In the 1999 film The Limey, Cockney ex-con Wilson (played by Terence Stamp) refers to someone as “Me new china.” For Americans or others in the audience similarly befuddled by the term, he helpfully clarifies: “China plate, mate.” Due to the increasing popularity of British crime films, particularly in the U.S., more and more people are becoming aware of a peculiar form of slang which, though strictly identified with the East End of London, has to some degree filtered into the daily expressions of speakers of British English.
Origins of Cockney Rhyming Slang
The true origins of this intricately nuanced argot are murky, though it is thought to have taken root sometime in the sixteenth century among the immigrants, soldiers, and seamen working and living around the London docks. There is also speculation that Cockney rhyming slang, also known as “Rabbit,” was purposely developed as a code by shady merchants and other members of the criminal element in order to confound customers, the authorities, or anyone else who happened to be listening.
Rhyming slangs in general are fairly common in many languages; even American English has a few lingering examples, such as “brass tacks” being possibly derived from a rhyme with “facts,” and the colloquial term “bread” meaning money coming from the rhyming phrase “bread and honey.” However, Cockney rhyming slang is by far the best known of this type of argot, at least in the West. Historically speaking, a “Cockney” is anyone born within the sound of the bells of St. Mary-Le-Bow in the Cheapside area of London, but many expressions that started out as Cockney rhyming slang have infiltrated the speech of other Britons, sometimes without the speakers even being aware of the derivation of the expression.
Structure & Examples of Cockney Rhyming Slang
The argot is structured by replacing one word with a (usually) two-word phrase that rhymes with it. The second word of the phrase is then generally dropped, so that the original word has now been replaced by a word that does not rhyme, and that on immediate hearing has nothing to do with the original word. For example, the word “head” is sometimes rendered as “loaf” through the intervening rhyming phrase “loaf of bread.” By the same token, an American may be called a “Sherman” or a “septic,” through the phrases “Sherman tank” or “septic tank,” both of which rhyme with “Yank.”
Some of the derivations are fairly straightforward: “Frog” for “road” (through “frog and toad”); “Moby” for “sick” (through “Moby Dick”); “Adam” for “believe” (through “Adam and Eve”). Some of the constructions, though, are somewhat baroque, utilizing other slang terms, puns, celebrity names unknown outside of the U.K., and so forth. The use of the word “grass” to mean an informant, for example, was originally derived from “grasshopper,” which rhymed with “copper,” an old slang term for a policeman; the word slowly evolved to describe someone who cooperated with the police.
The Addition of New Slang Terms
For someone on the outside, much of the argot may be unintelligible, and to make matters worse, new terms are springing up all the time, as many online rhyming slang dictionaries will attest. The use of “Becks” to replace “eat,” for instance, comes through “Becks and Posh” (i.e. soccer star David Beckham and former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham) rhyming with “nosh.” Though use of the slang is not as widespread as many British films would have us believe (or “Adam”), it is nonetheless a fascinating and constantly evolving demonstration of the playful ingenuity with which people make a language their own.
Jenny Ashford - Jenny Ashford is a writer and graphic artist from central Florida. Her main area of interest in her Suite 101 articles is science, with a ...
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