A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang

Julian Franklyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136109485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This re-issue of Julian Franklyn's classic dictionary not only defines these expressions but also explains their origin and history. An introductory essay examines the roots and development of rhyming slang. Although many people assume that rhyming slang is exclusively Cockney, Franklyn illustrates how it is common to Australian and Americn dialects.
From the unlikely to the bizarre, the 1, 500 entries both entertain and enlighten. Cartoons enliven a reference section which combines linguistic detail and cultural analysis. Whether reading the dictionary from cover to cover, or dipping into it as a reference tool, linguists and students of popular culture will find it the definitive source of information on rhyming slang.

ESSAY

THE Oxford English Dictionary informs us that ‘Rhyme … [is] agreement in the terminal sounds of two or more words or metrical lines, such that (in English prosody) the last stressed vowel and any sound following it are the same, while the sound or sounds preceding are different.… The consonance may extend over more than one word.… Imperfect rhymes are tolerated to a large extent in English’, but imperfect rhymes are nearer to true rhymes than assonances are. ‘Assonance’, says the O.E.D., is ‘resemblance or correspondence of sound between two words or syllables’. It is characteristic of Old French, rather than of Old English verse.

Some people, even some poets, endure the labours of Hercules in writing a short, rhymed, metrical verse; others, who make no claim to literary ability, find unpremeditated rhyme flowing rhythmically into normal conversation.

At the head of the list of unconscious rhymesters are the Cockneys, some of whom have the faculty developed to a pathological pitch inasmuch as they rhyme not merely unconsciously but against their wills at most inappropriate times.

This curious ability (or linguistic disease) has not been specifically commented upon in the past by those who have written on Cockney habits, customs and peculiarities, but it has given rise to the false impression that ‘Cockneys converse in rhyming slang. This erroneous idea is excusable, because in the presence of a stranger who is obviously attentive, or one who is overtly enquiring, the conversational landscape will soon become transformed in a bewildering blizzard of this arresting speech-system whereby, in place of a word, a phrase consisting of two or three words that rhyme with it, is used.’¹

A nice discrimination must, however, be observed between rhyming slang and slang that rhymes. ‘Argy-bargy’, for argument, is one kind; another is the very general verbal euphemism, ‘ruddy’ for bloody, another is the rather weak literary expedient of writing in dialogue ‘muck’, ‘mucker’ and ‘mucking’. Cockneys have, and have had for at least fifty years, their own little spelling joke: ‘If you see Kate’. Another of the same type is: ‘See you any Tuesday’.

The automatically standardized rhyming slang, evolved in the early nineteenth century, attracted educated attention reasonably soon after it had become established and popularized.

The Cultural and ideological century over-runs the Chronological century. The nineteenth century did not expire at midnight on 31 December 1900; it was bludgeoned to death on 4 August 1914; and the eighteenth century lingered in a senile state until 1837 when Queen Victoria ascended the Throne.

It should, however, in self-defence be noted that to some minds—particularly the mechanical, fact-and-figure tabulating type—the same idea could be expressed in reverse. ‘Coming events cast their shadows before.’ Did not the first internal-combustion engine propelled vehicle explode its concussive way along before 1901?

Nevertheless, achievement is not necessarily culture, and gentlemen of the pre-Victorian period could carouse in Seven Dials with the highwayman and the cut-purse—the prostitute being taken for granted—but in Victorian times, and particularly in the Victoria and Albert section, the chasm between the respectable and the rapscallion, the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, became wide, deep and practically impassable.

Robert Peel’s Police Force was a sign of the times. By 1837 it had survived its infancy. The population of Seven Dials was ‘not to be mentioned to ears polite’.

There were a few outstanding characters who could and did take a full-bodied flying leap over the chasm and return with social and mental hands unsullied by the tar they had touched! Further, such men, though not missionaries, were clearly social reformers, and could not, because of their close contacts with what had come to be uncritically called ‘the underworld’, be denounced as renegade.

No distinction was observed between the criminal and the pauper: pauperism was regarded as a negative form of criminality, because such relief as there was for the poor was of a nature that no man of spirit could tolerate, hence, pauperism led to crime, and the undiscriminating, dignified, bewhiskered Victorian, too sincere in his hypocrisy to be lightly dismissed as a hypocrite; too sure of the sanctity of work—no matter how harrowing and poorly paid, provided it yielded him a profit—to be denounced as indifferent to the needs of the ‘industrious classes’, could not tolerate the existence of self-supporting poor; and he suspected every street-trader and door-to-door hawker of illicit activities. The overt occupation was condemned as merely a cover for procuring information for house-breakers.

