I fell in love with a pile of pants

The first time I heard "a pile of pants" was when I asked my dear friend, Lesley, in Scotland about the new system she was working on for her company. "It's a pile of pants!" she said. I fell in love with this phrase the moment I heard it.

Better than the worn-out "load of rubbish", not as vulgar as "a load of old bollocks", but still a little bit naughty. You shouldn't really be going around talking about your pants. Or anybody else's. Unless you're in a clothes store, in the US, where pants are long and worn over underpants. In the UK, pants, short for "underpants", are short and are worn under trousers.

The word pants is a shortened form of the word pantaloons — popular pirate wear — which comes from the Italian pantalone.

The phrase "a pile of pants" became so popular because it was a catchphrase used by BBC Radio 1 DJ Simon Mayo in the late 90s. It's often shortened to "pants", a relatively new synonym for "rubbish", as in "This wine is pants!"

In 2000 the Home Office demonstrated how not to use this phrase. It wrote in a letter to an asylum-seeker, rejecting his application: "With regard to your claim to be a national of Afghanistan, the secretary of state thinks that this is a pile of pants."

According to The Independent, the comment was noticed only after the letter had been given to a caseworker at the Refugee Legal Center, who had already translated it for her client. Bit pants, really. Or as they're saying in Scotland these days: "a pile of mince "!