bills
n.pl.— «When I was growing up back over there on Merseyside, we didn’t really go in for rhyming slang. However, one term was in common parlance yet I rarely find anyone from outside the Liverpool area who’s familiar with it. It is, to my knowledge, the only example of scouse rhyming slang. “Bills,” meaning underpants: “Bill Grundys.”…it was the 1980s and 90s when me and my mates were using the term “bills.” The small minority of us who knew who Bill Grundy was only knew it from punk history, we were all too young to actually remember him from the Sex Pistols incident, and we’d never heard of him being anywhere else. Yet there we all were, using “bills” and “billies” without even consciously thinking of it as slang.» —“Scouse rhyming slang” by Merrick Bristling Badger (U.K.) Jan. 17, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Oofless is an antiquated bit of British slang that describes someone temporarily short on cash. It’s from ooftisch, a Yiddish-derived term for “cash placed on the table,” from German auf Tisch. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
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