ad hoc and illogical, and often non-​literal, as for example, ‘I saw him in the window’, ‘he is under observation’, ‘she is under the doctor’ and so on. Expressions like these, though not usually thought of as idioms, have some of the same attributes as idioms, which is that their surface form –​‘under the doctor’, ‘under observation’, ‘in the window’ and so on –​does not convey a literal meaning. As speakers, we derive the meaning from exposure to the expression, just as we do with idioms such as ‘he got the sack’, ‘she flew the nest’, ‘they dropped a clanger’ and the many hundreds of others in the language. It is precisely because these types of structures, including those containing idiomatic expressions, are ad hoc, non-​literal and illogical, that they require the user’s individual experience in order to master them. Idiom is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a linguistic one. It is also the case that where a person has not mastered the language’s idiom they may be inclined to be over-​literal in their interactions, including the fact that they will tend to interpret questions literally. Thus, when being interviewed by police (who at that time were investigating the possibility of a sexual relationship between the doctor and the patient –​the patient being a vulnerable person), the

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doctor was asked how she got to work at the hospital. She replied, ‘Walk’. The police officer stated that what he meant was how the doctor had come to be employed by the hospital –​for example, in response to an advertisement in a medical journal or by some other means, such as referral by a colleague or agency. He was not referring to her mode of transport. ‘How did you get to work at the hospital’ can be interpreted in several ways, the more obvious one being in relation to the means of transport, the less obvious one being to do with the process by which the state of being employed by the hospital came about. A person whose idiom is poor will almost always tend to select the more literal option. A further characteristic which accompanies the language of someone who lacks idiom is that they rarely use colloquial expressions. This contrasted with the letters where, on several occasions, the writer wrote ‘cos’ for ‘because’. It was also evident that the doctor was unable, at least some of the time, to ●●

use ‘a’ and ‘the’ in standard ways, for example, she said, ‘I can work in any field of the medicine’, ‘I work as a care of the elderly’, ‘can I have look’, ‘it’s difficult procedure’;

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determine when a plural noun is required: ‘if there are any other problem’, ‘we have two extra ward’, ‘above 40 patient’;

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decide on the appropriate verb form, either in relation to the use of the auxiliary, or with regard to the required inflection: ‘it’s only me who able to do it’, ‘they are more concern about that’, ‘if they are cancel’, ‘I know what date I’m graduate’, ‘I’m work as a locum’, ‘everything go with this number’, ‘I’m usually use [stethoscope]’;

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use prepositions in standard ways: ‘[avoid] infecting to the patient’, ‘I am not for psychiatry, I am for general medicine’

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(meaning she was not a specialist in psychiatry, but in general medicine), referring to how she carried her stethoscope ‘it’s in your neck’ (meaning around your neck). In the letters which were complained of as having been sent to Mr Z, there were no observable lacunae, whether in relation to idiom, grammar, the use of prepositions or in any other respect. I am pleased to say that the disciplinary panel agreed and the charges against Dr X were dropped.

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18 The invisible Bronski I used to think of Bronski as a busy person, buzzing around the courts seeking judicial retribution for the crimes and civil wrongs against him, filing papers, arguing with lawyers, grimly pursuing fleeing judges in their flapping red robes across courtyards and generally making a complete nuisance of himself as he sought to obtain the justice he felt lay tucked in some judicial pocket. That is how I imagined Bronski but, as it turned out, I was completely wrong; he was much more like a chess master, quietly planning his moves in the background, supported by a steadfast, if misguided, partner. Nevertheless, he managed to cause a great deal of consternation to the learned masters and judges at the Royal Courts of Justice. The case concerned that most slippery of civil offences, libel.1 In an age when almost anyone can publish virtually anything they choose on the internet, great harm can be done to innocent reputations, both of organizations and of individuals. The internet affords the malicious person the opportunity of damaging an enemy, possibly mortally, while at the same time remaining completely anonymous. It is the perfect forum for the poison pen letter, but with this advantage to the author  –​that the calumny is potentially spread far and wide. Fake news does not just happen to public figures; everyone is a potential victim.

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Bronski’s target was a businesswoman (Mrs Smith) who had successfully developed a range of products sold on the internet. I was informed that these products had gained a substantial reputation and the company was known for its fair dealing and customer satisfaction. Apparently, reviews were generally positive and complaints few and far between. In addition to his claims about the Smith products, Bronski peppered his reviews with allegations that Mrs Smith had molested and abused children in her care. Solicitors tend to avoid inflammatory language, but Georgina Rackworth, the solicitor acting in this case, considered the accusations as ‘scurrilous’. Efforts to discover who Bronski was were without success. At more or less the same time that Bronski became active, a certain Clarence Wilbuthnot also started posting commentary about Mrs Smith. He began an online campaign against the company, effectively no more than a prolonged tirade about its ‘substandard products’. Wilbuthnot (not his real name) turned out to be a real person who lived in an entirely different part of the country from Mrs Smith, the target of the libel. Wilbuthnot so phrased his commentaries about Mrs Smith that they could not be said to be libel in themselves, but they were certainly hostile. Solicitors acting for Mrs Smith contacted Wilbuthnot to determine if he was the same person as Bronski. Thus, having started out as a question no forensic linguist would consider answering –​‘Can we identify Bronski?’ –​the case now hinged on a much more straightforward question, which could informally be phrased as ‘Are Bronski and Wilbuthnot likely to be the same person?’ Wilbuthnot stated that he was not Bronski and was merely registering his protest. A  lengthy correspondence was entered into between Wilbuthnot and the solicitors. The solicitors felt confident enough to make a civil claim against him, but counsel for Mrs Smith was not so sanguine, and suggested that expert linguistic evidence might be helpful.

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As a result, I  reviewed the correspondence from both Bronski and Wilbuthnot. An early observation was that both Bronski and Wilbuthnot considered the actions of Mrs Smith’s legal representatives to be worthy of complaint to the regulator, as can be seen from Table 18.1. What is interesting about the above excerpts is that the relevant regulator is the ‘Solicitors Regulation Authority’ not the ‘Solicitors Regulatory Authority’, an error produced in both the Bronski and the Wilbuthnot emails. While this is not a unique error, it is nevertheless unusual. According to a well-​known search engine, the error occurs in less than 3 per cent of references to the regulator. Wilbuthnot and Bronski, between them, sent a number of further communications to the Smith solicitors. These appeared to be attempts at intimidating the solicitors into not pursuing an action against Wilbuthnot.

Table 18.1  Bronski and Wilbuthnot correspondence Wilbuthnot

The Solicitors Regulatory Authority would no doubt frown upon your stance on this issue

Bronski

I pointed out to you that I will be passing on further evidence to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority for them to investigate

Table 18.2  Bronski and Wilbuthnot correspondence Wilbuthnot

Your accusations and allegations are denied in their entirety. I view the actions of those you name as your clients to be victimisation under the Equality Act 2010

Bronski

The accusations and allegations which are completely false and defamatory and are wholly denied. I believe that the actions of . . . amount to harassment and also victimisation under the equality act 2010

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In each of the excerpts in Table  18.2, there are four expressions, namely, ‘accusations and allegations’, ‘denied’, ‘the actions of ’ and ‘victimisation under the equality act 2010’. This combination of expressions was not found in any corpus or internet search within one sentence or even within one document. Moreover, in each excerpt the expressions occur in the same sequence, which, I suggest, increases the possibility of the two documents having one author. The non-​ capitalization of ‘equality act’ in Bronski’s email may be an oversight or it may be an attempt at disguise. In another example, the unseen Bronski directed someone he was writing to ‘to respond to my correspondences’. At about the same time, or a little later, Wilbuthnot accused the solicitor of failing ‘to respond to my correspondences’. As the reader will be aware, correspondence, in the sense of communication between people, does not usually take the plural form. The same text sets also give:  ‘I am informing the court’, although the contexts in the different emails are not similar. This is a fairly rare phrase. No document was found on the internet which contained both expressions. Both document sets showed an author who had problems with the use of the auxiliary verb ‘be’ in its various forms as shown below:

Table 18.3  Uses of ‘be’ in the documents Various uses of ‘be’ in the documents

Corrected version

This was proven to be fabricated

to have been

You have obviously not being following [what was happening]

been

[This was] alleged to be inflicted by your client

to have been

I note that; despite you being informed by me that you or your firm have not responded to any of my correspondences

having been

[I have heard of people] be told by Mrs Smith that . . .

being told

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It is worth considering the nature of the errors in Table  18.3. It is not necessarily the case that the writer does not know how to use auxiliary ‘be’. We should consider that the social context is a legal one, and thus the writer is having to produce text in an unfamiliar linguistic environment, the effort involved resulting in what appears to be pseudo-​legal language. In other words, the writer is not linguistically comfortable in the legal register and thus makes poor adaptations, as evidenced by the types of errors shown above. These errors may be contextually temporary idiosyncrasies brought about by having to produce text in a domain in which the writer is not inexperienced. Similar observations can be made about the use of prepositions across the two text sets, as Table 18.4 shows. Note that the verbs ‘request’, ‘petition’ and ‘demand’ are semantically cognate, and it is in each of these that we find the incorrect use of ‘for’.

Table 18.4  Use of prepositions in the case texts I am therefore requesting for your consideration of this urgent matter

‘for’ should be omitted

. . . received an unsafe judgment as a result of what I believe to be dishonourable conduct of your solicitors

The construction should be either ‘the dishonourable conduct of your solicitors’ or ‘dishonourable conduct by your solicitors’

I will be petitioning for [them] to take immediate action

‘for’ should be omitted

A brutal attack of [person]

attack on [person]

Please find attached some of the documents which you requested for

‘request’ as a verb does not take a preposition

I am demanding for the head of your company to contact me

The whole expression would be better as: ‘I am demanding that the head of your company contact me’

. . . as proof as communication from me to your firm

The second ‘as’ should be replaced by the preposition ‘of ’

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Redundancy and legalistic language A number of phrases are repetitive or contain redundant expressions. In ‘those I view as connected by participation or association to this matter . . .’, the words ‘connected’, ‘participation’ and ‘association’ are semantically linked. Similarly, we find ‘accusations and allegations’ ‘withheld or concealed’, ‘from the evidence . . . it is evident’, ‘verify and confirm’ and ‘current evidence in place’. This type of redundancy may be a feature of the writer’s usual use of language, but I suggest it is more likely to be in response to the legal genre, couplets being an instantly recognizable feature of legal language  –​for example, ‘cease and desist’, ‘record and retain’, ‘aid and abet’, ‘seize and detain’ and so on. The above-​noted tendency to legalistic language was also found in other expressions, notably ‘proven by way of a letter’, ‘proven to be fabricated’, ‘purported to have contacted’, ‘accusatory communication’, ‘deem my petition’, ‘those I deem responsible’, ‘this said application’, ‘regarding this said matter’, ‘within the statutory period’, ‘wherein I complained about’, ‘immediate commencement of ’. Note the use of ‘you or your’ in these two examples: Bronski  I note that; despite you being informed by me that you or your firm have not responded to any of my correspondences Wilbuthnot  It appears that you or your clients have no interest in sending your local contacts to verify my identity Here, we see that the putative writers do not use the more usual ‘neither . . . nor’ construction  –​‘that neither you nor your firm’ or ‘that neither you nor your clients’. Rather, negation is transferred to the verb, respectively ‘have not’, ‘have no . . .’, thus producing analytic rather than synthetic negation.

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Cross-​textual cohesion Linguists Halliday and Hasan were the first scholars to describe the textual phenomenon of cohesion. There are many forms of cohesion, the most common being the use of determiners to refer to an entity which has previously been mentioned in a text. ‘A man was walking along the road . . . this man sat down on a tree stump’. Here, the determiner and noun ‘this man’ refers anaphorically to ‘a man’ in the previous sentence. Subsequently, we would be likely to see ‘he’ being used to refer to that individual. This type of sequence ‘a man’, followed by ‘the man’, followed by ‘he’, is very common in texts. Without cohesion, a text would be no more than a string of sentences. In police statements, we often find a lack of cohesive devices, such as determiners or pronouns. ‘Mr Smith was then arrested . . . I asked Mr Smith what he was doing . . . Mr Smith then replied that . . .’. Here, instead of using the pronoun ‘he’ to refer to Mr Smith in the second and subsequent references, the police author repeatedly uses the suspect’s name, ‘Mr Smith’. In this sense, police statements may be described as ‘over-​cohesive’. Following Halliday and Hasan’s work, cohesion within texts is now widely recognized by linguists. However, the phenomenon of cohesion across texts –​cross-​textual cohesion –​is less well-​known. It is illustrated in this case in relation to a ‘telephone recording’ of a conversation between Bronski and an investigator mentioned in an email. In that email, the recording is referred to as ‘a telephone recording’, but as ‘the telephone recording’ in a separate email to another addressee, and of Wilbuthnot’s authorship, not Bronski’s. Bronski:  My correspondences include a copy of an obviously falsified court order. Furthermore, a telephone recording provides information stating that this court order was received by [name of party].

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Wilbuthnot:  The family who received a telephone call from [name of person] [will] provide a witness statement and their evidence including the telephone recording of Mr X. Note that in the first excerpt the indefinite article is used: ‘a telephone recording’. This is consistent with this being the earliest reference to the recording. In the second excerpt, written by Wilbuthnot, we see a reference to ‘the telephone recording’, even though the recording has not been referred to previously in this email. The immediately preceding ‘telephone call is not a sufficient reference to justify the use of the definite object ‘the’ in ‘the telephone recording’ because no information has been given in this second email that the telephone call was recorded. In any event, the lack of a prior reference would not matter if the same author had already made the same reference to the same addressee on a previous occasion. In that case, the addressee would probably have no difficulty in recalling the earlier reference and would not find the use of ‘the’ unusual. However, not only does the second email (by Wilbuthnot) contain an unreferenced definite entity (‘the telephone recording’), but this email is also to a different addressee from the first email and, purportedly, by a different author. In my opinion, this was a clear example of cross-​textual cohesion: the same person must have made the same reference, but without realizing it. Combined with the reasons given above, I  therefore considered that Wilbuthnot’s claim to not be Bronski was improbable. The court took the same view and substantial damages were awarded.

