Would you Adam and Eve it?

Cockney Rhyming Slang isn't limited to sitcoms and soap-operas, it's alive and well and breeding like monks' habits.

Rhyming slang serves as a saleable icon of London life and culture. Go into any tourist gift shop or newsagent in the centre of London and you are liable to find there, probably displayed next to the cash register for the benefit of the impulse buyer, a small phrase book of London rhyming slang. It has become a commodity, to an extent unparalleled in any other area of language and usage. In the process it has become embalmed, but it has also been given new life. Whiskery rhymes that in the normal course of linguistic evolution might have faded quietly away (apples and pears, skin and blister, whistle and flute) are preserved and polished as much-loved heirlooms, and their high profile keeps alive the impulse to create new rhymes (Britney Spears, Millennium Dome, Pete Tong).

But how did it all begin? The earliest explicit reference to 'rhyming slang' on record is in John Camden Hotten's The Slang Dictionary (1859): 'The cant, which has nothing to do with that spoken by the costermongers, is known in Seven Dials [a noted sink of iniquity in 18th- and 19th-century Holborn] and elsewhere as the Rhyming Slang, or the substitution of words and sentences which rhyme with other words intended to be kept secret... I learn that the rhyming slang was introduced about twelve or fifteen years ago.'

Superficially rhyming slang is in the tradition of the thieves' cant of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, but by the end of the 19th century it had become firmly associated with the language of London street-traders. In the 1850s it had had little or no public profile (Charles Dickens in an 1853 article on slang in Household Words didn't refer to it at all), but by the beginning of the 20th century it was a star.

A high-water mark appears to have been reached in the first decade of the 20th century, and a decline in rhyming slang's popularity was noted thereafter. George Orwell, for instance, writing many years later in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), observed 'Twenty-five or thirty years ago..the 'rhyming slang' was all the rage in London. In the 'rhyming slang' everything was named by something rhyming with it - a 'hit or miss' for a kiss, 'plates of meat' for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct. Perhaps all the words I have mentioned above will have vanished in another twenty years.' But his prediction has proved excessively pessimistic. Quite the reverse has happened. At the beginning of the 21st century new rhyming slang is still being created.

The body of British rhymes as they currently exist consists of three fairly clearly distinguishable categories. The first could be called 'classic rhyming slang'. This consists of a comparatively limited set of items, many of them dating back to the 19th century, which most British English-speakers are more-or-less vaguely aware of, and which they would almost certainly select from if asked to give an example of rhyming slang. However these are no longer fully 'live' components of people's vocabulary. If ‘classic’ slang does get used, it tends to be self-consciously ironicApples and pears for 'stairs' is the one that generally pops up first when the 'rhyming slang' button is pushed, but it has many fellow usual suspects: Adam and Eve 'believe', dicky dirt 'shirt', frog and toad 'road', Lucy Locket 'pocket', tea leaf 'thief', trouble and strife 'wife', whistle and flute 'suit', and so on. These are the museum pieces of 'Cockney' rhyming slang, words that exist on a different plane from the rest of the English lexicon - as objects in themselves rather than as elements in a communication system. And as such they underpin the character of rhyming slang as a whole - as the product not of unconscious evolution but of deliberate creation.

The middle ground of current rhyming slang is occupied by items, of varying degrees of antiquity, which are still plugged into the living language, albeit in a slightly odd and restricted way. In some cases their currency may be due to preservation in a specific environment (for example, the bingo caller's clickety-click for 'sixty-six'), or to revival in a particular set of circumstances (as with currant bun, a long-standing rhyme for 'sun' which took on a new lease of life with the appearance of the Sun newspaper towards the end of the 20th century). But in general the active users of rhymes such as boat race 'face', Brahms and Liszt 'pissed', dog and bone 'phone', elephant's trunk 'drunk', jam jar 'car', la-di-da 'cigar', mince pies 'eyes', mutt and jeff 'deaf', and porky pies 'lies' are the inheritors of, or see themselves as the inheritors of, the working-class London speech community out of which rhyming slang arose (the linguistic 'dressing down' partly responsible for so-called Estuary English has rhymes in its baggage). However - thanks in large measure to the (often exaggerated or caricatured) use of these and other similar rhymes in television dramas and comedies featuring 'Cockney' life, such as Minder and Only Fools and Horses, with the occasional support of films like The Limey and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels - many of these items have become fixtures in at least the passive vocabulary of British English-speakers of all regions and classes. They are unlikely to be used, other than as a deliberate joke, but their meanings are widely understood.

Finally, at the leading edge of rhyming slang are new coinages. It continues to be a genre to which people are eager to make their own contributions, and the final decades of the 20th century showed no slow-down in the birthrate. It's rare to go to the lengths of dreaming up an entirely new sub-system of rhymes but it does happen. Cockney Rhyming slang has a new rival: 'popney rhyming slang.' Another set of slang to learn - what a Shania Twain in the backside. It's all gone a bit Pete Tong and now, according to The Current Bun (The Sun) holidaymakers fly to Gary Barlow (Monte Carlo) or have a Noel Gallagher (a week in Malaga). If you're going somewhere hot then you'd better take your Billy Ocean (suntan lotion). Or if you're staying at home a couple of Britneys (beers) followed by a Jay Kay might be your idea of SClub7(heaven).

The new slang, based on the names of pop people, has been devised by Paul Elliott, editor of the music website Music365.com. 'It started as a joke,' he said, 'but now everybody's using it.' Sunday Times (2001)

But the impulse remains, apparently, a powerful one. As the above suggests, the favoured current model is a rhyme based on the name of a fashionable or well-known personality. This has always been a popular strategy but in the 1980s and 90s it swamped all others - whence the profusion of Tony Blairs, Claire Rayners, Britney Spears, Jeremy Beadles, Leslie Ashes, Camilla Parker Bowles and the rest. Anyone famous with an easily rhymable name is fair game, and liable to be potted. And anyone can pull the trigger - you need no licence to create a rhyme. For a 150-year-old, rhyming slang is in remarkably good health. Its old favourites are still cherished (though few of us go to the lengths of Mike Coles, an East London religious education teacher, who in 2000 produced a rhyming slang version of St Mark's Gospel: 'Jesus took the Uncle Fred (bread) and the Lillian Gish (fish) and fed it to the 5,000'). And new players are constantly taking up the game of inventing fresh rhymes (and posting them on the Internet). It's just an amusing linguistic side-show these days, but one which promises to run and run for some time yet.

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