Dent's Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain

perhaps it’s just for a laugh. Either way, they don’t sound nearly as funny when they’re read out in court.’

In the US army, ‘meat-eaters’ are the Special Forces soldiers whose mission depends on violence rather than the establishing of peace;

We took the modern word ‘coffee’ from the Arabic qahwah, said to be rooted in a term for ‘having no appetite’ and to refer to coffee’s stimulating properties. In the seventeenth century, when coffee was introduced into Christian Europe, it was promptly condemned by the Councilmen of Pope Clement VIII as being ‘the bitter invention of Satan’. The Po

Take the ‘zarf’, too: the cardboard cupholder dispensed with every barista-brewed cappuccino. This throwaway symbol of modern life could not have had a more prestigious beginning. Zarfs in the Ottoman Empire were honed out of precious metal and encrusted with emeralds and diamonds.

fullscrew: a full Corporal in the Army. grunt: an infantryman. mod plod: a nickname for an officer in the Ministry of Defence Police. club swinger: the PE trainer. fang farrier: a dentist. pusser’s issue: a label for any equipment issued by the Service, a corruption of the word ‘purser’. Anything done unimaginatively or ‘by the book’ is done in a p

the American humorist Erma Bombeck, who once professed: ‘I do not participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill.’

Also known as the Olympic torch (never goes out).

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

Between the early 1990s and the beginning of the noughties, the number of traditional high-street butchers fell from 15,000 to fewer than 6,000. This was largely down to the proliferation of supermarket meat, presided over by meat-cutters rather than butchers, with far less experience than those who take an animal right through from slaughter to ta