Note 1 It became evident, because of the nature of the products being sold, that ‘Bronski’ –​as the anonymous author signed himself –​was a male.

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19 Dissing the opposition Some individuals and organizations cannot bear the idea that others wish to compete with them, and perhaps even put them out of business. This is a very understandable reaction to prevailing conditions in a number of market sectors: too many suppliers vying for shrinking market share. Since the financial crash of 2008, there have been record numbers of bankruptcies and insolvencies, many of which remain below the radar because the relevant organizations are so small they are not even registered businesses. Thousands of people have lost their savings, their homes and some even their families. Competition has never been more intense. Nevertheless, there are rules, unspoken codes of conduct, that people who operate ethically do not transgress. In the age of internet buying, some of these rules are only just being formulated or, as the case may be, translated into a form compatible with the world of internet transactions. One such rule is that product reviews should be the honest, unsolicited opinion of the reviewer or, if it is necessary to solicit opinions, they should not be subject to the exigencies of outside influence. Since no person can be a judge in his or her own case, so, too, should a company avoid posting adverse reviews of a competitor’s products, much less pay others to do so.

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The exact nature of the product in question is not of any importance. Let us imagine it is a tortoise flea brush, a brush used to remove fleas from tortoises. It is not, but that is no matter. In fact, so far as I am aware, there is no such product. Nevertheless, let us say that several tortoise flea brush manufacturers claimed to be selling the best, most effective, tortoise flea brush ever created. Competition between them was fierce. Let us call two of these companies Tortoise Flea Brush Inc. and Flea Brush Tortoise Inc. (respectively ‘Tortoise’ and ‘Flea’ –​ although, may it be noted, no such organizations exist). Tortoise had been operating for a number of years and, like Flea, sold its products through an internet retailer. The retailer’s website where both Tortoise’s and Flea’s products were sold allowed customers to comment on products in a rating system:  the purchaser could apportion anything from one to five stars to a purchased product. Tortoise had, it appeared, attracted consistently high ratings over a period of more than five years until approximately six months ago when its ratings suddenly plunged. Flea, on the other hand, was a relative newcomer to the world of tortoise flea brushes. Its early ratings appeared incapable of sustaining much more than two out of the five available stars. However, recently a miracle seemed to have happened: the company’s product ratings underwent a transformation and, for approximately the last six months, Flea’s brushes attracted only four and five star commendations. I was approached by Tortoise who alleged that Flea had been posting fake reviews on the retailer’s website  –​first, to rubbish Tortoise’s products and, second, to boost sales of its own product range. Online retailers who host products on behalf of manufacturers and distributors view this kind of conduct very seriously and usually take steps to remove the offending content. It can also result in a ban for the offending organization.

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Once I  was in possession of all the data, an early observation was the presence of several interesting orthographic features. For authorship purposes, orthographic features are those relating to punctuation, the use of apostrophes and some aspects of spelling. The orthographic features found were as follows:  space before punctuation marks, sequences of any combination of question mark and exclamation mark, space after open bracket, and the use of some form of ‘erm’, ‘errrrmmm’, ‘errrrrrrmmmmmm’ (i.e. multiple instances of ‘r’ after ‘e’ and before multiple instances of ‘m’). On their own, each of these features can be described as unusual but not rare. In addition, two of the negative reviewers wrote the word ‘review’ in a somewhat unusual way, ‘revuwe’. I  did not consider that this was likely to be a typographical error. The reviews which contained this particular aberration did not contain any other misspelled words and it therefore seemed possible that, far from being unable to spell the word ‘review’, it seemed that the individual or individuals responsible for misspelling the word were probably competent spellers trying to disguise that fact. I had come across this particular phenomenon on several previous occasions. See for example Chapter  5 of the book I  co-​authored with June Luchjenbroers, Forensic Linguistics (2013). In addition, some readers may recall the case of Jonbenet Ramsey, the 6-​year-​old girl killed at her parents’ house in Boulder, Colorado some twenty years ago. There, the so-​called ransom note contained two misspelled words ‘possesions’ and ‘bussiness’. In the book chapter mentioned above, and in the Ramsey ransom note, the respective documents contained hundreds of standardly spelled words, many of them of greater difficulty than the apparent misspellings. It is a particular feature of authors who attempt to disguise their style of writing by misspelling words, that they will almost always choose to misspell words which are not rated as difficult to spell. Moreover, they will spell such words in unusual ways. Thus, while it is not

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uncommon to see ‘recieve’ instead of ‘receive’, it is very unusual to see ‘ritten’ instead of ‘written’, or ‘lightss’ instead of ‘lights’. As it seemed to me, ‘review’ written as ‘revuwe’ was an instance of this phenomenon. I considered that the presence of at least two of the above features could possibly indicate commonality of authorship. Several of the negative reviewers obtained scores for at least two of the above features. None of the positive reviews for the period under consideration contained any of the features noted above. On the other hand, for Flea’s own products, none of the negative reviews contained any of the features mentioned above, but several of their positive reviews (four or five stars) contained at least two features. It seemed to me that these findings could not be coincidental. Next, I  looked at the website of each tortoise flea brush manufacturer, distributor and retailer and tested each of their websites for the features detailed above. Only one of these websites was found to share any of the orthographic features described earlier, namely Flea’s website. As a result of these investigations, Flea was forced to take down the reviews which were offensive to Tortoise, and its own overblown reviews, within the six-​month period referred to above. Nobody minds a bit of competition, but at least it should be honest and above board.

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20 The concrete tomb Christophe Borgye was a flight attendant with a well-​known airline. He was a French citizen from Ronchin in the north of France and had been living in the UK for two years when he disappeared. In 2008, he moved from his home in Liverpool, where he lived with a friend, Sebastien Bendou, to Ellesmere Port, where a third man named Dominik Kocher lived with his wife and children. It appears that both Christophe and Sebastien moved into Kocher’s home, where they all lived together, but under a somewhat unusual arrangement: both Christophe and Sebastien paid their entire salaries into Kocher’s bank account. Why Kocher controlled the finances of these two men is not known. At some point in 2009, Christophe Borgye disappeared. To all inquiries, the cryptic response given was, ‘gone on holiday’, but if it was a holiday, it seemed never to end. Documentation was scant: one questioned email which did not elaborate on the ‘holiday’ much; a series of postcards from the victim; a letter to his brother. Data to investigate included emails from the suspect, a handwritten letter and a typed card. After the email there was silence for nearly two years. The police considered that they were dealing with a missing person; that Christophe had returned home to France.

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Matters came to a head when Sebastien Bendou unexpectedly contacted police at Ellesmere Port to inform them that he had killed Christophe Borgye, but only as an accomplice to Dominik Kocher. It was thought that Bendou and Kocher must have fallen out, or that perhaps Bendou had had a sudden fit of conscience. Officers who had previously handled the missing person inquiry remembered the email in which it was claimed that Christophe was on holiday. They began to wonder whether Dominik Kocher might be its actual author. At the early stages of the inquiry I had no knowledge of the case. Whenever I work on a case, I make a point of asking officers to give me the absolute minimum of information. All I was told was that an email had been received, and that there was a question mark over its authorship. I should also state that experts do not undertake internet or other research on any case on which they are working. The expert is there to assist the court and to stick strictly to the task in hand; it is not the expert’s task to play detective and become embroiled in the facts of the case. Although I  am not a native speaker of French, I  undertook the authorship task in this case for the following reasons: First, the analysis of text for the purposes of authorship attribution is a technical task of object observation and discrimination. The objects for analysis are linguistic objects, recognizable by whatever degree of distinctiveness they exhibit in their respective forms. The same linguistic principles are present in all languages, although they will be realized in different ways. Second, the task of observing an author’s linguistic features is greatly facilitated when observing authorship in languages which are highly regulated, such as French. Because French is a heavily inflected language, even native speakers can find it difficult to create error-​ free written text. Common errors can include spelling, the use of the apostrophe and the placement of accents and word endings, especially

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of irregular forms. Because of its many exigencies, individual style in French is in many ways easier to observe than in a less inflected language such as English. To put this another way, the requirement in written French for inflections, many of which are irregular, the various accents and other orthographic elements means that the cognitive load on a person writing French is higher than it is, with regard to those factors, for a person writing English. This in turn opens up the possibility of even reasonably well-​educated writers of French exhibiting the kinds of idiosyncrasies found in English language text messages. I am indebted to my friend and colleague, francophone Dr Emmanuel Didier, a lawyer, linguist and former immigration judge in Canada, as well as my brother, Justice Olsson, a translator, for their considerable assistance in this case. Kocher presents both digital text and handwritten text. In his digital text, he does not use accents or the apostrophe. Instead of the latter he inserts a space. The reason for these omissions appears to be that, in those examples, he may be using a Qwerty keyboard rather than an Azerty keyboard. The accents found in French are more difficult to produce on a Qwerty keyboard because the user would have to programme them into whatever software is being used. The lack of apostrophes is a further indication of lack of familiarity with the keyboard layout:  on an Azerty keyboard the apostrophe is in a different location when compared to its location on the Qwerty keyboard, and someone more used to an Azerty layout might experience difficulty locating the apostrophe on a Qwerty keyboard. By contrast, it is apparent that the questioned email was produced using a keyboard where it would not be difficult for a familiar user to locate either the accent marks or the apostrophe. I will first deal with lacunae found in Kocher’s known writings. However, beyond my observations about the keyboard used by

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Kocher, I will not, for the moment, comment on the fact that he does not use apostrophes.

Kocher ­example 1 bonsoir x_​_​_​_​_​, pas de soucis je vais faire cela. la natwest tout devrait rentrer dans l ordre avant fin de semaine donc finalement tout sera resolu ouf! cordialement good evening x_​_​_​_​_​, don’t worry I’ll do that. natwest everything should be okay by the end of the week so therefore it will all be resolved phew! kind regards For anglophones it is a curious feature of French, especially continental French, that almost all writers place a space before an exclamation mark (and other punctuation marks consisting of two elements, such as colons, semicolons and question marks). We see in the above email, on the second last line, that there is a lack of space before the exclamation mark. This is a characteristic also found in the questioned email (which we will look at later), but is not present in Christophe’s writing.

Kocher ­example 2 bonjour x_​_​_​_​_​, comme vous devez le savoir la natwest a quelque souci depuis deux jours et rebelote ce matin! donc z_​_​_​_​_​_​et moi nous inquietons un peu car votre cheque a toujours pas ete debiter.

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donc juste au cas ou je vais demander a la banque ce matin meme s ils ne pourront certainement pas dire grand chose car ils ont le meme souci que hier malheureusement. cordialement dominik et z_​_​_​_​_​_​ hi x_​_​_​_​_​, as you will know natwest has been having some problems over the last two days and this morning it all started up again! so z_​_​_​_​_​and I are a bit worried because your cheque still hasn’t been debited. so just in case I will go down to the bank this morning and ask them even though they certainly won’t be able to tell me much because they have the same problem as yesterday unfortunately. kind regards dominik and z_​_​_​_​_​_​ Here, ‘quelque souci’ would standardly be in the plural, that is, ‘some concerns’ (quelques soucis). Also, in ‘pas ete debiter’ [sic], ‘débiter’ would not be in the infinitive, but would ordinarily be given as a past participle  –​‘débité’ (this is not uncommon among French speakers under 50). This lacuna of using the infinitive instead of the past participle also occurs in the questioned email which we will look at below.

Kocher ­example 3 bonjour x_​_​_​_​_​, just pour vous prevenir que le cheque est parti ce jour hi x_​_​_​_​_​, just to let you know the cheque went off today Here, ‘juste’ would normally be used instead of ‘just’. This is unusual.

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Kocher ­example 4 bonjour x_​_​_​_​_,​ nous esperons que vous aurez bien cette e-​mail:-​) Nous avons bien recu votre lettre et croyez nous, nous ne vous oublions pas. une lettre avec un 1er paiement devrait vous etre envoyee tot la semaine prochaine. nous avons rencontres des soucis indépendant de notre volonté et nous sommes desoles du delais. en esperons que vous reception erez cet e-​mail. Hi _​_​_​_​_​_​, we hope you will get this e-​mail:-​) We did get your letter, and believe us, we have not forgotten you. a letter with a first payment should be sent to you next week. we have run into some problems through no fault of our own and we are sorry about the delay. hoping that you will receive this e-​mail. ‘Cette e-​mail’ is not typical. It would usually be ‘ce mail’. The word ‘espérons’ in ‘en esperons’ [sic] is given here as the first person plural where, without ‘nous’ it means ‘let us hope’. However, it is in reality a gerund, and would normally be given as ‘espérant’. It is attached to ‘en’, literally meaning ‘hoping that’  –​‘en espérant que’. This is a very basic lacuna. ‘Nous avons rencontres’ [sic] should read ‘Nous avons rencontré’ (i.e. no ‘s’). In the phrase ‘du delais’, ‘du’ is a singular determiner, but ‘delais’ is in the plural.

Kocher ­example 5 salut y_​_​_​_​_​_​ on espere que tu es bien arrive a manilla. nous il fait tres chaud aujourd hui

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Sebastien m a dit de dire merci a h_​_​_​_​_​et toi d avoir essaye de vendre sa tele et de m avoir pris les dvd ca a bien aide car aujourd hui il y a un solicitor qui est venu chez seb il a pu lui donne £520.00 le gars etait tres sympa rnais il a dit a seb qu il a jusqu a fin de semaine pour trouver £479.00 de + et apres il pourra rembourser le reste des dettes a chris en petites mensualites! ouf! donc seb avec son salaire, ce que nous on va encore lui avance et je vais vendre la grosse tele comme ca il aura l argent pour vendredi quand il doit payer le gars et au moins il aura de nouveau la paix un peu et nous aussi lol on a bien apprecie la soiree avec vous samedi et comme dit si tu as besoin de parler (car nous on sait que pour toi ce n est pas facile non plus loin de h_​_​_​_​_​) on est la par email. des ton retour, on organisera une soiree pour feter Ie fait que tu ne partes plus a manilla lol . . . tayo vient demain avec seb et moi voir erin en spectacle j essaierai de prendre des photos et je t en enverrai. a bientot bises de nous 4 domi hi y_​_​_​_​_​_​ we hope that you arrived safely in manilla. here it is very hot today Sebastien told me to say thank you to h_​_​_​_​_​_​_​and you for having tried to sell his TV and for having taken the DVDs off my hands, that helped a lot because today a solicitor came to see seb and he was able to give him £520.00. the guy was very nice but he told seb that he had until the end of the week to find £479.00 more and after that he could pay back the rest of the debts to chris in small monthly instalments! phew!

