UK DUers: What does the British slang "pants" mean? = "lame/bad"?

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

I'm reading this in a description of the British World Cup team's performance thus far, and that's what I gather?

Any examples of usage?

I like the way it sounds.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

1. Yes, right

"Tony Blair's foreign policy is totally pants"

Person A: "Dude, what do you think of Britney Spears' music?"
Person B: "It's pants."

"Pants" in this way is used as a milder word to replace the S-word.

BTW: It is the English team. In football(soccer) the U.K. competes as four different teams. :)

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

3. Here's what I was reading:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=davies/index

The "working" press room, FIFA World Cup Stadium, Stuttgart, 7:35 p.m., June 25

England 1 -- Ecuador 0.

How to be absolute pants and win.

...

Learn to grind out victory in life by being just like the England team -- working quite hard, not doing anything too well, getting a little lucky and doing just about enough to succeed. You don't have to change your habits, perform to your potential, come up with any great ideas or even execute anything well. You just have to show up, be a little bit hard, and stand the heat. Until it cools down.

The England team are all basically pants. But they've turned pantsness into an art. It sucks the opposition in, slows the momentum of the game to a crawl, makes the opposition play down to their level and makes them believe they must be winning even when they're not, which means they seem to try less hard.

But while they're still (barely) winning, let's rank them again in ascending order of pantsness.

Absolutely no pants
David Beckham
Ashley Cole

...

[billyskank]

2. "It's pants" is synonymous with "it sucks"

:thumbsup:

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

4. Thanks. The column I was reading ranked the England team in ascending

order of "pantsness", no pants being Beckham and Cole, and then going on up to frilly pleated Dockers, LOL.

[Oeditpus Rex]

5. The guy who followed me as sports editor

at the paper here played some club rugby. We'd frequently hear "pants" from his desk as he wrote or worked on a page design. Until I learned the source of this euphemism, I thought he was about half nuts.

But then, the guy also apparently had Tourette's, or a form of it, because the damnedest things would fly out of his pie hole — including "panties," "bull pants," "needle," "noodle" and the classic "shit on a whore."

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

6. I think there are definitely variants of Tourette's. I've certainly known

at least a few people who have the sudden noises and tics typical of Tourette's, but without the obscenities, they just emit random kind of noises instead.

I wonder if it's possible to train away the obscenity aspect and channel it into other kinds of verbalization.