VULGAR TONGUES

(Serpent’s Tail £9.99) SLANG is a tricky business, as any parent who has made the mistake of trying out their offspring’s picturesque street argot knows.

A basic rule of thumb is that the instant a word appears in print, you can be sure it is no longer regarded as cool/wicked/ sick by the hipsters who coined it. Max Decharne is a journalist and musician, and his amusing book on the private vocabularies of such groups as musicians, soldiers, schoolboys, criminals, politicians et al contains a wealth of entertaining detail.

He delivers a jolly riff on the eventful history of the word ‘whore’, following its evolution from the Wycliffe Bible of 1380, via Shakespeare’s First Folio, to a term popular with rappers, for whom, he speculates, the Devon village of Westward Ho! must present an intriguing conundrum.