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so seb with his salary, what we’ll do we will give him an advance and I will sell the big TV in that way he have the money for friday when he has to pay the guy and at least he won’t have to worry for awhile and nor will we lol we really enjoyed the evening with you on Saturday and as I  was saying if you need to talk (because we know that it’s not easy for you either while you are far away from h_​_​_​_​_​) you can get us by e-​mail. as soon as you get back, we’ll have a party to celebrate the fact that you’re no longer going to manilla lol . . . tayo is coming tomorrow with seb and myself will be going to see erin in the show I will try to take some photos and will send them to you. talk soon hugs from all 4 of us domi In French, the city of Manila is written ‘Manille’. The word ‘arrive’ [sic] in ‘tu es bien arrive’ would be written ‘arrivée’ as the addressee is of the feminine gender. In standard French, the word ‘donne’ in ‘lui donne’ would be in the infinitive –​‘donner’; ‘avance’ in ‘lui avance’ would also be in the infinitive –​‘avancer’. The words ‘comme dit’ would usually read ‘comme on a dit’. In addition, ordinarily there would be a space before the exclamation mark, as previously noted.

Kocher ­example 6 ici il fait tres chaud on voulait jouer au foot avec tayo hier il a du annuler car il avait un truc a faire aujourd hui, c est moi qui etait busy alors se sera pour un autre jour . . . lol vero m a dit qu elle t enverrai un email ce weekend. allez courage celine plus que 15 jours et c est finit manilla . . . ouf!

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bises de nous 4 domi here it is very hot we wanted to play soccer with tayo yesterday he had to cancel because he had something to do today I’m the one who is busy so it’ll have to be another day . . . lol vero told me she’ll send you an e-​mail this weekend. so be brave celine only a fortnight left and manilla is over . . . phew! hugs from all 4 of us domi The word ‘enverrai’ would ordinarily be ‘enverra’ (third person singular, future tense), and the word ‘finit’ would be ‘fini’. Note also the lack of a space after ‘chaud’ and before the exclamation mark. Also worth observing at this stage are the repeated, and somewhat blatant, borrowings from English –​‘Manilla’ [sic], ‘reporting’, ‘busy’. Later we have ‘emailler’, ‘valuer’, and ‘laptop’.

Kocher ­example 7 oui se sera sympa de feter ton retour definitif . . . ca fera du bien! il fait tres chaud ici. les problemes de seb a cause de christophe se resolvent petit a petit ouf! tayo etait avec nous hier. on a mange au chinois puis on est alle voir erin en spectacle. apres on a joue 30 minutes au foot . . . apres on etait KO . . . lol voila on espere que ton reporting se passe bien yes it would be great to have a party when you come back for good . . . it will do us good!

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it’s very hot here. seb’s problems because of christophe are slowly being resolved phew! tayo was with us yesterday. we ate at the Chinese restaurant and then went to see erin in the show. after that we played soccer for 30 min we were exhausted . . . lol well that’s all we hope your reporting is going well The word ‘se’ in the first line is used instead of ça. There is no space before the exclamation mark, as previously noted.

Kocher ­example 8 Desole nous sommes toujours en France dans ces dure moments. Je t’envoie un cheque pour les £500 que je te dois encore. Peux tu l’encaisser le 30th novembre 2012 pas avant car je mets l’argents par virement de France seulement pour le 30 Novembre 2012. Si tu mets avant le cheque /​passera pas!! Mais si tu met le 30 Novembre il n’ya aura pas de probleme Le pere de vero est entrain de deceder. A bientot mon ami et merci encore So sorry that we’re still in France at this difficult time. I’m sending you a cheque for the £500 that I still owe you. Could you deposit it on 30 November 2012 not before because I’ll be transferring the money from France only by 30 November 2012 If you deposit it earlier /​it won’t go through!! But if you deposit it on 30 November there will be no problem Vero’s father is dying. See you soon my friend and thank you again

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The opening sentence is totally un-​French. It should either have been ‘Désolé, nous sommes’ (Sorry, we are . . .) or ‘désolé que nous sommes’ (So sorry that we are). Normally, a French speaker would have said something like: ‘Dommage que nous sommes . . .’. (It’s a pity that we are . . .). The word ‘desole’ [sic] requires accents as follows: ‘désolé’. ‘Dure’ would ordinarily be in the masculine gender and in the plural, hence ‘durs’. The word ‘cheque’ requires an accent on the first ‘e’, hence ‘chèque’ (two examples). Le ‘30th’ is very strange in French. ‘L’argents’ in the plural is non-​existent in French. The word ‘novembre’ is hardly ever capitalized in French. In this example, uniquely for this writer, there is a space before the exclamation mark. Any reasonably competent writer knows that the following require accents:  ‘problème’, ‘père’, ‘à’ and ‘bientôt’. Note that ‘je mets l’argents par virement de France seulement’ would normally be something like ‘je ferai le virement depuis la France’. The expression ‘tu mets’ is appropriately rendered the first time, but non-​standardly the second, as ‘tu met’. In any case ‘mettre’ requires a direct object. The sentence should read ‘si tu le mets . . .’ on both occasions. It is necessary for ‘en train’ to be two words. As one word, ‘entrain’ carries an entirely different meaning. Following these observations, I  examined the victim’s known writings.

Christophe ­example 1 Cher Mamie et Marcel. J’espère que vous allez bien. Moi ça va. Désolé de n’avoir donné de nouvelles. Le boulot me prend beaucoup de temps. J’ai déménagé. J’habite toujours avec les français de Strasbourg, mais nous avons bougé à l’extérieur de Liverpool. J’habite maintenant à une demi-​heure en voiture du boulot. J’ai

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ramené ma voiture d’Irelande par le ferry. Là où j’habite maintenant, j’ai l’internet ce que je n’avais pas avant. Mon adresse e-​mail n’a pas changé:  borgyechristophe@_​_​_​_​. C’est beaucoups mieux que de vivre dans le quartier des cas sociaux de Liverpool. Les Anglais sont un peu spéciales parfois et ils sont plutôt alcoholics. Avec le boulot je vais un peu partout en Europe: Italie, Espagne, Irelande, Norvège, Pologne, Lithuanie . . ., mais que des allés-​retours. En ce moment le temps est très mauvais en Angleterre, il pleut tout le temps. J’ai pas pris de congé cet été, je les aurais sans doute après. Je passerais sans doute vous rendre visite la fin d’année. Si vous voulez m’écrire mon adresse est . . .. Dear Gran and Marcel. I  hope you are well. As for me I’m okay. Sorry I  haven’t given you any news. My job is taking up a lot of my time. I  moved house. I’m still living with the French people from Strasbourg, but we’ve moved to just outside Liverpool. I’m now living half an hour drive away from my job. I brought my car over from Ireland on the ferry. In the place I’m living now, I’ve got Internet, which I didn’t have before. My e-​mail address is still the same:  borgyechristophe@_​_​_​_​. It’s much better than living in the ’hood with social outcasts in Liverpool. The English can be quite weird sometimes and they tend to be heavy drinkers. My job takes me to quite a few different parts of Europe:  Italy, Spain, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Lithuania but always rapid there-​and-​back trips. Right now the weather is really bad in England, it keeps raining. I didn’t take any leave this summer, I’ll probably have some later. I’ll very likely come and see you at the end of the year. If you want to write to me my address is . . .. ‘Cher’ is incorrect  –​it would usually be in the plural, because two people are being addressed:  ‘Chers’. Christophe writes ‘Irelande’, erroneously on several occasions. However, the questioned email has

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‘Irlande’, which is standard, and which Kocher also has. ‘Beaucoups’ is never written with an ‘s’ at the end. ‘Spéciales’ is not standard as regards gender. The word would usually be ‘spéciaux’. The word ‘alcoholics’ is ‘alcooliques’ in French. However, as the writer is referring to English people, there may be an ironic meaning to the word. Lithuania is normally ‘Lituanie’ in French, not ‘Lithuanie’ as here. However, not many writers would necessarily know this. The expression ‘des allés-​retours’ would usually be written ‘des aller-​retour’ or ‘des aller-​retours’. The words ‘aurais’ and ‘passerais’ would normally be given in the future tense, ‘aurai’ and ‘passerai’. Finally, the phrase ‘la fin d’année’ would more usually be ‘à la fin d’année’. Here, Christophe is writing to his mother apologizing for not having written before. This is important, because after his disappearance his family did not have any news of him for a considerable period. At first they were not unduly anxious, as he was not a regular correspondent. This, in turn, delayed the crime coming to light.

Christophe ­example 2 Désolé de n’avoir donné de nouvelles plus tôt. A tu reçu m’a carte de Tunisie? J’espère que les médecins trouveront vite de quoi te rétablir, que tu puisse reprendre le travail. Je vais t’envoyer l’argent que je te dois petit à petit car moi aussi au niveau finance en ce moment c’est pas terrible. J’ai des frais pour la voiture dû au changement de plaques et j’ai deménagé car la maison était trop petite. Je suis désolé d’avoir mis tout ce temps pur te remboursé. Je sais qu’il est difficile de me joindre au téléphone a cause de mes horaires de travail qui sont irrégulières mais mon numéro est: 0000 00 0000 0000 le plus facile pour me joindre est le E-​MAIL. Alors comme ça

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les parents ont deménagé. C’est toi qui me l’apprend car en ils ne me donne jamais de nouvelles. Je suis content que tu ai retrouvé ton parrain. Tu lui fera le bonjour pour moi. Embrasse Aurelie et franck aussi. Gros bisous Christophe Sorry I didn’t send any news earlier. Did you get my postcard from Tunisia? I hope the doctors will quickly find out how to get you better, so you can go back to work. I’ll be sending you the money I owe you bit by bit because financially, right now things are not too good. I had to spend money on the car because of the change in number plates, and I had to move because the house was too small. I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to pay you back. I know it’s hard to get me on the phone because of my working hours which are irregular but here’s my number: 0000 00 0000 0000 the easiest way to get me is through E-​MAIL. So, just like that, your parents moved away. I heard it from you because they never give me any news. I’m glad you were reunited with your godfather. Say hello to him from me. Kiss Aurelie and franck as well. Lots of hugs and kisses Christophe ‘A’, first line, would usually be ‘As’, and ‘m’a carte’ would be ‘ma carte’. The missing comma after ‘rétablir’ is a fairly rare punctuation lacuna for this author. The word ‘puisse’ would usually be ‘puisses’, ‘dû’ would be ‘dus’, ‘remboursé’ would be in the infinitive, and ‘irregulières’

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would be in the masculine gender. The expression ‘que tu ai’ is not standard –​the subjunctive verb would usually be given here, ‘aies’, and ‘embrasse’ requires ‘s’ at the end. Regarding Christophe’s known style, I concluded that although he produces a number of non-​ standard forms, very few are critical or even serious. Notably, he uses accents appropriately. His punctuation is reasonable, and mostly he capitalizes words in standard ways.

Questioned email excerpt 1 salut N_​_​_​, Je viens d’acceder pour la 1ere fois a mes emails depius 5 semaines et je vois que toi A_​_​_​et Dominic vous êtes tous inquiets pour moi. Je vous rassure je vais bien hi N_​_​_​, I’ve just been able to read my e-​mails for the 1st time in 5 weeks and I see that both you A_​_​_​_​_​_​_​and Dominic had been worried about me. Don’t worry, I’m fine There are several non-​standard forms here, the most critical of which is ‘a’ instead of ‘à’. There are other missing accents, but that is the most serious. Some of this may be attributable to the use of a Qwerty keyboard. Here, the writer claims that this is the first time he has been able to access his emails for five weeks, and he reassures ‘N’, ‘A’ and Kocher that he is well.

Questioned email excerpt 2 Je vais avoir 36 ans cette année et j’ai pas grand chose dans la vie et je travaille pour une compagnie où chaque jour je pars le matin

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et je rentre chaque jour et alors que je prefererai bosser pour une compagnie où je reste 2 ou 3 jours sur place! I will be 36 this year and don’t have much in life to show for it and I’m working for a company in which I leave in the morning and come back every day whereas I would prefer to have a job in a company where I stay 2 or 3 days on the spot! ‘Preferai’ is standardly ‘préférerais’ here because, not only are accents required, but the meaning is better conveyed with ‘would’ rather than ‘will’. While some francophones might not know where to place the second accent in ‘préférerais’, the appropriate use of the first accent would be expected of a reasonably competent writer. Note, also, that there is no space before the exclamation mark. This does not occur in Christophe’s writings but does occur, almost all the time, in Kocher’s writings. In this excerpt, ostensibly from Christophe, the writer states that he is approaching 36 years of age and feels that he has accomplished nothing. This sets up the email for the following excerpt.

Questioned email excerpt 3 Alors j’ai decidé que c’était le moment de faire un choix et j’ai decidé de voyager un peu. Je suis donc allé en Irlande . . .. So I decided it was time to make some choices and I decided to travel a bit. So I went to Ireland . . .. In this excerpt, the most important non-​standard form is ‘decidé’, given instead of ‘décidé’. Also important is ‘Irlande’, which is the standard form. However, in his known emails, Christophe writes ‘Irelande’. Kocher also uses ‘Irlande’, which is the standard form. In this excerpt, as a result of meditating on where he is in life, ‘Christophe’ decides that the best thing for him to do is to ‘travel a bit’. The reader will be aware that it is not uncommonly claimed, on behalf

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of missing persons, that they ‘disappeared’, ‘went on holiday’, ‘decided to see the world’ and so on. Later in the email, as we will see below, ‘Christophe’ has decided to go to China.

