Like many Netflix viewers, I first started watching the four‑part crime drama Adolescence because of the innovative filming techniques used in its production. Each of the four episodes is about one hour long and each episode is staged and shot as a continuous take with a single camera. The technique of using long single‑take scenes has been included, arguably with varying degrees of success, in a number of different films. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), starring James Stewart, was the first film I saw where I was aware that the technique was being used. Unlike Adolescence, the screenplay of Rope was adapted from the play, Rope, written by Patrick Hamilton in 1924. When Hitchcock used it, the single‑take technique seemed especially appropriate for a movie that had been adapted from a play, a performance genre that is customarily experienced as a single take.
Like Adolescence, the crime that is described in Rope is both extraordinary and horrifyingly realistic. Hamilton’s play is based upon the 1924 murder of 14‑year‑old Bobby Franks, the trial of whose killers was closely followed in the popular press and described at the time as the ‘crime of the century’. Like their characters in Rope (both the movie and the play), real‑life murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two students at the University of Chicago, conspired to kidnap and murder Franks to demonstrate that their superior intellect entitled them to commit the heinous crime without remorse or accountability. In Hitchcock’s Rope the discussion of crime and punishment draws upon Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch ‘superman’ (as it usually translated into English) in many of the same ways that Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov considers the concept in the novel Crime and Punishment. For its time, Hitchcock’s Rope condemns the crimes of individuals or groups who are emboldened by delusions of privilege, narcissism, sociopathy and/or psychopathy.
The crime at the centre of Adolescence is equally thought‑provoking and similarly allows for extended discussions of social problems, especially those that would drive a 13‑year‑old boy to murder his female classmate. In the series we learn that the crime was related to online misogynistic discourse communities within what has come to be called the ‘manosphere’, although I don’t recall this term ever having been used within the series. The term manosphere refers to an unorganised collection of online discourse communities (blogs, podcasts, websites, etc.) that promote anti‑feminist and misogynistic discourse. One term that is used in the series, however, is the term incel – a portmanteau of involuntary celibate and a word that I did not know until I read the submitted manuscript of Ksenija Bogetić’s article ‘Race and the language of incels: Figurative neologisms in an emerging English cryptolect’, published online in June 2022 and appearing in volume 39, issue no. 2 of English Today in 2023. The motive for the murder in Adolescence becomes clearer as the detectives decode cryptic phone messages written with emoji. Although it is unusual that a television series will send me to previous issues of English Today for a deeper understanding of the language used in an episode, it should not come as a complete surprise in this particular case. In the opening paragraph of their paper, Bogetić (Reference Bogetić2023) notes that ‘elements of this cryptolect are quickly infiltrating broader popular culture and global vernacular contexts’ (89). The language of the manosphere was engineered to hide in plain sight, to obfuscate hate speech and to misdirect the concerns of parents and law enforcement about users’ messages. In Adolescence the motive to commit murder is first exposed within the cryptically misogynistic language that has come to define what was once, in Bogetić’s estimation, ‘[a]n obscure online subculture’ (89). Like the crime in Hitchcock’s Rope, the crime in Adolescence horrifies as it places the spotlight on cultural influences that have yet to be fully exposed in society or understood within their criminal contexts.
In addition to foregrounding the language of the manosphere, Adolescence also highlights the speech of Northern England with performances of Liverpool English, something that will also interest many readers of English Today. We recommend twoarticles (the first a research article and the second a shorter article) in the current issue about English from the North of England. Scott Lewis and Esther de Leeuw offer an unusually timely investigation of adolescent production of dark /l/ in Liverpool and the Wirral to suggest that gender‑based differences have developed in both communities. Claire Ashmore tests the hypothesis that a ‘scale of northern‑ness’ affects the perception of northern speech within the dialect transition area of the Midlands. It feels, therefore, that this hit TV programme Adolescence is one that reverberates from within the pages of English Today, but that is probably simply due to the journal’s commitment to descriptions of contemporary uses of the English language. English Today strives to publish research that is academically rigorous, responsible and, at the same time, relevant to current and contemporary events and thinking about English. In many ways, the examination of contemporary English is our forte, and the journal’s commitment to up‑to‑date description is not only part of our editorial policy, it is embedded within the name of the journal. For relevant discussions of today’s Englishes, I hope that readers will continue to rely on English Today.
The current issue contains four more articles. Megumi Hamada and Faisal Hamad Alharbi examine ambiguity in noun‑noun compounds and how the structure of these compounds is understood by first‑language speakers of Arabic and Chinese, and Bebwa Isingoma describes the development of English in Rwanda to close the selection of research articles in this issue. For shorter articles Yixi Qiu, Yongyan Zheng and Wen Sun examine challenges related to language management in a subsidiary of a German multinational corporation operating in Shanghai, China. Finally, Ayako Hiasa surveys the experience of what they conventionally call ‘multilingual English teachers’ across the expanding circle in East Asia. Four book reviews round out the issue. Will Amos reviews Durk Gorter and Jason Cenoz’s (2023) A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies, and Huichao Bi reviews Michele Zappavigna and Lorenzo Logi’s (2024) Visual Paralanguage in the Digital Age: Unraveling the Role of Emojis in Social Media Communication. Shanshan Guan and Jessie Barrot review Bertus van Rooy’s (2024) World Englishes: The Local Lives of a Global Language. Finally, Jianhong Wu and Bin Shao’s review of Benedikt Szmrecsanyi and Jason Grafmiller’s (2023) Comparative Variation Analysis: Grammatical Alternation in World Englishes closes the issue.
