Cockney Rhyming Slang!

 

Hello! This blog post is about a video detailing Cockney Rhyming Slang. Cockney is a term given to the people who lived by the St Mary-le-Bow church in East London around the 1840s. Cockney eventually became a term to refer to the working class. Well, what is Cockney rhyming slang? Cockney Rhyming slang is a linguistic phenomenon where you take the word you're referring to but replace it with a word that rhymes with it, but still use it to mean the same thing. In the example below, the video's author uses the example “I went up the stairs,” stairs rhyme with pears, so instead, you get the Cockney Rhyming Slang version of “I went up the apples and pears,” and it still means the same thing. 

                                                     (Jorgensen 0:46-1:09)

If I heard someone say they were going up the apples and pears, I would have no idea what they were talking about. That was the point of the creation of the language. Street merchants and criminals invented the slang to deter people from understanding what they were talking about on the streets of London. I had no idea this slang existed, and it is a reminder of how clever and innovative humans can be.

 

 

Jorgensen, Paul. “Cockney Rhyming Slang.” Youtube, uploaded by Langfocus, 2 February 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La7Tg5e547g. Accessed 28 April 2023.