Questioned email excerpt 4 Je vais m’installer et visiter la chine pour 2–​3 mois puis je trouverai sois une compagnie aerienne qui voyage plus que ryanair ou je resterai avec L_​_​_​. Tu sais que j’ai toujours voulu aller en chine. La batterie de mon portable et vide . . .. I will settle in and visit china for 2–​3  months and then either I’ll find an airline company that travels more than ryanair where I’ll be together with L_​_​_​_​You know I always wanted to go to china. My cellphone battery is about to die on me . . .. An interesting form here is ‘sois’, which would standardly be ‘soit’ –​a conjunction, not a subjunctive verb. This would not be something a reasonably competent writer would do. The second last word in this excerpt ‘et’ would ordinarily be ‘est’. This is definitely not something a competent writer would do –​this is a form that occurs several times in the questioned email. It is evident from the volume and type of errors that the writer of the questioned email has considerable difficulty in producing standard written French forms consistently. It seems reasonable to assume that this writer is either a nonnative speaker, a bilingual from a diglossic area with the target language as his weaker language, or that he has been poorly educated in written French. All in all, the overall feel of the text, although often quite ‘in tune’ colloquially, is simply not that of a native French speaker, because of these untypical small errors. The numerous accent lacunae are particularly striking, as are some of the grammatical difficulties, especially ‘et’ for ‘est’ and ‘sois’ for ‘soit’. The lack of appropriate punctuation is also a serious issue.

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For the above reasons, I  considered that the typology, extent and gravity of lacunae found in the writings of Dominik Kocher, as outlined above, indicate that he is more likely to be the author of the questioned email than Christophe Borgye. His style of language use in French is consistent with the style found in the questioned email. Also, I  found Christophe Borgye’s style of language use not at all consistent with that found in the questioned email. A trial was held, and Kocher and Bendou were found guilty of murder. It turned out that he and Bendou had tricked Christophe into entering what was described as a kill room, a room prepared by the killers, with the floor lined with PVC, the men dressed in clothing which could easily be washed. Having killed Christophe, they buried his body in a specially constructed tomb which was covered in concrete. According to investigators, Kocher appears to have been motivated by money. Bendou was unable to live with his conscience and so he confessed, leading police to the scene some two years after the murder. Somehow, Kocher had persuaded Bendou that Christophe had been sent to spy on them.

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21 A particularly unpleasant man The parish of Cranage in the county of Cheshire was, a very few years ago, the scene of a tragic slaying. While some murders are committed in a moment of anger, and probably often immediately regretted by the perpetrator, others are planned in the cold light of day. A barrister of my acquaintance informs me that not all murderers are foul, reprehensible people. He says that most of the murderers he has dealt with are pleasant, even courteous. Be that as it may, there are many who will not hesitate to kill another human being in order to remove what they consider to be a ‘problem’. One such person, according to the facts of the case, was David Ryan, a former resident of Altrincham, Manchester. The reader will appreciate that when I  become involved in an investigation I very often do not know the nature of the crime being investigated, nor even the names of the individuals involved. In the present case I was, at my own request, kept entirely in the dark as to the details. There are good reasons for this. First, it is too easy to be influenced by what you know or, worse, what you think you know. Most of us are, quite rightly, horrified by violent crime, and if we become aware of the details in a particular

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case, we might easily form an irrational view as to a suspect’s involvement. This is part of a psychological process termed cognitive bias. Everyone is susceptible. In order to avoid it, I always ask police officers to give me only as much information as is necessary for me to reach an opinion. For example, I do not need to know the names of suspects or victims. I certainly do not need to know the details of the crime; this especially applies to violent crime. In reality, in most cases, I  only need to see one or more sets of documents or texts. There is no reason for these to be referred to in a way which would identify anyone. For example, they can be labelled ‘Author A’, ‘Author B’, ‘Questioned Text 1’, ‘Questioned Text 2’ and so on. Individual and place names can be redacted. The second reason that I  do not want to know details of a case in advance is even more basic than the first: it simply clutters your thinking. You need to be very clear-​headed when working on a case –​ distractions have to be kept to an absolute minimum. In the Kenyatta inquiry, for example, I was not initially made aware of the identity of Mr Kenyatta (president of the Republic of Kenya), the subject of the investigation. He was simply referred to as ‘K’. It also goes without saying that no respectable forensic expert would research a case on the internet or by consulting other media, or carry out any form of research at all. News media often present cases in a salacious, sensationalist manner and some journalists are quite indifferent to the possibility of contaminating a case by making public accusations against people whom they consider to be ‘guilty’. A  striking example of this was the case of Joanna Yeates. There, elements of the media labelled a particular person as suspicious at an early stage of the case, mainly based on his appearance. For several weeks, some of the tabloids carried speculative, spurious innuendo implying his involvement. As it turned out, the papers were completely wrong. The real murderer was someone entirely different.

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In the meantime, the media had ruined the reputation of an innocent, entirely harmless man. Thus, given the possibility of being influenced, however unwittingly or reluctantly, either by police officers or by the media, it is important that the forensic expert knows as little as possible about the details of a case. I did not know, for example, that David Ryan was a failed businessman who had borrowed upwards of £60,000 from the victim, Diana Lee, on the pretext that he was investing it in a business. I did not know that he had entered into a relationship with Ms Lee, purely for the purpose of extorting money from her. I  was aware that a murder had been committed and that one David Ryan was the suspect and, later, the defendant. I was not aware of the name of his victim, and nor was I aware that he had attempted to mutilate her body in a particularly gruesome way –​attempting to cut out her genitals in order to remove traces of his DNA; subsequently, he tried to set her body alight. Diana Lee owned a luxury cattery in Cranage. People would bring their pets for her to look after while they went away on holiday or on business. She appears to have been a much-​loved person, caring, compassionate and a lifelong animal lover. About two years before the murder, she had the misfortune of meeting David Ryan, who charmed her into believing that he was a serious businessman worth investing in. He did not inform Ms Lee that he was married. Ms Lee took a considerable portion of her capital and lent it to Ryan on the understanding that he would invest it in a glazing business. In reality, the money was spent on fuelling Ryan’s luxury lifestyle. It appears that Ms Lee had asked for an account of the money on several occasions but had not received a satisfactory response. Late on the evening of Wednesday, 8 August 2012, or in the early hours of Thursday morning, Ryan slipped out of his own house and

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drove the seventeen miles to Cranage. After several hours, he killed Ms Lee and, as mentioned above, tried to set her body, and parts of her house, alight –​all with the intention of removing any DNA traces of his existence in her life. Fortunately, his attempts to destroy the evidence failed. Part of the cover-​up involved sending mobile phone text messages. Altogether, four sets of mobile phone texts had been sent. Because of the facts of the case, police suspected that there were two different authors. In the early stages, I did not know what type of crime was involved, or even which text sets were considered to be the ‘questioned’ texts. The first two text sets were as follows (some information has had to be changed or otherwise redacted for reasons of confidentiality):

Text set JMH8 1. Sorry to mess you around Mary, but I have been sick all night so can you drop off later? As it would really help me, after 10 please 2. Great see you 12.0! Thanks

Text set JMH9 1. Hi Mary yes Misty is fine,I’m giving her some extra fuss to settle her in and yes those other camping trips are fine with me too, see you Sunday night 2. That’s fine Mary see you tomorrow 3. Hi Mary we did say 9am but 8:30 would suit me better if that’s ok with you! 4. Thank you see you tomorrow The question was whether JMH8 and JMH9 were likely to have been authored by one person or by two separate individuals. The reader will appreciate that this is a relatively small amount of data. Nevertheless, there are several important differences. These differences centre

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around the use of the comma. In JMH9 (1), there is no space after fine+comma and no space after too+comma. On the other hand, in JMH8 (1) there is a space after Mary+comma and me+comma. Using what was at the time a relatively small corpus of about 5,000 texts from ninety-​five different texters, it was found that the no-​ space-​after-​comma phenomenon was relatively rare. Only four out of the ninety-​five texters in the corpus used this particular sequence. The other observation, also relating to the use of the comma in the above texts, is that in JMH8 the comma is used to separate, in the first instance, two clauses, and in the second instance, a clause and a phrase: JMH8 (1) Sorry to mess you around Mary, but I have been sick all night so can you drop off later? As it would really help me, after 10 please By contrast, in JMH9, the comma is being used to end sentences, producing the well-​known phenomenon of ‘run-​on’ sentences: JMH9 (1) Hi Mary yes Misty is fine,I’m giving her some extra fuss to settle her in and yes those other camping trips are fine with me too,see you Sunday night The next text set, JMH10, consisted of a number of texts, excerpts of which are given here:

Text set JMH10 1. That’s fine Emily, see you later 2. Hi Emily next tues and time is fine and going home 2nd july sat is fine,but the time out may have to change.Speak to you about it when you next bring them in.

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3. I have someone coming at 5pm,so if you could text me first that would be great. 4. Yes I  can do that apart from the dropping off time,I am having my hair cut at 5pm in Knutsford, could you bring them in a bit earlier ? As with Text Set JMH9, in JMH10 we find that the space after the punctuation mark is omitted. Intriguingly, in JMH10 (1) and (4) we see that there is an additional space before a comma and a question mark. There are no examples of either of these phenomena in JMH8. So far, it would appear that JMH8 and JMH9 are by different authors, and that JMH8 and JMH10 are also by different authors. It is, however, possible that JMH9 and JMH10 are by the same author. However, a cautionary approach is particularly necessary when very small amounts of data are under consideration. We now come to the fourth group of texts, JMH11.

Text set JMH11 And to you. David x x x And to you all. David, George and Fred x No worries. Do not forget to send your address before you go. David x Two for after 17:30hrs., would be great. Also can we get the mat moving, due to holidays, so ready for delivery 1st September. David x Hi, did you manage to sort the two appts? And mats? David x Hi Luke, any news? David x Thanks, will do. Have a great summer too! David x Hi Milton, I a just wondering what time you will be coming? David

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Beep, beep, too. See you soon. David x At the dentist then, so probably better after 14:00hrs. Is that OK for you? David Here, the style is completely different from the other sets. First, we see that the texter frequently places one or more Xs at the end of the message. This should not be seen as a stylistic difference but a contextual one. In the other text sets there is no indication that the texter and textee are on familiar terms  –​the topics appear to be related to business, or other non-​personal matters. Here, it appears that a number of recipients are personally known to the texter. Nevertheless, there are still differences between this set and the other set, most notably in relation to punctuation spacing. We also see that the author places two spaces after full stops and question marks. This occurs only in one other place in the entire case corpus, which is the second message given in JMH8: JMH8 (2): Great see you 12.0! Thanks There are other similarities with JMH8, namely the fact that spaces are left after punctuation marks, such as commas, and there are no spaces after a word where a punctuation mark is used. This is in contrast to JMH9 and JMH10. Note that where a specific time is given in JMH11, it occurs with ‘after’: JMH11: At the dentist then, so probably better after 14:00hrs. Is that OK for you? David

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Two for after 17:30hrs., would be great. Also can we get the mat moving, due to holidays, so ready for delivery 1st September. David x This is similar to what we see in JMH8 in relation to references to time: 1. Sorry to mess you around Mary, but I have been sick all night so can you drop off later? As it would really help me, after 10 please 2. Great see you 12.0! Thanks Note that there is a collocation with ‘great’ where we have a reference which includes time and the word ‘after’: David: Two for after 17:30hrs., would be great Questioned: after 10 please . . .. Great see you 12.0! Thanks On the above basis, I concluded –​with some reservation given the relatively small amount of data –​that JMH8 and JMH11 were likely to be by the same author, and that JMH9 and JMH10 by another. On unravelling the case later, after the trial, it appeared that JMH8 were sent by Ryan on the morning of the murder, before he had ‘cleaned up’ the scene of the crime. While he was engaged in that activity, Ms Lee’s phone must have received a text from one of her clients asking to come to the cattery quite early in the morning. He did not want to be seen at the house so he sent a message back to the client claiming, on Ms Lee’s behalf, to be ill and requesting that the client come after 10 o’clock. He must have been relieved to get back a message that she would come at 12. JMH9 and JMH10 are text sets sent from Ms Lee’s phone. Here, she is texting clients in relation to collections and deliveries from the cattery. JMH11 is a series of messages from David Ryan’s phone to a

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variety of people, most of whom appear to be friends or members of his family. At the trial, the jury found David Ryan guilty. Newspapers reported that the judge, His Honour Richard Henriques, stated that Ryan had made a ‘ferocious’ attack on a ‘happy, sensitive and trusting woman’. Ordered to be taken down to the cells, it is said that the court became momentarily disorderly, as cries of ‘scum’ from erupted from people in the gallery. Ryan himself showed no emotion upon being sentenced to thirty-​four years in prison. I consider it fortunate that I  knew nothing about the case in advance. When dealing with crimes of a truly monstrous nature, it would simply not help to be encumbered by the facts of the case. Usually all that one needs to know is what is being claimed by the two sides regarding the questioned documents. In the present case, Ryan denied that he had sent the two text messages given in JMH8. Although there was only a relatively small amount of linguistic information against that proposition, it seemed reasonable, on the basis of the linguistic data, to conclude that this claim was probably incorrect.

