Steven in Cavendish, Vermont, remembers this saying from his Cockney grandfather: There I was on the dog and bone, with me mate Charlie, when my trouble and strife took a tumble on the apples and pears, and I couldn’t Adam and Eve it. It’s a bit of Cockney rhyming slang that translates as “There I was on the phone, with my friend Charlie, when my wife took a tumble on the stairs, and I couldn’t believe it.” Such slang has been around since the mid-19th century, and has spawned further slang terms: apples can mean “stairs,” apple-dancing means “to steal from multi-story buildings.” By extension, the word fruit can mean “stairs,” as can oranges and lemons. In addition to trouble and strife for “wife,” there’s also joy of my life, or simply joy. Another bit of rhyming slang for “trouble” is Barney, short for Barney Rubble. Often used among the criminal underclass, rhyming slang is intended to be difficult for outsiders to understand. In French back slang, the word femme for “woman” becomes meuf. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A Bit of Rhyming Slang”
Hi there. You have A Way with Words.
Hello.
Hi. Who’s this?
This is Stephen Plunkard from Cavendish, Vermont.
Welcome, Stephen.
Welcome to the show.
My question is about rhyming.
I grew up in England in the 50s and 60s, and my grandfather was a Cockney.
And I was just wondering, you know, sort of what are the origins of rhyming, and is it just in the U.K., or is it spread to other places?
Can you give us a couple of examples of that, Stephen?
Sure. Well, here’s one example, and I’ll just read it as I would when I was a child.
There I was on the dog and bone with me mate Charlie when my trouble and strife took a tumble on the apples and pears.
I couldn’t Adam and Eve it.
Oh, yeah. Okay. Let’s see if we can break this down.
And there I was on the telephone with my mate Charlie when my wife took a tumble on the stairs and I couldn’t believe it.
How’s that?
That’s correct.
Yeah.
So rhyming slang is what you’re referring to.
And you learned some of that from your grandfather.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And those are classics, right?
Apples and pears for stairs.
Apples and pears.
That’s the one when you ask somebody to tell you some rhyming slang and they come from that tradition of slang.
That’s one of the ones they pull out right away.
It goes back to like the 1850s.
It’s been around so long that it has this offshoot of other slang terms.
For example, it can be shortened to apples on its own.
It has created the term apple dancing, which means to steal from multi-story buildings.
People have made other slang out of it.
So fruit can just mean stairs, or you can just say oranges and lemons to mean apples and pears, which means stairs.
So it’s just slang out of slang out of slang.
Trouble and Strife for a Wife is another classic, although I have heard people say joy as a short shortened for joy of my life.
So there’s a positive one.
That’s nice.
Dustbin lids for the kids, right?
Yeah.
And another famous one is Barney, short for Barney Rubble, which means trouble.
Right, right. I remember that one, yeah.
You know, I don’t know how it would fit in with today’s language standards.
I mean, with, you know, being discriminatory and everything else.
I mean, I don’t even want to go there in terms of how it would be perceived today.
But back in, you know, we would have entire conversations around the dinner table, and I would go away not wondering what we said.
It was just to keep up with my grandfather.
Yeah, mystery to the kids.
And that’s part of the role of the rhyming slang was to make it opaque to outsiders, to make it a little hard to understand.
And then when you realize the outsiders caught on, it was time to shift to something else, time to change it up again.
Some of the travelers language, the Irish travelers, they also have some rhyming slang of their own.
And they also used reversed Irish Gaelic, where they take the Irish Gaelic words and turn them around in order to disguise some of their talk so that they couldn’t be understood by outsiders.
Rhyming slang never really caught on all that much in North America.
And there have been pockets of it.
Always the criminal underclass.
It’s sometimes used as a novelty among people in the know, but it never really had that pervasiveness that it’s had in the UK and even in Australia and New Zealand.
Rhyming slang never really has been the thing here like it was elsewhere in the English-speaking world.
It’s been very informative.
Thank you for looking into this. It’s great.
Take care and be well. Bye-bye.
Okay, bye.
I don’t know, Martha, of another language that does rhyming slang like that.
French has a few little playful things that they do with rhyming city names with verbs that sound kind of similar to mean things like to die or to get money or to hide.
But it’s not really as deep and as broad as rhyming slang is.
It’s just pretty interesting.
A lot of languages do back slang.
French has this whole big thing of words turned around where one thing like femme means, meaning woman becomes mouf.
But rhyming slang is kind of its own thing in English.
English rhyming slang is its own thing.
Yeah, it’s very interesting.
You would think it would be in other languages, but not so much.
It’s more the reversing of syllables and things like that.
Yeah.
Those language traditions of your parents and grandparents are sometimes hard to let go of, and we know they’re lingering there in your mind, and you’ve got questions about the things that you kind of half remember.
Let’s uncover those together, 877-929-9673, or send a question about it to us in email words@waywordradio.org.
