Robert Bush, who ran Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull, was jailed for 20 years today — 67 offences, including 30 counts of preventing a lawful and decent burial, in what prosecutors called some of the most serious breaches of trust possible in the funeral industry. That's the event, one sentence, done. What we're here for is what three of the UK's biggest newsrooms decided to call it — because the same conviction came out in three completely different languages. * The BBC: "Disgraced funeral boss who failed to bury bodies jailed for 20 years." Sit with "failed to bury" for a second. It's the grammar of a missed deadline — a lapsed permit, an unfiled form. There's a reason it reads that way: the criminal charge really is called "preventing a lawful and decent burial," and the BBC's headline is essentially quoting the charge sheet. But charge-sheet language is engineered for precision in a courtroom, not for carrying the weight of what a courtroom heard. * The Guardian: "Hull funeral director who left bodies to rot in mortuary jailed for 20 years." Blunt — and the closest to the actual court record. Over five days of sentencing, more than 80 families described discovering that the people they loved had been left "rotting away" in his premises. When the families' own word in court was "rotting," printing it isn't sensationalism. It's accuracy. * The Mirror went the other direction, twice. First: "'Monster' funeral director Robert Bush jailed for 20 years" — "Monster" tucked safely inside quotation marks, so it's somebody else's word wearing the Mirror's font size. Then, in the same day's news feed: "Britain's sickest funeral director Richard Bush devastated grieving relatives to fund his fantasy lifestyle." One problem. His name is Robert. The web address of that very article — generated from the Mirror's own reporting — says "robert-bush." If you're going to hand a man the superlative "Britain's sickest," the absolute minimum entry fee is his name. * Same court, same facts available to everyone: 67 offences, 35 bodies found in varying states of decomposition, half a tonne of unidentified ashes, families who may never know whose remains they were handed. The BBC's rendering could describe an administrative failure. The Mirror's could describe a horror film with a casting error. The Guardian's describes the evidence. * Here's why the register matters and this isn't word-nerd pedantry: for the families involved, headlines are the public record of what was done to them. Language that's too cold tells them the country didn't grasp it; language that's too hot — with the wrong name attached — tells them nobody was really paying attention. On a story like this the job isn't to perform neutrality or perform outrage. It's to describe the thing. One of the three did.