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22 The mysterious Mr Erdnase In 1902 a book on card artifice was published by somebody with the unlikely name of S. W. Erdnase. For more than a hundred years, and despite extensive, albeit for the most part amateur, searches, no record of the name Erdnase, other than that appearing on the cover and title page of the book, has ever been found, and for this reason the name has long been considered to be a pseudonym. Almost immediately after publication, the book became an icon of the magic world. To this day, card experts spend years studying Erdnase’s techniques. Without a doubt, the book is the most famous text ever produced on the topic of magic. The book is generally referred to just as Expert or sometimes Erdnase. From the outset, the identity of S.  W. Erdnase has been a mystery, with speculation ranging far and wide. Notwithstanding this, or perhaps partly because of it, Expert became the classic text on card manipulation and continued to be reprinted throughout the twentieth century and into this one. First published in an age in which books on magic, card tricks, sleight of hand, mind-​reading and a myriad of related topics were being presented to the public in ever-​increasing quantities by such people as Edwin Sachs, William Hilliar, August

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Roterberg, C. H. Wilson, Houdini, to name but a few, Expert has never ceased to draw readers to its pages. Indeed, it is extremely unlikely that any person with any pretension to a skill at card manipulation would not have read a copy of Expert, whether a printed book or a digital one. Even people with barely a passing interest in any sort of card table recreation have heard the name ‘Erdnase’. Copies of the first edition now fetch thousands of dollars at auctions, with the fruits of each sale surpassing the previous one in value. Along with its continued, ever-​increasing popularity, the mystery as to who the author was has generated substantial quantities of air, a not inconsiderable amount of which could justifiably be labelled as ‘hot’. There can be few card players or lovers of magic in ‘this feverish nation’, or any other, who are unaware of the enigma. The identity of Expert’s author has engendered mention in journals no less august than the Wall Street Journal, the New  Yorker and the Washington Post. Stubbornly, however, the identity of the real person behind Erdnase has continued to perplex and elude, with several books having been published, including the once acclaimed The Man Who Was Erdnase1 by Martin Gardner, and the more recent volume by the late Hurt McDermott, Artifice Ruse and Erdnase.2 This is entirely aside from the regularly advanced claims appearing on the internet where one or other candidate is put forward as the possible author, usually with little or no basis. In fact, it seems that an entire lack of probative substance is a sine qua non of such musings. A number of claims or speculations have arisen over the course of the last century, several relating to the nom de plume used and its potential as an anagram for other names. It is not controversial that ‘S. W. Erdnase’, if reversed, spells ‘E. S. Andrews’. For this reason, the family name ‘Andrews’ is often proposed as the family name of the author. An example of these speculations is that the author was

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one ‘James Andrews’, the first three letters of the first name having been omitted from the anagram. Other speculations include Edwin Sumners Andrews, while Gardner’s book considered that yet another Andrews, one Milton Franklin of that name, was the likeliest candidate. In a still further conjecture (but only one of many), the fact that the wife of a candidate by name of Andrews had ‘E. S.’ as the initials of her forenames, was considered to be supportive of the husband’s authorship. It need hardly be said that no actual proof of the viability of any of these candidates has ever been forthcoming. As will be readily appreciated, almost anyone with a plausible combination of letters in their name can be put forward as a candidate. In fact there are 362,880 permutations of the letters which form the name ‘S. W. Erdnase’. I could find no linguistic evidence to support any of the anagram candidates. In the present case, I  was approached by Chris Wasshuber of Lybrary. He wanted to know whether linguistics could be of any assistance in discovering Erdnase’s identity. Chris Wasshuber has been researching this matter for a number of years. Over that period he had considered many possible candidates, and had finally settled on the names in Table 22.1.

Table 22.1  Authorship candidates Author

Work

Gallaway, Edward

Estimating for Printing

Hilliar, William

The Modern Magician’s Handbook

Roterberg, August

New Era Card Tricks

Sanders, Wilbur E.

The Framing of Rectangular Shaft Sets and Mine Timbering

Wilson, C. H.

The 52 Wonders

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Of course, the true author might well be someone whose name is not on this. For myself, I have no attachment to any of the candidates. I can only work with the candidates who have been proposed to me, and with the books which they are known to have written. An important part of the way we use language is of course our vocabulary. Given the importance of childhood and later reading, it would be helpful to establish the extent to which popular novels of the period may have influenced the author candidates in this inquiry. Although we can but speculate as to which books the candidates read, it is not unlikely that most, if not all of the candidates would have read one or more of the most popular classics of that era, a list of which is given here:  Cranford  –​Elizabeth Gaskell; Far from the Madding Crowd  –​Thomas Hardy; Great Expectations  –​Charles Dickens; Hard Times –​Charles Dickens; Huckleberry Finn –​Mark Twain; Jane Eyre –​Charlotte Brontë; Middlemarch –​George Eliot; Moby Dick –​ Herman Melville; Nicholas Nickleby  –​Charles Dickens; North and South –​Elizabeth Gaskell; Oliver Twist –​Charles Dickens; The Mayor of Casterbridge –​Thomas Hardy; The Mill on the Floss –​George Eliot; Tom Sawyer –​Mark Twain; Villette –​Charlotte Brontë. In order to discover possible sources, among the above classics, of the candidates’ vocabulary, I measured each text for the number of what I would term ‘very long words’, which I defined for the purposes of the test as words of thirteen or more letters. It is intriguing to consider how an author develops his or her own individual approach to using the language. A key aspect of this is vocabulary. Why do we find ourselves using certain words again and again and yet, at the same time, not using others with similar meanings? It will come as no surprise to many readers that, in fact, we form our vocabulary at a relatively early age. A  great deal depends on

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what we read in childhood. People who have not read extensively in childhood will tend to have a much poorer vocabulary than those who were lucky enough to grow up in a household, or attend a school, with a good library. We would expect not only that those who read well in childhood and adolescence would have a more extensive vocabulary than those who did not, but also that they would have a richer vocabulary, that is, words which are less common and which consist of several components (e.g. one or more prefixes, a root, and one or more suffixes and/​or inflections). For example, ‘understanding’ has three components ‘under’ ‘stand’ and ‘ing’. It is a richer word than its synonym ‘knowledge’. On the other hand, ‘comprehension’ is richer than either. It has the same number of components as ‘understanding’, namely ‘com’ ‘prehen-​’ and ‘sion’, but it is a much rarer word. A related, albeit distantly, word such as ‘perspicacity’ is even richer, being considerably rarer than any of the above. We derive most of our common vocabulary from conversation, but it is from reading that we gain our more specialized and rich vocabulary. The more reading we do in childhood and adolescence, the more likely it is that we will enjoy the benefits of a rich vocabulary throughout life. For present purposes, I decided to look at words of thirteen or more letters. Words of this length are likely to be more specialized than shorter words and are, in general, much rarer than words containing fewer letters. I selected fifteen of the most popular novels of the period during which the authors of the works being compared with Expert were growing up (the reader will be aware that English authors were very popular in the United States at the time, given that their books could be reprinted without restrictions, since the United States was not yet a party to international copyright treaties. I  researched a number

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of contemporary newspapers of the period to arrive at the final list I chose. It will come as a surprise to many readers but, in fact, English authors were as popular in America as they were in England  –​in fact, in America they had a much greater readership than in their native land).

Table 22.2  Potential vocabulary sources Book

Erdnase Gallaway Hilliar Roterberg Sanders Wilson

Middlemarch

43

21

13

16

13

11

Moby Dick

36

15

9

17

6

6

Nicholas Nickleby

36

14

14

20

13

11

Oliver Twist

31

13

12

11

13

7

Far from the Madding Crowd

30

15

13

22

14

9

The Mayor of Casterbridge

30

15

12

16

14

16

The Mill on the Floss

30

13

10

14

13

7

Hard Times

27

9

8

13

7

5

North and South

25

12

12

17

11

10

Jane Eyre

24

15

10

18

10

9

Cranford

21

8

10

10

9

5

Villette

20

9

8

8

8

3

Great Expectations

14

8

7

11

6

2

Tom Sawyer

13

4

6

7

5

2

4

5

0

3

1

0

Huckleberry Finn

Note: Values not adjusted for length of work analysed

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Having found each word of thirteen or more letters in each of the candidate works, I then searched the classics (listed above) for each of those words in order to determine which of the classics was most likely to have influenced each individual candidate. Each classic was then ranked in order of the number of words found in it for each candidate. Where a word occurred in more than one of the classics, as was often the case, each occurrence was listed. The reader will appreciate that there are potentially many other sources for the candidates’ vocabulary other than the classics listed above. However, as I  am testing words which can accurately be described as ‘very long’, I  suggest the source for most such words is just as likely to be novels as it would be, say, newspapers or magazines. A search was undertaken of the above mentioned classics for the long words found in each of the works of the candidates in this inquiry to see which of the classics may have been most influential on each of the candidates. I stress ‘may have been’ because, of course, the classics are not the only possible sources of these words and we have limited evidence as to which books each of the candidate authors may or may not have read.

Aspects of vocabulary: Very long words In the above table, the books are listed for each classics author, with the highest number of common long words between each author’s work and Expert. From the above table we can see that the author with potential vocabulary sources for long words which has the most in common with that of Expert is Gallaway. The reader needs to bear in mind that Gallaway’s book, unlike most of the others, is not on magic. It is a technical account of print estimating –​yet its potential

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vocabulary sources appear to have more in common with Expert than any of the books on magic which are being compared for the purposes of this study. While this is not an authorship test, I suggest that it provides an important insight into the vocabulary found in Expert. Further insight is obtained when we look in more detail at those long words which the different candidates have in common with Expert. In Expert there are sixty-​six different words of thirteen or more letters. Ten of these words are found in Estimating, seven in Hilliar, the same number in Roterberg, and six in Sanders and eight are found in Wilson. From Table 22.3 we can see that Gallaway, the author of Estimating, has more very long words in common with Expert than any of the other candidates. However, it should be noted that Gallaway’s book is longer than some of the other books and so, proportionately, we

Table 22.3  Common very long words found in Expert and in the candidate authors’ works Gallaway (Estimating)

Hilliar

Roterberg

Sanders

Wilson

comparatively

comparatively

accomplishing

characteristics

comparatively

consideration

distinguished

comparatively

comparatively

comprehensive

demonstration

entertainment

distinguished

inconvenience

denominations

illustrations

entertainments

experimenting

independently

entertainment

intelligently

extraordinary

extraordinary

possibilities

inexhaustible

justification

instantaneously

instantaneous

qualification

objectionable

possibilities

possibilities

possibilities

proportionate proportionately understanding

professionals straightening

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should expect this result at least to some extent. On the other hand, Estimating is a book on a completely different topic, which most likely offsets that factor. Looking at another aspect of the lexicon, a striking feature of the language of Expert is the breadth of the author’s vocabulary, evidenced by the ability to use synonymous words and expressions. I  tested this specifically with reference to words and expressions relating to cognition; in other words, expressions relating to ‘mental processes’, specifically of an intellectual nature. Since all of the books under examination in this analysis purport to teach something  –​ whether it be card artifice, print estimating or mine timbering  –​ I believe this is a logical choice. Some of the items given in Table 22.4 may not ordinarily be synonyms of the word ‘learn’; however, in the context of Expert they are synonyms –​for example, ‘accumulate’ is in reference to ‘knowledge’, ‘appreciate’ (and its forms) are in the context of ‘understand’ and words such as ‘understanding’ and ‘attain’ are in reference to ‘skill’ in the sense of ‘knowledge’. From Table 22.4 it can be seen that Estimating has twenty items in common with Expert, Roterberg sixteen, and the others fewer than that. An additional factor connected with the vocabulary to be borne in mind is the relative rarity of the lexicon used by each candidate. We have already noted that the author of Expert has a wide range of vocabulary. To test how wide the Expert’s author’s vocabulary is in comparison with the candidates, I researched the likely frequency of each of the words which I have described as ‘very long words’. Given that all of the texts in this inquiry were written between 1878 and 1927, I used the database of newspapers for the period at the Library of Congress to determine the frequency of each word. The reader will recall that in Expert there are sixty-​six words of thirteen or more letters. Fourteen of these words are rarer than any of the very long words of any of the candidates (Table 22.5).

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Table 22.4  Synonyms for ‘learn’, ‘study’, etc., across the works in this inquiry Expert

Estimating

Roterberg

Wilson

Hilliar

Sanders

[in]discern[ible]/​ accumulate discern[ing]

acquire

acquire

acquire

comprehend

accumulate

achieve

appreciate

ascertain

ascertain

considered

achieve

acquire

ascertain

contemplate [mis]calculate

acquire[d]‌

analyze

calculate

gain[ed]

appreciat[ive]

appreciate

comprehend learn

consider

ascertain

ascertain

conclude

gain

attain

calculate

consider[ed] study

calculate

comprehend

discern

comprehend[ing] conclude

fathom[ing]

conclu[sively]

consider[ed]

gain

consider

contemplate

judg[ing]

contemplate

determine

learn

determine

gain

master

fathom

judge[ment]

study

gain

learn

think

judg[ment]

master

~versed

learn[ed]

realize

master

study

meditate[d]‌

think

think

understand[able]

~versed

master

think

conclude

master[ed]

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Table 22.5  Showing the rarest very long words in Expert Word

Frequency in LOC newspaper database

Machiavellian

1437

prestidigitation

2858

unenlightened

3834

indistinguishable

6310

archaeologist

10489

unprofessional

11777

unostentatious

20031

prearrangement

21427

interpolation

22065

unsophisticated

22207

imperceptible

24765

disconcerting

36721

unhesitatingly

59102

expeditiously

62921

The value given in the second column is the number of times the word in question occurred in the database between the years 1836 and 1922. The exact size of the database in terms of words is not known. It is given, rather, as a number of broadsheet newspaper pages, which the Library of Congress states as over ten million. If we conservatively assume an average of 1,000 words per page, we are dealing with a very substantial database of approximately 10 billion words. From this we can see that the frequency of words such as ‘Machiavellian’ is extremely low. The same applies to the other words given in Table 22.5.

