Dent's Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain

the proprietor of a mug house or shicker shop, the pub landlord or -lady, is not without his or her own monikers. Among the earliest labels, in the 1500s, were the lick-spigot, ale-draper, and cove-of–the-ken. Today you’re more likely to hear the governor or mine host. In the years in-between, and if you were fond of a tipple, you might have encoun

‘who have been put on earth with the sole purpose of ruining your personal life’.

The censorship code of 1948 imposed ‘an absolute ban’ on the following: ‘Lavatories, Pre-Natal influences, Marital Infidelity, Effeminacy in Men, Immorality of any kind, suggestive references to Honeymoon couples, Chambermaids, Fig-leaves, Prostitution, Ladies Underwear, Lodgers and Commercial Travellers, and Animal Habits’. Since then, every one o

In 1736, the first Gin Act was passed. Gin (from the Latin juniperus, ‘juniper’) was first distilled in Holland and brought back to England by soldiers returning from the Anglo-Dutch wars. Cheap to buy and even cheaper to produce, it quickly became the easy ticket out of the miseries of poverty. As a jingle at the time went, you could be ‘drunk for

There are few professionals in life to whom we relinquish all control. Doctors, lawyers and taxi drivers are among them, but top of the life-and-death list must surely be the commercial pilot. This is the person in whom we trust as surely as they themselves trust in the air they fly.

brag-rags: medal ribbons.

Our language has over 3,000 words for being drunk, from ‘schnockered’ to ‘spifflicated’, ‘befuggered’ to ‘woofled’, and ‘phalanxed’ to ‘liquorish’. Benjamin Franklin famously collected 200 more synonyms for a slathered state, including ‘cherubimical’ (describing a happy drunk who goes around hugging everyone), as well as ‘he’s taken off his conside

‘the new dead-meat market’

Prize-giving, here, is a term for sentencing, in which a defendant is weighed off for their crime. It’s said that the expression derives from the historical need to assess the condemned prisoner’s weight, so as to indicate the length of rope needed for hanging; great care had to be taken that, in the course of the drop, the deceased was immediately

‘To find a man’s true character,’ P.G. Wodehouse observed, ‘play golf with him.’