Apologies to everyone who's sick of everyone banging on about Line Of Duty. But I like it, so.
Much has been said about the mis-spelling of the word definitely as definately, which kept all of us wondering if it was in fact Hastings who was 'H' (the bent copper) last series, and this series ended up being helpful in identifying the actual baddie. Spoilers, by the way. I was as much here for it as any other linguist, as it's not often you get to hear the word 'syntax' in the most-watched telly series of the year. I'd have been even more up for an extended glass-box scene where they went through every syntactic characteristic one by one, showing how they led to Buckells being found out.
I hope they did find more than just that spelling, because it's so common I don't think you could hang anything on it. After all, we saw Hastings doing it too and don't try and tell me that was him being clever and aping the error. At a conservative estimate, about 85% of people spell it that way. (No, of course it's not that high, but I don't know how many it is, so it's a lot.) I assume they had more stuff because they literally mentioned syntax, so they must have had some. What were the patterns?? Linguists need to know, Jed Mercurio.
I was also wondering, though, in related linguistics thoughts, about Buckells' accent. The plot twist is that he's basically an incompetent ninny, pootling through life, not caring much about policing, and so no one really suspected him of anything, but it turns out he's the linchpin, a kind of middle man on the take. He uses what I assume is his own accent, or an exaggeration of it, in the series - he's from Birmingham and he speaks with a Brummie accent. Brummie is unfairly maligned as a UK accent, and its speakers regularly derided as stupid in polls about attitudes to accents. So how much did his non-threatening, bumbling, not-very-clever accent cause the AC-12 team to overlook his role? Should they all go on a course of linguistic anti-bias training? Should I set up this service as a business model for the police?
