Criminal law and procedure

The fifty-third entry is la fedina penale, the criminal record, and beside the official English name sits a small vocabulary that no statute contains and every newspaper uses. The formal word is « record », and the collocations are fixed: a person « has a criminal record », a record is « clean », and a conviction « goes on your record ». Below that lies the idiom of the police station and the courtroom. To « have form » is to have previous convictions, and it takes a preposition for the kind — « he has form for burglary ». The image comes from horse racing, where a horse’s « form » is the written account of how it has run before, printed so that punters can judge it; the transfer to a person with a past is exact and quietly unkind. The second idiom turns an adjective into a noun: « he has got previous », where « previous » stands alone for previous convictions. Italian reaches the same place with a plain plural, ha dei precedenti penali, and keeps la fedina penale for the paper itself. A learner who hears « form » and thinks of shape has lost the sentence.