Quite a few of these are still part of everyday speech in the UK. If I said something “hit me right on the loaf” everyone would know I meant my head
Loaf of bread
I’ve never heard loaf used to mean head. Grass, porkies and raspberry I’d say are the ones that have gone into common usage, to the point where I didn’t even know they were rhyming slang
I didn’t know grass was rhyming slang! What’s the connection?
Grasshopper -> copper (police, for the Americans reading the thread) :)
This is wild and I barely understand it
Rhymes with the last part:
Sausage and mash -> cash
Charlie Sheen -> screen
Rattle and tank -> bank
Sky rocket -> pocket
Dog and bone -> phone
Makes sense - thanks!
If I understood it correctly, this slang’s dictionary was filled by searching a two word rhyme to any word you want to translate. Once you found that, you’d cross out the second word (the one that rhymed) and just use the first one as the translation.
E.g. for ‘Lemmy’ you might come up with ‘golden penny’. Once you cross out the second word, you end up with just ‘golden’ as your translation.
But I completely agree that this is more of a one-way, non-deterministic encryption than a slang. As you could pick a huge variety of first words (rusty penny, tiny penny, old penny, dirty penny, …) only people that were given or taught the ‘dictionary’ are able to understand it.
I guess that’s at least one explanation why this way of speaking was used by…
the criminal underworld of the West Coast between 1880 and 1920
Ohhhh! Awesome. Thanks :)
This is the dumbest fucking thing I have ever seen in my life.
