<"By G-d", he said, "this is impossible" -- he would sometimes swear tolerably round oaths ...>

OK, that's Aubrey on Hobbes, making it more 17th century, but the principle holds.

*Our* society prefers to disguise secular 'swearing'. I sometimes wonder if we choose the words with sufficient care.

Like in that piece by Leonard Cohen that goes "don't ever f-word with me, or I will k--l you". Where f-word is spelled out but k-word isn't.

This line of dialog from the 1970 Roeg & Cammell masterpiece 'Performance' can be loosely translated as "I have already been visited by both the police and the mob".

*The Filth* (pronounced 'filf') was perhaps the world's finest generic slang term for 'police' -- better than cops, bobbies, flics, Old Bill, pigs, rozzers, the Man, etc. Or, as an old friend of mine used to say, he was 'somewhat constrained in his movements due to the attention of Aged William'.

And yet in 2011 the yoof of England refer to the police as 'the feds'. And it's not short for 'Federales': it's a direct lift from American 'urban' patois.

Which leaves only one burning question on the matter of Laura Norder: should the song "Please Police Me" be sung Beatles-style (Won't you puh-lease puh-lease me?) or in the manner of Bert Hump ("Please police me, let me go ...").

Young folk won't remember Bert Hump, no relation to Ms Koneru, a crooner who poshed-up his monicker to Engelbert Humperdink. But all sorts of people have 'covered' his hit song.

The filth. That's what Law and Ordure gets you, I suppose. Mr Pynchon's unprintable punk lyric "I'm a Cop" is also worth a nod ... "Eff you mister/ eff your sister/ eff your mother/ eff your brother/ eff your Pop/ I'm a cop" is the cleaned-up version.

Here is an attempt, by me, to see if you can find the solution (2 possible answers)

I'm done there for now, but as I said in my last post there, you hit the nail on the head with your last comment.

No getting around it, that's true what you said.

Is today's Pommie yute aware that American doesn't have a "Federal Police Force"?

They know the FBI isn't a "police force" like the Bobbles over in Blight eh?

I guess they must know this since they got the slang from American TV cop shows. So they'd be commenting on the fact that Britain's police force is a federal organization?

In Canada as you also probably know there is a federal police force, but there are also a few provincial police forces, and, horror of horrors, the real "filth"- Municipal Police forces.

They may well be all these things. They may also be the valiant protectors of the property of the propertied class, and the heroic apprehenders of criminal nasties.

But - my point - is that certain things are built into the culture of police forces around the world. A closed us/them paramilitaristic culture. If violence is freelly sanctioned, it tends to get used. Behaviour patterns are just 'cop DNA'.

Just like agreed draws emerge from chess DNA.

Meaning - if it was a real clue in a real comp, somebody else would have zipped past me in the first minute, leaving everyone else going "Eh? Whazzat? Oh. Duh."

Now, lemme think ... what was the 26th century famous for? The 26th 'century' scored by somebody in a sport like cricket where scores come in tons?

What century is this in China? Israel? Yucatan?

Alekhine wrote Nazi propaganda, the Rosenbergs were executed by the US in 1953 for spying, and a rat is a rat ... which covers the 'traitor' bit. I can twist it round to various centuries with some contortions of logic ...

Screen didn't light up and say 'jackpot' yet. Hmmm ...

Shouldn't you be asking Roland Barthes for a fee?

There are local differences though, at least within Canada.

Take the local RCMP detachment in my family's small farm village.

Please.

No seriously I actually know the officers personally at this branch, to the extent that I was able to get them to give me details about my Police "sheet" over the telephone from Korea.

They are not allowed to do this, but the Constable not only recognized my voice, he remembered the details of when I got my last Police record check in person last year.

Contrast this with the rather frosty attitude of the nameless faceless Vancouver police force.

But there are still "small towns" in Canada where there's almost no crime, and the local police- who are always federal in these locations- are not only trusted, they are considered a friend to the community.

Could this be an "inevitable consequence of the structure of small town culture?"

You may be pleased, or horrified, to learn that I've taken to using your phrase and telling everyone I coined it.

Im fact I'm thinking of copyrighting it, after consultation with my laywer <hms123>.

The truth is true, and often beautiful. Either way nobody owns it.

I may well bequeath you - one day - my entire oeuvre of bon mots. So you can tell folk that you're directly descended from Bobby Fischer, Oscar Wilde, and Myles na Gopaleen.

I got a small town policeman to authorize my passport application once, declaring that he knew me to be an upstanding member of the community. He'd never clapped eyes on me before. However, he knew my aunt and I'd been out drinking with his daughter, and these are what counts in small communities.

Yes, the facts, that only 'not' is <THE> queen herself involved, but the <KING> hisself is also involved.

I know he was briefly taken in by the Romulan Peace Process, but I wouldn't call Mr Spock a *traitor* ...

Any traitor names among chessplayers? Benedict Arnold and Arnold Denker? Or Robert Hess (GM) vs Rudolf Hess -- the one who flew from Germany to Scotland during WW2 and got locked up in Spandau for his pains ... but does that count as traitorness? Traitority? Traitorhood? Or treason, even?

*Treason's bleatings*, as <mack> sez.

Eponymous songbird suffered distress (5,5)

To crack it, I had to break the word 'songbird' in two -- 'song' is part of the meaning of the answer, and 'bird' belongs to the cryptic bit.

I already had a 'T' at the start, which got me thinking of tits. As they do. And from tits to titles ... voila: <title track>

A 'title track' is an eponymous song. It also breaks down into 'tit let rack' which is equivalent to 'bird suffered distress'.

If 20th and 26th were letters of the alphabet, we get T and Z. There's a played named Zagema - Z for 26th, age for century, Ma for traitor. I don't know why Ma is a traitor, but the Chinese probably do.

Is Marco (Polo) the traveler?

Another angle: traitors are 'turncoats' and if you turn the letters in 'coats' you get Costa.