Dent's Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain

a VAT tribunal in 1991 ruled that Jaffa Cakes are exempt from VAT as they harden when stale, and are consequently cakes not biscuits.

As Margaret Atwood put it in The Blind Assassin: ‘The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn’t one’.

The first deadline, back in the 1800s, was a line drawn around a military prison, and any prisoner who dared to cross it was liable to be shot.

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

With that phrase the fans were unwittingly forging a link between the modern game and the Roman mindset, for fanaticus was the Latin for ‘belonging to the temple’ and, by extension, ‘inspired by a god’.

Jean-Marie Le Pen: a ball that goes too far to the right.

called an ‘anechoic chamber’. If you stand in one for too long, the sound of the blood in your ears will apparently drive you insane.

Alexander the Great: ‘I am dying with the help of too many physicians.’

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?

two firm favourites in the Arsenal manager’s own lexicon: the adverb footballistically (‘footballistically, he’s ready for the first team’), and the adjective handbrakeish (‘I felt we were a little handbrakish today’).