Dent's Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain

common to all is the most singular characteristic of the new spoken-written language of social media: brevity. This is a land where vowels are dropped, phrases condensed to acronyms, sounds reduced to numbers, and most punctuation forgotten.

The establishment The act of going to the pub has necessitated varying levels of subterfuge over the centuries, and drinking establishments have consequently dispensed a fair number of euphemisms along with their pints. Among the nicknames for one of the few places that, alongside the church, is open to all, are fuddle-caps hall and tippling booth

if a male golfer hits a rather short ‘girlie’ putt or moves it only a few yards up the fairway, you might hear his male opponent ask, ‘Does your husband play golf?’

flâneur (one who strolls, observes and enjoys),

In some ways I’ve been writing this book all my life.

mouseholing: blowing an entry hole in a wall of an enemy building rather than entering via a potentially booby-trapped door.

The trouble with words is you never know whose mouth they’ve been in. Dennis Potter

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 earliest sense of the French word raver was to be mad, or to behave as if delirious; it’s related to rêver ‘to dream’. Modern ravers would probably recognize this feeling of being tranced out, particularly as the beat drops, that all-important moment when, as one post in the Urban Dictionary puts it, ‘a song goes from being slow to being really