Henry Mayhew, and to a lesser extent, Charles Dickens, ought, by their works, to have enlightened their contemporaries, but no mass mental disease is so far removed from the sphere of curability as current public opinion is, hence ‘the underworld’ of the mid-nineteenth century was a vastly greater territory than the character of its inhabitants justified.

Henry Mayhew, who possessed the rare ability of making an intimate sociological investigation without poisoning his system with statistics and by so doing losing sight of the fact that his material was human, discovered the street poet who, referring to the Great Exhibition of 1851, said: ‘I shall be there. Me and my mates. We are going to send in a set of verses in letters of gold for a prize. We’ll let the foreigners know what the real native melodies is, and no mistake!’

Notwithstanding, Mayhew made no specific mention of rhyming slang, with which he must have been familiar.

Francis Grose, whose (third edition) Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue made its appearance in 1796, gives but a vague hint at the possibility of a rhyming form of ‘flash language’, and even the fifth edition (1823), with extra, early nineteenth-century additions by Pierce Egan, the author of Tom and Jerry, does no more.

In 1839 ‘H. Brandon Esq.’ edited Poverty, Mendicity and Crime, or the Facts, Examinations &c. upon which the Report was founded, presented to the House of Lords by W. A. Miles Esq. to which he ‘added a Dictionary of the Flash or Cant Language, Known to every Thief and Beggar’, and in that book a negligible number of rhyming slang terms were included.

It is not a very good piece of work—Brandon does not seem to have made a personal study of slang in the field but simply to have reprinted goodly extracts from The Flash Dictionary, a 48mo volume designed for the waistcoat pocket—its overall dimensions are 4 ×

inches—it has an engraved title-page, and was ‘sold by C. Smeeton, St. Martins Churchyard’ in 1821. It has fifty-five pages of Glossary, with twenty-nine lines to the page. Most of the definitions are on one line, a few extend to two or three. The rest of the pages are consumed in preliminary ‘Advertisement’, and appended ‘The Sixty Orders of Prime Coves’, and some ‘Flash Songs’.

This fascinating little volume was, with a few additions and no acknowledgements, again reprinted as the appendix of Sinks of London Laid Open (1848), ‘embellished with Humorous Illustrations by George Cruikshank, published by J. Duncombe’.

By this time, Victorianism was firmly established. The gentleman who was ‘something in the City’ was something quite different in the suburbs. All classes were users of slang, each according to the orbit of his activities, but the conventional, respectable attitude was one of shocked disapproval.

Charles Dickens, not in his capacity of great-hearted humanitarian and humorist but as the personification of vox populi, wrote a poor and priggish article denouncing the use of slang which he printed in Household Words, No. 183, 24 September 1853. He gave examples of slang usage in various strata of society, but he did not so much as mention rhyming slang even casually. Apart from three or four examples that had by mid-century unostentatiously crept into print, where they nestled quietly, innocent of comment, one would conclude, from the lack of evidence, that the system was not yet established. There is, however, good reason to believe that it was already a lusty youth, safely past the perils of infancy.

II

Wise men do not tempt fate, nor set the avalanche in motion; hence, in a period when parsons preached against the use of slang,¹ and shocked parents addressed letters on the subject to the press,² a philologist who felt that a dictionary of slang would be a desideratum would proceed with caution and conceal his identity behind the opacity of a pseudonym.

Such a one was ‘Ducange Anglicus’ who was so effective in his self-effacement that a fair amount of research has so far failed to reveal the man behind the name.³

He produced a book of eighty pages 6 × 4 inches overall, entitled: The Vulgar Tongue: a glossary of slang, cant, and flash words and phrases, used in London from 1839 to 1859.… The first edition made its appearance in 1857 (the second in 1859); and both editions were published by Bernard Quaritch.

In the ‘Preface to the first edition’, reprinted in the second, the author says:

‘This little volume has been printed with the view of assisting Literary Men, the Officers of the Law, and Philanthropists, in their intercourse with Classes of English Society who ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• GLOSSARY
• ESSAY
• ADDENDA
• LIST OF MEANINGS
• EXAMPLES
• APPENDIX:
• INDEX