"Which hairstyle will it be today, sir? The Kentucky waterfall? A bouncing cobra? How about we spice things up a little, with the hunnic look? Or is sir perhaps feeling like something a little more exotic today? In which case, might I be so bold as to suggest a vokuhila for sir?"

If your barber/hairdresser/budget-conscious mother or significant other ever says this while coming at you with a pair of scissors, then my advice is simple—make like the shoplifter at a bake sale and and get the fudge outta there. Especially if your mother or significant other is calling you sir. That's just weird.

But the primary reason you should head for the hills is that those innocent (if a little disturbing) sounding coiffures are in fact anything but. Anything but innocent, I mean. They are coiffures. Well, they are a coiffure. Although only in the very loosest sense.

Can we guess what that coiffure is? Oh, yes. Just like the mythic wolf in sheep's clothing (which is a saying that always struck me as a little weird, given most sheep's general and habitual inclinations towards nudity) those quaint little aliases are really mullets in...hmm, what's the aquatic version of the sheep? Um. The salmon? Goldfish? Dunno. Probably doesn't matter given most species of fish aren't all that big on clothes, either.

Look, they're all synonyms for the mullet, okay? You see, despite being widely credited with the creation of the term in their 1994 song Mullet Head:-

Put your Dakleys and your stone wash on
Watching MTV and you mosh on
number one on the side and don't touch the back
number six on the top and don't cut it wack, Jack

- the Beastie Boys did not in fact invent the style. Nope, the mullet has a "proud" history that well and truly predates rap and rock and Achy Breaky Hearts and all manner of modern iterations. There were ancient mullets. There were medieval mullets. There were renaissance mullets. There were Victorian and Jazz Age and Swinging Sixties mullets. And the assorted fashion-challenged old-timey folk of history, who sported the 'do well before the Beastie Boys gave the sucker its modern name, had to call it something.

So they did. They called it all kinds of interesting things. Their friends and family probably called it interesting (and much ruder) things too.

Anyway, the point of all this is to acknowledge the existence of the pre-mullet mullet, as it were. Those bad-boys (look, I know I probably shouldn't genderise, but I can't imagine any self-respecting genders willingly putting their hands up to take ownership, and given the lads' side of the ledger tends to be unfairly weighted their way in most of the good stuff, I reckon the Y-chromosome crew can cope) have been around for a long time. Like war and plague and crop rotation in the 14th century, they are historic.

And given the presumed lack of mirrors for a good part of that history, the Mullet-o-Meter™ is gonna cut 'em some slack and give those historic mullets a:-