Spot the Frippet: mullet.

Oh, the joy of mullets.

You can find them in the sea or on land; they come in several colours and forms; they (so refreshingly) epitomise the anti-celebrity.

Yes, that's right, the anti-celebrity. I suppose this must mean that if you put a celebrity near a mullet of any kind they will both immediately vapourise in a flash of an extremely unfashionable green.

Hmm...you'd probably need to test that out in the Cern Particle Accelerator. But I doubt very much if you'd find any celebrity willing to wear the shower-cap over-shoes.

Anyway, mullets.

Here's one:



That's a striped red mullet, Mullus surmuletus. Actually, I  suspect it of writing its own wikipedia entry because it's so keen to make absolutely clear that it isn't related to any of the other mullets.

Here are some grey mullets:



Those are thick-lipped grey mullets, Chelon labrosus. They're well-known both for being tasty and for living near sewage-outlets. Yum!

And this one's mostly blond:




There we are. Feeling sharp, up-to-date and sophisticated now, are you?

Thought so.

Good, isn't it?

Spot the frippet: mullet. The word for the fish comes from the Old French, from the Latin mullus, from the Greek mullos. No one knows for sure where the word for the hairstyle came from, unless it was from someone seeing a fish with some seaweed on its head.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the hairstyle mullet was popularised by U.S. hip-hop group the Beastie Boys who used mullet and mullet head in their 1994 song Mullet Head.

The Beastie Boys' magazine Grand Royal was the first to use the term in print, in 1995. The article credits Mike D as the first Beastie Boy to use it.