Words: bad-hair, adj.

"I WAS out of order the other day," apologised the cashier at a garage on the A23. He had been churlish when I admitted confusion over the use of "super" and "premium" brands of unleaded. "That's all right," I replied, "we all have bad-hair days" - which, unwittingly, probably compounded the offence, for he was bald.

The phrase often springs to the lips, but is absent from the new Oxford Dictionary of Slang. It could hardly fail to be a beguiling volume, but it lacks the authority of the multi-volume Random House American Slang, which dates the expression to Seattle and January 1991, but more evocative was the LA Times a month later: "bad- hair days . . . I'd been driving around in a convertible. I looked like a feral Hungarian mop dog."