Don’t you just love Cockney rhyming slang? With its quaint vocabulary and the images it conjures of Pearly Kings and Queens singing Knees Up Mother Brown, and using the phrase “How’s your father” for reasons no one can quite fathom?
No, neither do I.
For a start, the rhymes aren’t very clever. Plates of meat (feet), apples and pears (stairs). Ho-hum. If they were to say asphyxiating to mean denigrating, I might be more impressed, but probably more confused.
A few examples that are “once removed” are semi-intriguing. “On your tod”, to mean on your own, comes from the name of a jockey, Tod Sloan (rhymes with own), who died in 1933. And “to blow a raspberry” is said because raspberry tart rhymes with . . . I’m sure you can work it out.
But the point of language is to express meaning. If I had a sore toe and saw a doctor in London who told me I had a touch of “twist and shout” I’d prefer he just said gout. I’ve had gout, it is not to be trifled with!
I have a suspicion this type of slang is famous because it originated in the UK’s capital city. If it was Arbroath rhyming slang we’d never hear about it.
If you have to stop and have a think about what you are being told, then it’s not your fault, it’s the fault of the person spouting gobbledygook. So, frankly, they can throw their rhyming slang out the Tommy Trinder
Slang words regularly enter the language of course. It’s not long ago that botch, posh and twit were all words that weren’t tickety-boo.
It’s a social code. If you say “woke” when you mean “alert to injustices in society, especially racial injustices”, then you are part of the in-crowd. Although no one who claims to be “woke” would include themselves in such an old-fashioned thing as an “in crowd”. The term was, however, coined in the 1960s.
In one way, I am interested in this type of slang because new ideas need new uses of language. Being aware of social injustice is surely a good thing.
However, I sometimes suspect that youngsters who describe themselves as woke rarely appreciate that by creating a distinction between those who are and aren’t woke they are displaying a form of discrimination.
I’m woke, I just never describe myself as woke. Are they woke to that?
Word of the week
Locuplete (adjective)
Ample, richly supplied. EG: “English is locuplete with slang words that have become accepted parts of the language.”
Read the latest Oh my word! every Saturday in The Courier. Contact me at sfinan@dctmedia.co.uk
