the.com/mullet
a haircut so committed to compromise it negotiates with itself.
means A hairstyle cut short at the front and sides but left long at the back — and also, separately, a name for several kinds of edible fish.
from The fish came first: 'mullet' arrived in Middle English from Anglo-Norman 'mulet', a diminutive of Latin 'mullus', meaning the red mullet. The haircut sense is startlingly recent — it barely existed as a word until the Beastie Boys' 1994 song 'Mullet Head' popularized it, after which it stuck so hard it now eclipses the fish in everyday speech. Whether the haircut borrowed its name from the fish, or from 'mullet head' (an old American slang term for a dim or stubborn person), remains genuinely unsettled.
- slogan
- business in front, party in back
- named late
- Beastie Boys coined the term in 1994
- royal precedent
- ancient Greeks and Hittites wore them
- comeback kid
- resurrected as ironic, now unironically cool
billy ray cyrus — 'achy breaky heart' singer whose mullet defined 1990s country music culture
andre agassi — tennis champion who wore a iconic mullet throughout the 1980s and early 1990s
joe dirt — fictional character played by david spade in the 1999 film, sporting a legendary mullet