Dent's Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain

Some words are identical across different groups, but mean vastly different things: a bird’s ‘jizz’ is most certainly not the same as the one a chef slathers all over his chicken cacciatore.

brag-rags: medal ribbons.

I still have some of those early scribblings. Many of them hint at the nerd I was to become.

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.

as Saki once put it, ‘a little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation’,

We may be hungrily embracing novelty in technology, but through language we are clinging on to the permanence of the past.

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.

There We Are Then,

Sex, sensation, pets, heroism: the four ingredients of headline news according to the former Daily Mirror columnist Donald Zec. So much for the subjects, but what about the art?