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More important than the actual ‘numbers’, however, is the fact that the very long word vocabulary of the candidates in the inquiry is not by any means as rare as that displayed by the author of Expert. Put a different way, if it is valid to focus on just the ‘very long word’ vocabulary of the texts in this inquiry, then all the candidates have a much more ‘common’ or ‘everyday’ vocabulary than does the author of Expert. This could suggest that none of the candidates in this inquiry is the author of Expert; that possibility cannot be ruled out. On the other hand, in the next section I will show that there may be evidence to suggest that Expert was written over a long period of time. If that is the case, then the author would have had more time to choose his vocabulary than if the book had been composed within a more condensed time frame. The reader will be aware that the word manoeuver is also spelled manoeuvre in Expert. There are several possible ways of accounting for this. In the first place, spelling in American English was in a state of flux throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As regards manoeuver, there was in fact a kind of competition between –​ not two, but three different spellings of this word in the United States, as shown in the table below –​manouevre, maneuver and to a lesser extent, manoeuver.3 As Table 22.6 shows, the majority of archival instances of maneuver appeared in the ten years before Expert’s publication, whereas, in the same period, the decline in the frequency of manoeuvre in relation to maneuver was already apparent. From being approximately one-​ and-​a-​half times more common than manoeuvre in the earlier period (1836–​1891), maneuver became approximately five-​and-​a-​half times more common in the latter period (1892–​1902). The manoeuver spelling also increased, but did not approach the numerical significance displayed by the other forms. Source: From the Library of Congress ‘Chronicling America’ series available from the LOC website.

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Table 22.6  American newspaper spellings of maneuver and manoeuvre Period:

1836–​1891

1892–​1902

maneuver

16,689

28,644

manoeuvre

11,162

5,912

manoeuver

743

941

monolog

268

361

2033

6810

monologue

Readers will be aware that manoeuvre is the spelling still used in the UK, as is another relatively unusual word found in Erdnase, namely monologue, and for this reason the question may arise as to whether the Expert author was perhaps British, especially in view of the fact that the book was registered at Stationers’ Hall in London. From the time Webster’s dictionary was published in 1828, there was a growing movement to simplify spellings and, by the end of the nineteenth century, this drive had taken hold both in the educational sphere and in the public sphere. So-​called traditional spellings, such as manoeuvre and monologue tended to be associated with Britain, whereas the new, simplified spellings were said to be a sign of America’s progressive and practical approach to linguistic matters. Thus, the old forms of words such as colour, favour and fibre had long been replaced by simplified versions, namely, color, favor and fiber. In addition to manouevre, as noted above, the Expert author also used what at first sight appeared to be another notable traditional spelling, namely, monologue. However, while early editions of Webster’s Dictionary (both 1828 and 1841) revised the spelling of the first word to maneuver, the second remained unchanged in the form of monologue. By the 1898 edition, however, Webster’s had decided

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to produce an international dictionary, and although monologue was still in use, both forms of the first word were now being given –​ manoeuvre as well as maneuver. The third form, manoeuver, is not found in the Webster’s dictionaries of that time  –​although it does appear in nineteenth-​century US newspapers, as indicated above. Interestingly, this third form  –​manoeuver  –​occurs eight times in Expert, with the more traditional form, manouevre, appearing five times in the book. The page numbers of these appearances are given in Table 22.7.4 So, while the book begins with the traditional spelling of manoeuvre, a lengthy section of the middle of the book gives manoeuver, following

Table 22.7  Variation within Expert as to the spelling of manoeuver with page numbers manoeuvre

manoeuver

5 14 21 29 45 56 98 99 100 114 141 162

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which there is a reversion to manoeuvre, with the book finishing with manoeuver. Ordinarily, when there is variation within a text of an item such as the spelling of a particular word, we would expect one form to alternate with the other, that is, manoeuver would be followed by manoeuvre, which in turn might be followed by manoeuver. Alternation would not by any means be perfect or exact –​there would be some random sequences which did not follow the above pattern. However, what we would not usually expect to see would be an entire section of the book with just one form of the word, and then for that form to ‘suddenly’ reappear towards the end of the book, only to be superseded, once again, by the other form. As can be seen in Table  22.8, a similar pattern of variation occurs with the word ‘sleight’, also spelled ‘slight’ in the text (instances of ‘slight’ as an adjective were excluded from this comparison).

Table 22.8  Instances of ‘sleight’ and ‘slight’ (n.) in the text of Expert sleight

slight

12 16 23 28 64 86 129 131 131

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sleight

slight 131 132 132 132 133 141 153

156 157 173 175 175 175 176 179 181 189 195 195 198 201 204 206 208

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As Table  22.8 shows, ‘sleight’ is the initial spelling, followed by ‘slight’; ‘sleight’ then reappears for the rest of the text except for a single instance of ‘slight’. As with the manoeuver/​manoeuvre dyad, we can generalize by saying that the second spelling used in the book occurs mainly in the middle section of the book. The reader will observe that ‘slight’ occurs mainly in the first half of the section on ‘Legerdemain’.5 Very few books are written in the precise sequence in which they finally appear. A  great deal of editing, note-​taking and rewriting inevitably takes place in the course of composition. What the above sequences of variation suggest is that the first half of Legerdemain may have been written at a different time or under different circumstances from other parts of the book. Note that manoeuvre is also reverted to in the early part of Legerdemain, followed towards the end of this section by manoeuver. In fact, I suggest that Legerdemain may have been written before any of the other sections of the book. Note that it is referred to as ‘legerdemain’ in the contents section and ‘slight of hand’ in the body of the text for that section. The opening lines of this section are also instructive: There is no branch of conjuring that so fully repays the amateur for his labor and study as slight-​of-​hand with cards. The artist is always sure of a comprehensive and appreciative audience. There is no amusement or pastime in the civilized world so prevalent as card games, and almost everybody loves a good trick. The above excerpt tells the reader that ‘slight-​of-​hand’ is a rewarding branch of conjuring, that an artist will always find an appreciative audience and that card playing is the most prevalent pastime in the world. What makes this unusual is that this information is on page 125, and not at or near the front of the book, which is where promotional copy designed to persuade a reader to buy a book is usually located.

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Does the reader who has worked his or her way through the first 124 pages, learning all about bottom dealing, one-​handed shuffles, culling, stocking, crimping, jogging and a dozen other devices of the art really need persuading, on page 125, that ‘there is no amusement or pastime in the civilised world so prevalent as card games’, or that ‘everybody loves a good trick’? I suggest that this persuasive language is not only more suited to the rôle of luring a potential buyer into parting with ready money, it is also somewhat simplistic, even basic, especially the phrase ‘good trick’. By this stage in the book, the author has described and demonstrated scores of dexterities, stratagems, manoeuvres and devices far beyond the level of skill we would associate with the somewhat banal expression ‘good trick’. At this point in the text, the interested reader is unlikely to require the kind of encouragement to learn ‘good’ tricks which the above excerpt appears to recommend. How then, may we ask, did this section end up in the middle of the book? This may have come about because, as the author notes at the beginning of Legerdemain, a foundation is required before the tricks can be exploited –​the reader needs, he urges, to ‘first take up the study and practice of our “System of Blind Shuffles” as taught in the first part of this book’. Therefore, it seems to me, the author found it necessary to move what may have been this first part of the book to the middle, in order to provide the reader with the foundation he thought it necessary for the reader to first acquire before launching into the ‘good’ tricks of Legerdemain. All of this implies that the book may have been written piecemeal, possibly over an extended period of time. This, in turn, may account for the odd positioning of the spelling inconsistencies noted above, as well as the somewhat rich vocabulary, as previously noted. An additional, perhaps related, curiosity with regard to the book’s spelling variation is the name Charlier, which is given as Charlie

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in ‘Charlie’s Pass’ on page 132 and as Charlier in ‘Charlier Shift’ on page 192. Note that the first instance –​Charlie’s –​is given in the same section where the ‘slight’ spelling is used, and that the more generally used Charlier is given in the section where the form ‘sleight’ has been resumed.6 This may indicate that this section, Card Tricks, may have been written before the author had familiarized himself with the more commonly used spellings, that is, ‘Charlier’ and ‘sleight’. It is possible, therefore, that the Card Tricks section even pre-​dates the Legerdemain section. Caution needs to be exercised where there is only one instance of a spelling, as in the Charlier/​Charlie’s case but, added to the other examples of spelling variation, it does indicate a number of possibilities: ●●

that the book was written piecemeal or over a period of time;

●●

that the author may have contemplated two separate books –​ one directed to the general public, one for the ‘expert’ (this may explain why the book has two titles);

●●

that the Legerdemain section may have been authored by a different person from the rest of the book, but that this idea was eventually abandoned as impractical or unnecessary, and the two books were combined into one book. In the next section I look at this possibility: Were there two authors of Expert?

No author is ‘completely’ consistent in his or her output. Authors vary, sometimes significantly, with regard to their habits. This is to be expected; humans are not machines. We react to changing circumstances,

mood

fluctuations,

the

vagaries

of

health,

modifications in living conditions and so on. What one expects,

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however, is a ‘reasonable’ amount of consistency; in other words, one allows for a degree of variation. An examination of the use of conjunctions can prove helpful in an authorship study. This is because English is especially rich in conjunctions and conjunction phrases, and thus an author often has a choice as to which conjunction to use. This enables us to see to what extent the author varies his or her choice in relation to an important component of the language –​namely, the way in which phrases and clauses are joined together. Even a simple conjunction such as ‘and’ has a number of synonymous expressions, such as ‘also’, ‘plus’, ‘as well as’, ‘including’, ‘in addition [to]’, ‘etc.’, ‘not excluding’ and so on. Moreover, conjunctions occur at phrase, clausal and sentence boundaries, and this has the potential of enabling the analyst to see how the author integrates the conjunction within the text, particularly in relation to punctuation. An example is the conjunction ‘however’.7 Its use as a conjunction is synonymous with words such as ‘but’. To examine this I will include the position of the conjunction in the sentence, since most conjunctions, if not all, can be used either sentence-​initially, or mid-​sentence. The following conjunctions were considered:  but, however, although, thus, therefore, of course, nevertheless, hence, as well as, whereas, rather than, whether, as much as, assuming that. In the first instance, these conjunctions were tested for position  –​sentence-​ initial, or mid-​sentence. The following results were obtained (see Table 22.9): From Table  22.9 we see, for example, that only Gallaway and Roterberg use ‘but’ both sentence-​initially and mid-​sentence. This may be relatively insignificant, but as we go through the list, we find more and more similarities between both Expert and Gallaway, and between Expert and Roterberg, and correspondingly relatively few

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Table 22.9  Position of conjunctions and conjunction phrases used in Expert and by the candidates Expert

Gallaway

Hilliar Roterberg Sanders

Wilson

but

IM

IM

M

IM

M

M

however

IM

IM

M

IM

IM

M

although

IM

M

IM

IM

thus

IM

IM

IM

IM

IM

therefore

IM

IM

M

IM

IM

of course

IM

IM

M

IM

M

nevertheless

IM

M

M

hence

IM

as well as

M

M

M

whereas

M

M

M

rather than

M

M

whether

IM

IM

as much as

M

M

assuming that M

M

M

M M

M M

M

M

M M

(I = sentence-​initially; M = mid-​sentence; IM = both initially and mid-​sentence)

similarities between the conjunction use of other candidates and that of Expert. Next, I  considered how conjunctions and punctuation work together, in particular the above conjunctions when followed by the humble comma. In Expert we find that after an adversative conjunction (‘but’, ‘however’) or a conjunction phrase used for emphasis (‘of course’), the author routinely places a comma. This is found to a greater extent

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in Gallaway’s Estimating than it is among the other candidates, as Table 22.10 shows: Table 22.10 shows that Expert and Gallaway show identical use of the comma for the three most common conjunctions. None of the other candidates share these characteristics. Drilling down further still, we observe that the however+comma feature common to Expert and Gallaway shows a further similarity –​in both cases we find however+comma+conditional, as seen in Table 22.11. Note that not every author in the inquiry uses a comma after the conjunction ‘and’. However, if we drill down even further, we see that it is less usual to find the sequence of ‘and’ followed by a comma, followed by another conjunction.

Table 22.10  Post-​conjunction comma in the inquiry texts Expert

Gallaway

Hilliar

Roterberg

Sanders

Wilson

However,

y

y

n

n

y

n

But,

y

y

n

n

n

n

Of course,

y

y

n

n

n

n

Table 22.11  However plus comma plus conditional conjunction However, if

Expert

Gallaway

Hilliar

Roterberg

Sanders

Wilson

y

y

n

n

y

n

Table 22.12  Use of comma after the conjunction ‘and’ and,

Expert

Gallaway

Hilliar

Roterberg

Sanders

Wilson

y

y

y

n

y

n

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Table 22.13  The sequence of ‘and’, plus comma plus conjunction Expert

Gallaway

Hilliar

Roterberg

Sanders

Wilson

y

y

n

n

n

n

and, of y course,

y

n

n

n

n

and, if

Table 22.14  Punctuation before or/nor Expert

Gallaway

Hilliar

Roterberg

Sanders

Wilson

, nor

y

y

n

y

y

n

, or

y

y

y

y

y

y

; or

y

y

y

y

n

n

As Tables 22.11, 22.12 and 22.13 show, the way in which the comma is used to demarcate conjunctions and conjunction phrases found in Expert is shared only by Gallaway. We are able to discover these similarities only by the process of carefully observing the use of punctuation in some detail, particularly in regard to its function in structuring clause and phrase boundaries. Previously we considered additive conjunctions (‘and’, etc.) and adversative conjunctions (‘but’, ‘however’). In this section we consider the punctuation environment of the substitutive and negative substitutive conjunctions ‘or’ and ‘nor’. With respect to this characteristic, we see that Gallaway and Roterberg share the same profile as that found in Expert. We will now compare some of the stylistic aspects of each of the candidate authors, beginning with Roterberg. For each of the authors, I have chosen sections dealing with the Charlier Pass to make stylistic comparisons. However, there is no description of the Charlier Pass

