My son says it means taking out the player without getting the ball, all while shouting \u2018Brexit means Brexit\u2019. Sound familiar?<\/p>\n
For the umpteenth time, my son, with an Ikea stuffed ball he has had since infancy, is playing football in the living room. He is joined by one of his best friends, an equally football-obsessed 10-year-old who, before slide-tackling in what can only be described as a deliberate attempt to knock my son\u2019s legs off, shouts: \u201cBrexit means Brexit!\u201d Confused, I pass it off as an example of tweenage precocity: which 10-year-old is happy to quote Theresa May while playing football?<\/p>\n
Over the next year, however, I will hear the term used again and again when my son plays football at the local park. He turns 11 and is off to secondary school. There, too, the phrase seems to have become a \u201cthing\u201d. One evening, as he recounts the details of how he got a painful-looking graze on his shin, he quotes the attacking player\u2019s prelude to clattering into him: \u201cBrexit means Brexit!\u201d I ask, finally, why people are saying this. Nonchalantly, as he practises \u201cskills\u201d with the same softball, he explains that the Brexit tackle \u201cis a tackle that doesn\u2019t get the ball, only takes out the player\u201d. Urban Dictionary concurs<\/a>, stating it is, among other things, \u201cwhen somebody hits a massive slide tackle and usually sends them flying and it hurts them servely [sic]\u201d.<\/p>\n Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and writer<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My son says it means taking out the player without getting the ball, all while shouting \u2018Brexit means Brexit\u2019. Sound familiar? For the umpteenth time, my son, with an Ikea stuffed ball he has had since infancy, is playing football in the living room. He is joined by one of his best friends, an equally … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}