Dent's Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain

the character ‘&’, designated the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and therefore part of the compulsory recitation of letters. The symbol was chanted as ‘and per se and’ (and, by itself, ‘and’). So laborious were these chants that children raced through them, mangling the final letter in the process to produce the word ‘ampersand’.

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.

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

this is the difference between placing ‘OMG’ in the 2000s or tracing it back to 1917, when it was used by a British Admiral in the exact same way teenagers would use it today.

Shakespeare knew a thing or two about popularity contests. In his works he used the word unfriended several times to mean someone who has lost the hearts of everyone around them. Four hundred years before the arrival of Facebook, he already knew what it meant to be rejected from the tribe.

Numerous words and expressions used in mainstream English started life in magic. Some of them, like phoney, are unexpected. The fraudulent practice of the fawney-rig was first recorded in the USA at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1823 Pierce Egan, a chronicler of popular pursuits and low life in England, described how the trick worked. ‘A fe

subterfuge (from the Latin for ‘escape by stealth’)

Prince Philip once quipped: ‘The mind cannot absorb what the backside cannot endure’.

As for the hymns, this is where a vicar’s chuckles really come into their own. Fish and Chips refers to two hymns that are regularly paired together at funerals, namely ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’ and ‘Abide with Me’.