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in Wilson, so I have selected text in his book dealing with other one-​ handed passes. I began with some comparisons between Expert and Roterberg’s book, New Era Card Tricks. I would first draw the reader’s attention to the different ways in which the books handle descriptions of the Charlier Pass (Table 22.15). First, we note that Roterberg refers to a ‘pack’ whereas Erdnase uses the word ‘deck’. In his book, Roterberg uses the word ‘deck’ only twice, while he uses ‘pack’ over 700 times. Conversely, Erdnase uses ‘deck’ over 500 times and ‘pack’ no more than 20 times. Notice also that Erdnase is more detailed in his description: he does not refer to just the thumb but the thumb ‘tip’; and, similarly, he does not refer to just the ‘second and third fingers’ but the ‘first joints’ of the second and third fingers. Moreover, Roterberg’s ‘other side’ could be any of the ‘other’ sides’, but Erdnase is more precise, referring to the ‘opposite’ side. Erdnase’s description is generally more detailed –​for example, he describes in detail the role of the ‘little finger’. Moreover, the role of the thumb is dealt with much more expansively in Expert than in Roterberg: Roterberg

Expert

and pushing it over towards the thumb As the performer extends the deck to pressing it in an upright position have the selected card returned, he against the latter raises the upper portion with the tip of the thumb, and the selected card is naturally placed in the opening

To describe all of the differences between the account in Expert and Hilliar’s description would risk driving the reader into a state of unnecessary tedium, but here are some of the more obvious dissimilarities. In the first place, Expert uses the active voice ‘hold the deck’, while Hilliar uses the passive ‘the cards are taken’. Moreover, Expert

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Table 22.15  Roterberg and Expert’s treatment of the Charlier Pass Roterberg

Erdnase

The pack is held in the left hand as shown in Fig the thumb being kept at one side of the cards and the second and third fingers at the other side while the first and fourth fingers lie slightly bent beneath the pack By slightly unloosing the thumb the lower half of the pack is allowed to drop down into the position shown . . . the first and fourth fingers immediately receiving this packet and pushing it over towards the thumb pressing it in an upright position against the latter. The upper pack is now allowed to drop down as shown . . . the former lower half being then placed on top of it

Hold the deck in the left hand face down, between the thumb tip at one side and first joints of second and third fingers at opposite side, first joint of little finger at end, and first finger extended at bottom. To make the shift release the lower portion of the deck with the thumb, letting it fall into the palm, then push up the finger side of the fallen portion, with the first finger tip, until it reaches the thumb which is still supporting the upper portion. Now extend the second and third fingers slightly so that the thumb side of the upper portion will pass the upturned side of the lower portion, then straighten out the first finger allowing the upper portion to drop down into the palm and the lower portion on top of it. The little finger held at the middle of the end is of great assistance in this shift, giving better control of both portions, and enabling the performer to hold the deck much nearer a vertical position. The shift is invariably made with a slight swing, or up and down motion of the hand. It can be executed very rapidly, and is the favorite one handed shift with most experts. It is usually employed to receive and bring a selected card to the top. As the performer extends the deck to have the selected card returned, he raises the upper portion with the tip of the thumb, and the selected card is naturally placed in the opening. In this position the shift is half made, the condition being the same as when the first movement of dropping the lower portion into the palm takes place. The performer now with an up or down motion, or swing towards the person, tilts up the lower portion with the first finger and the shift is made, bringing the selected card to the top to be disposed of as desired.

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Table 22.16  Highlights from Table 22.15 Roterberg

Erdnase

the pack is held

hold the deck

the thumb being kept at one side

between the thumb tip at one side

of the cards and the second and third fingers at the other side

and first joints of second and third fingers at opposite side

refers to ‘the deck’ whereas Hilliar refers to ‘the cards’. Expert further specifies that the deck is to be face down, which Hilliar implies but does not state. The order in Expert with reference to the initial action of the thumb and the second and third fingers, that is, ‘between the thumb tip at one side and first joints of second and third fingers at opposite side’ is the opposite of that seen in Hilliar, where the thumb is mentioned at the end of the construction, that is, ‘supported by the tips of the second and third fingers and thumb’. Further, Expert specifies the tip of the thumb and the first joint of the second and third fingers, while Hilliar refers only to the tips of the second and third fingers. Expert and Hilliar appear to be describing a subtly different action in regard to the role of the little finger which, for Expert, is ‘at end’ whereas Hilliar has the little finger ‘taking up its position midway across the lower end of the cards’. We also see that Expert follows this with a description of the action of the first finger, as does Hilliar, but in Hilliar the ‘first finger’ is mentioned before the ‘lower packet’, while in Expert, the ‘fallen portion’ (i.e. lower part of the deck) is mentioned before the ‘first finger tip’. In the next section the manoeuvre continues to be described in different terms in each of the texts. Expert refers to ‘the lower portion of the deck’ while Hilliar talks about ‘the lower half of the pack’. For Expert, the thumb ‘lets’ the lower deck fall, while Hilliar more

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circuitously writes that the pressure on the thumb is slackened and the cards fall ‘into the hand’ as opposed to ‘into the palm’. These are just some of the differences in the descriptions given in Expert and in Hilliar with regard to the manoeuvre known as the Charlier Pass, but the reader is free to make further comparisons if desired. I suggest there is no linguistic foundation for the view that these are of the same authorship. Moreover, there is an eminently practical reason for stating that Hilliar is most unlikely to be the author of Expert:  Hilliar’s book was published in the same year, namely, 1902, as Expert. While it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that an author would publish two books on the same topic within one year, it is very doubtful that the same person would write two entirely different texts on the same topic at the same time. Moreover, if a writer were to write two books on the same topic at more or less the same time, the degree of variation would be considerably less than is evidenced in the above quoted samples. Evidence of Roterberg’s status as a second-​ language speaker appears from constructions such as these:  The double handed pass, that I  am about to describe, was a favorite with the late Alexander Herrmann, who delighted to puzzle with it, people versed in the usual sleights. In the above sentence, the object of ‘puzzle’ is ‘people versed in the usual sleights’. Unusually, this object has been interposed by a prepositional phrase ‘with it’. Not only is the object thus grammatically postposed, but the object noun phrase ‘people versed in the usual sleights’ is separated from the verb phrase by a comma. This is not only atypical for a native speaker of English, but the flexibility with word order shown by Roterberg is much more common in German than English, principally because German relies heavily on a grammatical case system. Provided the cases are correctly applied

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to nouns and adjectives, the writer is often free to manipulate the word order. English is much less malleable in this respect. Another example of transposed word order in Roterberg is this:  Behind this half under cover of which the transposition of the two packets is effected the spectator is not allowed to see. Here, the clause ‘the spectator is not allowed to see’ occurs at the end of the sentence. The phrase ‘behind this half . . .’ is topicalized, that is to say it is placed in the thematic position in the sentence. I suggest a native speaker would be more inclined to write: ‘The spectator is not allowed to see behind this half, under cover of which the transposition of the two packets is effected’. In addition to the results derived from the previous tests presented above, and with regard to the descriptions of the Charlier Pass, and given the difference in style, the diverse selection of vocabulary, and the manner of description in the above two passages, as well as what I  have described as the nonnative speaker qualities of Roterberg’s prose, I consider evidence that Roterberg is likely to have authored Expert to be weak. Regarding a comparison between Expert and Hilliar, Expert’s account of the Charlier Pass is considerably more detailed than that given in Hilliar, being over twice the length, and affording more instruction as to how the cards are held and manipulated. This is consistent with Hilliar’s book offering no more than a description of card artifice whereas Expert’s purpose is to teach and instruct the serious reader, an important part of which is to give sufficient detail for every manoeuvre. As with the card artifice books other than Expert, Hilliar’s book noticeably lacks this level of detail. As with Roterberg, Hilliar uses the passive:  ‘The cards are taken in the left hand’, which is in contrast to Expert’s ‘Hold the deck in the left hand’. Although it is implied in Hilliar, only Expert states that the cards are to be ‘face down’. It seems to me that this is consistent with

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Expert’s author not leaving anything to chance, but clearly expressing each stage. Hilliar refers to ‘the tips of the second and third fingers and thumb’, whereas Expert refers to ‘the thumb tip at one side and first joints of second and third fingers’. Hilliar writes about ‘the lower half of the pack’ while Expert uses the phrase ‘the lower portion of the deck’ and, also more accurately, refers to the ‘palm’ rather than the cards falling ‘loose into the hand’. Moreover, the tone in Expert is more imperative, with actual directions being given, as the examples below show: Expert

Hilliar

hold the deck

the cards are taken

release the lower portion

the lower half of the pack is . . . allowed . . . to fall loose

extend the second and third fingers

the second and third fingers now relax their pressure

straighten out the first finger

the first finger is again extended

In the above table I have underlined the imperative form of each verb in Expert’s account of the Charlier Pass. Note how, by contrast, Hilliar tends to use the passive voice: ‘the cards are taken’, ‘the lower half . . . is allowed’, ‘the finger is extended’. Crucially, Expert mentions the essential part of the manoeuvre within the description of the manoeuvre, namely that the shift can only be made with an accompanying movement of the hand:  ‘The shift is invariably made with a slight swing, or up and down motion of the hand’. Hilliar mentions this point only after the manoeuvre is described. Given the wide disparity of description between Hilliar’s account of the Charlier Pass and that found in Expert, I do not find support for the contention that Hilliar was the author of Expert. Not only is it

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evident from all the previous tests presented here, but it is also clear in the detail of phrasing, choice of vocabulary and style of description. As regards Wilson, an exact comparison cannot be made as Wilson does not refer to the Charlier Pass. The nearest comparison I could find was his description of what he calls the Single Short Pass. Wilson refers to the ‘pack of cards’ while, as noted before, Expert uses the phrase ‘the deck’. Wilson refers to the ‘index finger’ while Expert refers to the ‘first finger’. Wilson refers to the ‘under portion’ of the cards, while Expert refers to the ‘lower portion’. Expert makes no mention of ‘bending’ the cards, while Wilson does so twice. While Wilson talks of ‘a quick swinging motion of the hand and arm’, Expert is more nuanced with ‘a slight swing, or up and down motion of the hand’. Expert goes on to say that the shift can be ‘executed very rapidly’, which contrasts with Wilson’s reference to the motion being ‘quick’. In conjunction with the other tests carried out previously, I do not find support in the above descriptions of the single handed pass for the contention that Wilson is the author of Expert. It is not possible to make a direct comparison between Expert and Sanders. The works available for comparison are Sanders’s essays on mining, in particular mine-​timbering and his diary. Sanders’s diary is dated between 1876 and 1881 when he was still very young –​14 in 1876 and 19 years of age in 1881. Significant changes will occur in a person’s use of language as they mature, more so than at other stages of life. I transcribed a section of Sanders’s diary, which I give below. The excerpts total a length of about 1,000 words which I considered representative of both content and style. In addition, I read a sample of the other pages of the diary. The diary excerpts to which I have had access is dated 1876–​1881. At the beginning of this period Sanders was 14 years of age, and 19 years old at the end of it. I found Sanders to be an unlikely contender for authorship of Expert. Although quite young when the diary was written, I noticed very little development

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in his vocabulary from the age of 14 to 19. Most of his experiences are ‘pleasant’; the weather is ‘pleasant’ –​either ‘cool and pleasant’ or ‘warm and pleasant’; he and his family had a ‘pleasant’ day. Thus, across the five-​year period during which the diary was written, which sees Sanders moving from early adolescence to young adulthood, there is very little variation in content or style. Sanders describes typical day-​to-​day events in his life, such as visiting friends, going to Sunday School, working on the farm, chopping wood, branding calves, visiting his father in town at his office, hunting, going on visits with his family and so on. Throughout the period everything is, as indicated above, very ‘pleasant’. This does not change over the entire five-​year period and nor, apparently, do his interests, which remain mostly outdoor activities, including hunting, fishing, horseback riding, chopping wood and, at school, doing gymnastics and some rowing. Though it is evident that he is a very competent, perhaps even excellent, scholar, I could not find a single reference to a book that he read and no evidence, across the five-​year period, of any advances in his vocabulary. He refers occasionally to reading, but only in general terms –​‘Read some today’ –​but it is not known what he read, or whether that was connected with his school work. No authors are mentioned by name. Similarly, there is no evidence of any particular reading from the vocabulary that he uses, as we saw above when considering vocabulary richness. I believe this lack of reading is mirrored in his adult writing too. Recall, above I commented on the synonyms the different author candidates had for words relating to learning and studying. Of all the authors, Sanders had the fewest synonyms. His vocabulary cannot be described as extensive or rich; the reader may also remember that earlier I referred to the fact that a well-​developed vocabulary in adulthood would most likely have its roots in childhood reading. Sanders’s vocabulary in his adult writing –​ though by no means limited or lacking in adequacy –​reflects a lack

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of extensive childhood reading; his diary confirms his preference for outdoor activities and a conspicuous absence of reference to reading. In my opinion, Sanders is a most unlikely candidate for authorship of Expert. Expert is rich in metaphor and describes the operations undertaken in card artifice with subtlety, variety and flair. None of these qualities are evident in Sanders’s writing, though it has to be said that his subject matter is not best adapted to any of those qualities. It is also possible that his style of writing changed as he matured. However, the weakness of his vocabulary might counter that argument. The tests carried out in this analysis so far are given in Table 22.17.

Table 22.17  Summary of authorship and other tests Test

Author indicated or other commentary

Vocabulary source test

Gallaway

Long word test

Gallaway

Synonym test for words of cognition

Gallaway

Rare vocabulary test

No candidate

Variation of spelling test

Indicative of Expert having been written over time

Variation of measures (lexical density, etc.)

