Yesterday’s news from East Sussex (the old original Sussex, in southern England), a Sussex News story (by Jo Wadsworth) that kicks off with this juicy summary sentence:
A handyman who masturbated over a tenant’s knickers has been acquitted of criminal damage.
The story is pretty much unavoidably raunchy, given the nature of the offense; nobody writes stuff like commit an obscene act these days. The reporter used the technical and punchier masturbated in the intro, I’d imagine because it was compact, but then opted for the euphemistic pleasured himself in the full story, which continues:
Simon Lawrence, 55, had been called to fix a faulty washing machine when he entered Joanna Hatton’s bedroom at the cottage she rented with her partner Thomas Jones.
But he didn’t realise the couple had installed a motion sensor camera there to watch their cat.
The couple were driving to Somerset for Christmas when Joanna got an alert on her phone that the camera had been activated on 19 December, 2022.
She watched in horror as Lawrence laid out her underwear on the bed and began pleasuring himself.
The reporter must have yearned to use the British slang wanked, which is vulgar but what ordinary people say in the UK. But you can’t talk like that in a respectable newspaper (though the tabloids can go pretty far).
But there would be room to veer towards vulgarity in the head; in fact, this is a dream story for an alert headline writer, who while casting about for alternatives to masturbated, to knickers (which is kind of giggly slang but not vulgar, and which doesn’t have to get into the head), and to be acquitted (which is legalese), might hit on the possibility for a somewhat rude pun on ‘masturbate’ vs. ‘be acquitted ‘, via the phrasal verb get off.
Or, of course, a headline writer might go for get off rather than be acquitted just because it’s a bit shorter (writing heads is sometimes like solving a devilishly complicated puzzle), in which case they could come up with the actual Sussex News headline in all innocence (until the laughter rolled in):
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