TV tonight: the astonishing mobile phone network for gangs
EncroChat was a mobile phone network – or 'the dark web in your pocket' – used by organised crime gangs across the world. But in 2020, international authorities managed to hack these phones and read messages for 74 days, many of which revealed imminent threats to life, before the criminals realised. This astonishing four-part documentary speaks to insiders about how they did it and what happened next. Hollie Richardson
8pm, ITV1
The youthful detective who specialises in cold cases tries to solve the 40-year-old kidnapping of an oil heiress and her baby. Despite diving further into the victim's life and meeting the baby's dad, she hits a brick wall and gets threatened with having her case closed down. Can she prove her theory? Alexi Duggins
8pm, BBC Four
This Prom should be a real crowd-pleaser: New York jazz singer Samara Joy is only 25 but has already won five Grammys with her faithful renderings of beloved old songs. Andi Oliver introduces a performance by Joy and her octet that celebrates the legacies of Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus and Oscar Peterson. Jack Seale
9.15pm, BBC One
The atmospheric epic about an Australian war hero reconciling with his past continues. In the present, Dorrigo (Ciarán Hinds) is having an affair – but his mind is taken back to another illicit yet poignant entanglement he had in the 40s (with Jacob Elordi playing his younger self). We also see the full horrors that he endured while building the Burma railway. HR
10pm, Channel 4
It stars Elisabeth Moss and was created by Steven Knight but this spy thriller unfortunately doesn't live up to its pedigree. MI6 agent Imogen (Moss) and terror suspect Adilah (Yumna Marwan) keep on with their uneasy journey – but with the CIA close to a breakthrough and Imogen suspicious of Adilah's motives, something has to give. Phil Harrison
Women's International Football: Euro 2025 Final, 3.30pm, ITV1/4pm, BBC One England defend their title at St Jakob-Park in Basel, Switzerland.
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The Independent
7 minutes ago
- The Independent
‘Skibidi' has no place in the dictionary – and here's why
I was on a rollercoaster with my kids recently and the ride, apparently, was 'skibidi'. The hot dogs were also skibidi; the entire theme park was skibidi – but I, when I screeched about how I wasn't going to spend another £15 on tokens for more goes on a giant teacup that spins you round fast enough to give you whiplash, thank you very much, was not skibidi. I was not skibidi at all. I could have been, though – because the Gen Alpha slang term 'skibidi toilet' (confused, yet?) can also mean something terrible, depending on the context in which it's said and used. So, maybe I was skibidi? Either way, this lexical nightmare has entered the dictionary. That's right: 'skibidi' is one of a plethora of 6,000 new words to have made it in to the Cambridge Dictionary, along with 'delulu' (shorthand for 'delusional' and once spoken out loud – in public – by the Australian PM Anthony Albanese, who said the Coalition was 'delulu with no solulu'). The term 'tradwife', which takes us right back to stereotypical 1950s gender roles, meaning women who choose to stay home looking after the children and cooking, also made the cut. 'Mouse jiggler' has also been added, meaning someone who uses a device to give the illusion they're actually working when they're WFH, which I've never heard of. How 'brain rot' (Oxford's word of the year for 2024) of me. Now, I like to embarrass my children as much as the next parent who still believes very strongly they are young and hip and cool; and so one of my favourite past-times is intentionally bastardising the language of my Gen Alpha and Gen Z kids. That means that when we watch a film together, I will casually and entirely intentionally decree it as 'sigma'; except pronounced like this: 'Wow, that was sigmaaaaaaaa.' I will get dressed to go out and then ask my 13-year-old daughter if she thinks I've got 'rizz'; if I 'slay'. When they've fully collapsed with cringe, I will sometimes get on my high horse and tell them that actually, the word 'sigma' has darker underpinnings; popularised by the likes of ultra-chauvinist Andrew Tate, who uses it to describe a 'high-value male' like him, or so he believes. I would argue that being held in Romania over charges of trafficking and money laundering isn't very 'sigma' and is actually quite 'brain rot', but there we go. My daughter, though, argues that while it may have meant that once, in origin, 'it doesn't mean that anymore'. 'It's changed, Mummy! Like you always go on about with Shakespeare.' And she is correct, Mummy does go on about Shakespeare. Specifically: the way that language, over time, is organic – it grows and shifts and changes; it is fluid and not static. Words and phrases can outlast their originator and transcend their original meaning. Sometimes they turn back on themselves and become their entire opposite, like 'sick' ('that is sick, bruv!') They can also have surprising tenacity, too, such as in the case of the phrases 'wear your heart on your sleeve' and 'break the ice' and even 'wild goose chase' – which date back from Othello, Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, respectively. No cap. But that doesn't mean I want 'skibidi toilet' added to the dictionary. Far from it. Why? Well, to be honest I think silly phrases that are so clearly internet meme-coded only cheapen language – they don't enhance it. And a lot of that is to do with where they come from: the phrase first appeared in the "Skibidi Toilet" online series on YouTube, originally posted by Alexey Gerasimov. The animated film sees a battle between human-headed toilets and humanoid beings with electric devices for heads (of course). The phrase itself apparently derives from the lyrics of "Give It to Me" by Timbaland, sped up to sound like 'skibidi'. It's silly and frothy and ephemeral and of the moment – and while it may have its place among kids in school corridors, I don't believe it warrants the gravitas that adding it to the Cambridge Dictionary suggests (they have said they only add words with 'staying power'). Neither does the word 'snackable', which has also been added this year (meaning content you engage with only fleetingly and briefly, because of our shrinking attention spans). In fact, the combination of both of these words and phrases in the dictionary this year just about sums up my problem with it. The real issue I have with 'skibidi' is that it is snackable. My kids say it, for now, but then we used to say 'Yo, yo, spex ' meaning 'respect' when we passed each other in the school lunch hall in 1994. We grew out of it, just like Gen Alpha will grow out of 'skibidi' – and now cringe that we ever used it in the first place. The last thing they – or the rest of us – need is a reminder of it, forever, in the dictionary. Though it might, actually, have a surprisingly positive effect – legitimising slang takes away its cool creds, so perhaps 'skibidi' will now die because of its inclusion. That would be lit.
The Independent
7 minutes ago
- The Independent
Cambridge Dictionary adds 'skibidi' and 'tradwife' among 6,000 new words
What the skibidi is happening to the English language? 'Skibidi' is one of the slang terms popularized by social media that are among more than 6,000 additions this year to the Cambridge Dictionary. 'Internet culture is changing the English language and the effect is fascinating to observe and capture in the dictionary,' said Colin McIntosh, lexical program manager at Cambridge Dictionary, the world's largest online dictionary. 'Skibidi' is a gibberish term coined by the creator of an animated YouTube series and can mean 'cool' or 'bad' or be used with no real meaning as a joke. Other planned additions including 'tradwife," a contraction of 'traditional wife' referring to a married mother who cooks, cleans and posts on social media, and "delulu,' a shortening of the word delusional that means 'believing things that are not real or true, usually because you choose to'. An increase in remote working since the pandemic has created the new dictionary entry 'mouse jiggler,' a device or piece of software used to make it seem like you are working when you are not. Concerns over climate change are behind the addition of 'forever chemical,' a harmful chemical that remains in the environment for a long time. Cambridge Dictionary uses the Cambridge English Corpus, a database of more than 2 billion words of written and spoken English, to monitor how new words are used by different people, how often and in what contexts they are used, the company said. 'We only add words where we think they'll have staying power," McIntosh said.
