Word: cop
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Police prose is a burlesque of the administrative: "I apprehended the alleged perpetrator." (In a bar, the cop would say, "I collared this creep.") Eventually, all officialese takes on a mindless life of its own, the words combining and recombining according to some notion in the bureaucratic inner ear of how public language ought to sound, regardless (or irregardless, as they say) of what it means. This is an aerosol English, released by pushing a button. Writer Jimmy Breslin describes what is perhaps the ultimate in this prose: a policeman, testifying in a homicide case, refers to "the alleged victim...
...Finley's ideas are not brash enough, he peddles them with a pitchman's flair. When he wanted to press for adoption of the orange ball at one league meeting, he showed up wearing a traffic cop's phosphorescent orange glove. Every time he wanted to talk, he waved the glowing glove over his head...
...COP KILLER...
...designated advisers would have direct access to him at all times. But this attempt at simplification did not work out in practice; there were still too many people clamoring to see him, too many interruptions, too many demands on his time. The President still needs a kind of traffic cop, and Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld is entrusted with deciding who should see him and when...
...Whatever the problem, it is left for the Government to solve. Americans hesitate to acknowledge that perpetually passing the buck to Government may not indicate an enlightened concern with the plight of our fellow citizens so much as an easy way for an individual or a community to cop...