I know we have many writers here in the community, and my guess is that many of us are fascinated by the use of language.
I have been fascinated with Cockney Rhyming Slang since I was a child and heard one of Mr. Thackery’s students tell him that he was going “just up the frog a bit.” He explained to Sir that it means he was going just up the road, because toad rhymes with road, and frog is a synonym for toad.
One really needs to be in the know to decipher this stuff.
My favorite use of the rhyming slang was in 2008, on Olbermann’s old MSNBC show, when John Cleese referred to Sean Hannity as “a Berkeley.”
The construction involves replacing a common word with a rhyming phrase of two or three words and then, in almost all cases, omitting the secondary rhyming word (which is thereafter implied), in a process called hemiteleia, making the origin and meaning of the phrase elusive to listeners not in the know.
The most frequently cited example—although it is almost never employed by current user—involves the replacement of "stairs" with the rhyming phrase "apples and pears". Following the usual pattern of omission, "(and) pears" is then dropped and "stairs" becomes "apples"; this is deciphered as "apples" > "apples and pears" > "stairs". Thus the spoken phrase "I'm going up the apples" means "I'm going ['up the stairs'/'upstairs']".
In similar fashion, "telephone" is replaced by "dog" (= 'dog-and-bone'); "wife" by "trouble" (= 'trouble-and-strife'); "eyes" by "minces" (= 'mince pies'); "wig" by "syrup" (= 'syrup of figs') and "feet" by "plates" (= 'plates of meat'). Thus a construction of the following type could conceivably arise: "It nearly knocked me off me plates—he was wearing a syrup! So I got straight on the dog to me trouble and said I couldn't believe me minces."
Here is another favorite of mine: Aris = Buttocks.
Sometimes further obscuring is accomplished by adding a second iteration of rhyme and truncation to the original rhymed phrase. For example, the word "Aris" is often used to indicate the buttocks. This has been subjected to a double rhyme, starting with the original rough synonym "arse", which was rhymed with "bottle and glass", leading to "bottle". "Bottle" was then rhymed with "Aristotle" and truncated to "Aris".
Thank you everyone for having a butcher’s at me moor.