Indicative of single authorship

Conjunctions

Gallaway/​Roterberg

Semi-​colons and conjunctions

Roterberg/​Gallaway

Comma and conjunctions

Gallaway

Style comparison (card artifice books only)

No candidate

Diary analysis (Sanders)

Not a viable comparison because diary written during adolescence

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The reader will note that in the tests relating to authorship, Gallaway is indicated as the likeliest author of the group of candidates featured in this analysis. In the next section I will consider further evidence as to this possibility. Consider the following excerpts from Expert and Estimating respectively. Both occur in the opening section of the book and form part of what we may term the promotional or motivational material –​ the reason why a prospective purchaser would be persuaded to buy the particular book in question. Expert:  In offering this book to the public the writer uses no sophistry as an excuse for its existence. The hypocritical cant of reformed (?) gamblers, or whining, mealy-​mouthed pretensions of piety, are not foisted as a justification for imparting the knowledge it contains. Estimating: This is a practical book –​it is not padded with ponderous editorial homilies, old newspaper clippings, interest tables or platitudinous dissertations on the uplift of the printing industry. Note: Gallaway also uses the expression to ‘impart knowledge’ in the phrase ‘what the printing estimator needs to know and how to impart that knowledge to those who want it’. The first point I would make about these two excerpts is that they both reject the idea that, in either case, the book is written for moral purposes. Expert, by stating that the book lacks ‘pretensions of piety’, expresses the idea that the author is not pretending that the book is written to condemn card playing; in Estimating, the author, by stating that the book is not about the ‘uplift’ of the printing industry, is saying that he is not making printing out to be more noble or elevated than it is. Both excerpts go further than morality; they imply a particular consideration of religion and hypocrisy  –​Expert with ‘hypocritical

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cant’ and ‘pretensions of piety’, and Estimating with ‘ponderous editorial homilies’ and ‘platitudinous dissertations’. The words ‘piety’ and ‘homily’ are mainly used in connection with religious matters; in Expert it is the absence of genuine piety in the form of hypocrisy and in Estimating, the absence of homilies –​which demonstrate that neither of these two works is being written for any purpose other than the stated one. The reader may wish to note the parallels between ‘piety’ and ‘homily’ with respect to collocations of both words. Typical collocations of ‘piety’ are:  ‘Catholic’, ‘Protestant’, ‘religious’, ‘church’ and ‘evangelical’. Closely parallel to the ‘pretension’ of piety are some of the typical collocations for ‘homily’, such as ‘lofty’, ‘nauseous’ and ‘condescending’. There is a strong semantic connection between ‘hypocritical cant’ and ‘ponderous . . . homilies’, phrases suggestive of a ‘lofty’, ‘nauseous’ or ‘condescending’ lecture on ‘ponderous’ (Estimating) ‘pretensions’ (Expert). What is also important to note is that in each case the respective declaration as to the non-​moral purpose of the book is entirely unnecessary. It is particularly striking in Estimating, given the ‘neutral’ nature of the subject. On further examination, it becomes apparent that both books appear to indicate authorship not unrelated to religious questions. Specifically, Expert’s words with a religious connotation include ‘prodigal’, ‘cant’, ‘piety’, ‘purified’ and ‘reformed’, while in Estimating, vocabulary of this nature includes ‘homilies’, ‘vernacular’, ‘platitudinous’ and the expression ‘profound and mysterious’. I suggest that as both excerpts contain declarations relating to the fact that the publication is not intended for moral purposes, that it is not ‘hypocritical’ (Expert) or ‘ponderous’ (Estimating) and that it combines these concepts with words more typically suited to a

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religious lexicon, like ‘cant’, ‘homilies’ (Expert), ‘platitudinous’, ‘piety’ (Estimating), there is a strong possibility that the same person had authored both books. I further suggest that what I have termed their respective ‘religious’ vocabularies, in particular words and expressions such as ‘purified’, ‘reformed’ and ‘prodigal’ (Expert), and ‘vernacular’ and ‘profound and mysterious’ are also supportive of a common authorship. In Expert we find, inter alia, these words:  ‘honest’, ‘subterfuge’ and ‘suspicion’. These words are entirely expected in a book on card artifice. Given that three of the other books are also card books, it is surprising that none of them contain all of these words. Hilliar has ‘honest’, ‘suspicion’ occurs in both Roterberg and Hilliar but none of the card books, other than Expert, has ‘subterfuge’. It is therefore somewhat surprising to note that all three words occur in Estimating, namely, ‘honest’, ‘subterfuge’ and ‘suspicion’. Bearing in mind that Estimating is a technical book on print estimating, not on card artifice, this is, at the least, unexpected. Although the context is somewhat different from the books on cards, it can be argued that Gallaway could have chosen much more neutral words; for example, in referring to ‘honest ink’ he could have described the ink as ‘genuine’; instead of subterfuge he could have said ‘plan’ or ‘proposal’ and in place of ‘suspicion’, ‘awareness’ would have been completely acceptable. I  suggest that these words are, in the context of a book on printing, emotive in content. I  suggest that this particular sub-​ vocabulary adds support to the contention that Gallaway is a likely author of Expert. In my opinion, given the foregoing tests and the last commentary section, Gallaway is the likeliest, of the candidates presented in this analysis, for the authorship of Expert. I  would specifically rule out Hilliar, Roterberg and Wilson. However, I  cannot entirely rule out Sanders because it is just possible that Sanders developed a different

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writing style later in life, and that we simply do not have records of that development. Even so, of the two, it is still my opinion that Gallaway is the more likely author of Expert.

Notes 1 B. Whaley, M. Gardner and J. Busby, The Man Who Was Erdnase (Wallace, ID: Jeff Busby Magic, 1991). 2 H. McDermott, Artifice Ruse and Erdnase (Somerville, MA: Lybrary.com, 2012). 3 Note that Roterberg spells manoeuver/​manoeuvre differently from the other authors –​he writes maneuver and maneuvre. 4 These are the book page numbers as viewed on a word processor, not the folio numbers as printed on each page of the book. For folio numbers, simply subtract 4 from any of the above to obtain the printed book page number. 5 Note that Webster’s lists both ‘sleight’ and ‘sleight’ from the first edition published in 1828. It is still listed in both forms in the 1890 edition. 6 It cannot be said, however, that ‘Charlier’ is the correct form since it appears that ‘Charlier’ was one of a number of pseudonyms. The spelling ‘Charlier’ appears to have been the generally accepted form. 7 The reader will be aware that the word ‘however’ can also be a modifier, for example in phrases such as ‘however long it takes’. Here, I am referring solely to its use as a conjunction.

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Index abbreviations 128–9 acquaintance 104, 128, 213 adverse reviews, of competitor’s products 191–4 advocacy 5 age, and electronic writing 97–102 alarm and distress 103–7 anonymous letter 13, 106, 143, 145, 153–62 articles 178, 190 authorship analysis definition 3 document transcription 9–10, 12–13 examination 10–11 identical expressions 20 linguistic phenomenon 12–19 overall approach 11 preliminary steps 7–9 what it is not 4–5 authorship style 95, 133, 137, 193, 197, 209, 212, 219, 245–58 disguising 125–33 beneficial ownership 148 Bentley, Derek 57–60 bespoke essays 88–90 ‘beyond reasonable doubt,’ proving 175

Brexit 75–82 business letters 169 cab rank rule 78 Chapman, Peter 125–33 civil trials 175–6 Clifford, Brian 49 cognitive bias 214 cohesion within texts 189–90 common expressions 165–7 conjunctions 16–17, 161, 242–5, 254 position of 242–3 and punctuation marks 243–5 consistency 91, 96, 106, 177, 190, 211–​12, 241–2 officers statements 44–5, 47–8, 59 content words 50–2 contractions 106, 137 cooperative principle 157 cop speak 18–19, 20 Coulthard, M. 21 n.1, 113–14 Court of Chancery 148 cover letter 169 Cranage, tragic slaying in 213 cross-​textual cohesion 189–90 denials 61–2 determiners 17, 189 diaeresis 143

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Index

diary entries 169, 252–​4 Didier, Emmanuel 197 discourses 68–​9, 74, 79–​80

grammar words 50, 51 Grenfell fire accident 37–​8 Grice, H. P. 157

electronic writings 97–​102 see also emails; text messages emails 9–​10, 135–​9, 197 emotions versus reasons 77–​9 English law 6 equity, legal system 147–​8 Erdnase, S. W., identity of 223–​58 essay factory/​mill 85–​9 establishment evasion 32 everyday observation, need for 146 evidence fabrication of 28–​9, 47, 121–​2 falsification of 28–​9 quality of 121–​3 expert ego of 6 role of 5–​7 Expert (Erdnase), authorship analysis 223–​58

Halliday, M. A. K. 189 handwriting analysis 4 hard copies 10 Hasan, R. 189 Hillsborough cover-​ups 25–​7, 49 form of words 30–​1 parallel deceptions 32–​46 suppressing the truths 29–​30 homophobic content 72, 105 Hudson, Alastair 147 hyphens 13–​15, 95–​6, 170

fabrication of evidence 28–​9, 47, 121–​2 and lexically dense phrases 52 Facebook murder 125–​33 falsification, of evidences 28–​9 flyting 66 Forensic Linguistics Institute 3, 123 gang 63–​72 gangsta rap 65–​6, 69–​70 Gardner, Martin 224, 225 gender, and electronic writing 97–​102 Giles, H. 168 given information 133 Goffman, Erving 149–​50 grammar 16–​17, 50–​1, 116–​17, 176, 178, 180–​1, 186–​7, 211, 249

Ice Cream Wars 20, 48–​9 identical expressions 12, 20, 165 see also plagiarism identikit statements 55 idioms 2, 19, 138, 165, 168–​70, 176–​81 instant messages (IM) 97, 98–​9 see also text messages international cases see also non-​ English languages, authorship analysis of; Prosecutor of the ICC v Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta prosecution difficulties 111–​12 internet plagiarism 87–​8 search, avoiding 8 use of 45–​6, 183 internet essays 87 academic competence 87–​8 inadequate bibliographic references 88–​90 plagiarism 87–​8 textual coherence, absence of 89, 90 interpretation of intentions 63–​4 invisible Bronski 183–​7

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Index cross-​textual cohesion 189–​90 legalistic language 188 redundant expressions 188 involvement in case details, avoiding 8–​9, 213–​15, 221 Jefferson, Thomas 46 Johnson, A. 113 Kaczynski, Unabomber Ted 19, 177 keyboard layouts 11, 197–​8, 209 Kirsner, K. 100 legalistic language 188 length of words 226–​58 lexically dense phrases definition of 50–​1 and fabrication 52–​3 lexical recycling test 101 lexical richness 100 and type-​token ratio 100–​2 lexicon 17–​19, 231 lie detection 4 linguistic phenomenon 12 grammar 16–​17 idiom 19 lexicon 17–​19 orthography 12–​16 spelling 12–​16 linguistic variation 98–​9 love letter 173–​81 low-​level features phenomena 146 markedness 17, 158–​9 McDermott, Hurt 224 medical disciplinary matter 173–​81 memory 48, 49, 112 mental projections 118 Milton, J. 100 miner’s strike, and Hillsborough tragedy 32–​4

261

minimal information 213–​14 mistranslation case 110, 112 myth making 80–​2 non-​English languages, authorship analysis of 196–​212 no-​space-​after-​comma phenomenon 217 noun phrase 50 observer bias 10 Olsson, Justice 197 omissions 16, 105–​6, 117, 149, 161, 187, 197, 218, 225 online campaign against companies 183–​90 ‘on the balance of probabilities,’ proving 175 ordinary, obervation of 146 Orgreave incident 33–​4 orthography 12–​16, 144, 165, 170–​1, 193–​4, 197 see also punctuations; spelling paraphrasing 94, 168 participation frameworks theory 149–​50 passive construction 137, 246, 250, 251 phone texts see text messages plagiarism 41–​2, 48, 85–​96, 113–​14, 119–​21 bespoke essays 88–​9 case illustration 93–​6 internet essays 87–​90 mill essays 88, 89 off-​the-​shelf items 89 references and their proportion to assignment length 91–​5 in witness statements of Kenyan post-​election catastrophe 113 police speak 18–​19, 20

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Index

police statements 57–​8 avoidance of pronouns 60 consistency, in officers statements 44–​5, 47–​8, 59 times, dates and places 58–​60 use of denial in 61–​2 pragmatics 40, 64 prepositions 16, 116, 117, 170, 177, 180–​1, 187, 249 pronouns 60, 128, 138, 161, 170, 189 in police statements 60 proof reader 10 Prosecutor of the ICC v Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta 109–​10, 119–​21 background 110–​11 examples of similarities of documents 115–​19 international criminal prosecution difficulties 111–​12 plagiarism 113–​14 statement-​making, in international context 114–​15 witness statements 112–​13 psychological evaluation or profiling 4, 214 punctuations 13–​15, 143–​6, 170–​1, 218, 243–​5 Ramsey, Jonbenet, kidnap of 193–​4 rap battle 66–​7, 70 rap music 63–​72 reasons versus emotions 77–​9 redundant expressions 170, 188 Reed, James Earl 18–​19, 50–​2, 60–​1 register 165, 168–​70 see also idioms rejecting assignments 6 researching on cases, avoiding 8–​9, 213–​14, 221 run-​on sentences 217 Ryan, David 213, 215–​21

six-​word identical expression 165–​6 smilies 145 sociolinguistic profiling 4 speaker meaning 63 Speelman, C. 100 spelling errors 12, 105, 144, 193–​4 spellings 12–​16, 234–​9 see also vocabulary; words traditional spellings 235–​7 stylistic comparison see authorship style text messages 98–​9, 125–​33, 138–​40, 216–​21 traditional spellings 235–​7 transcription of documents 9–​10, 12–​13, 146 of videos and audio files 63–​4 Treffers-​Daller, J. 100 truth evaluation 4–​5 typed documents 10 type-​token ratio 100–​2 United Kingdom, 2016 referendum on EU membership 75–​7 and discourses 79–​80 myth making 80–​2 reasons versus emotions 77–​9 utterance meaning 63–​4 verb/​noun distinction 178–​9 very long words 226–​58 videos and audio files 63–​72 vocabulary 41, 52, 100, 102, 165, 167–​8, 226–​58 wars and discourses 79–​80 myth making 80–​2 reasons versus emotions 77–​9 and words 75–​82

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Index Wasshuber, Chris 225–​6 will 147–​51 witness statements 27, 33, 109–​10, 112–​14, 119–​20 words see also spelling errors; vocabulary content words 50–​2

263 form of 30–​1 grammar words 50, 51 length of 226–​58 six-​word identical expression 165–​6 and wars 75–​82

Yeates, Joanna 214–​15

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