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Cockney rhyming slang is the product of the eternal human fascination with rhyme and word-play. Its beginnings reach back to the first part of the 19th century when its speakers were the inhabitants of London from the area around St Mary-le-Bow church in the old City. This type of slang has a unique way of word-formation: a common word is replaced by a phrase of two or three elements that rhymes with it and then the second rhyming element is omitted in most cases by a process called hemiteleia. This makes the new slang term unintelligible to outsiders since its meaning is totally at variance with that in standard language and the key to the etymology, the rhyme, is lost. Rhyming slang is most prolific in coining nouns, but adjectives, verbs and even whole sentences can be replaced. Today rhyming slang has spread beyond the UK to several other English-speaking countries and these variants all contribute to its further development.
Keywords: cockney, rhyming slang, phrase, rhyme.
The eternal human fascination with rhyme, rhythm and word-play that will manifest itself in speakers of any language, not just English, is perhaps more enhanced and lively in Cockneys. They are, in Bill Bryson's view "among the most artful users of English in the world" and their sheer enjoyment of words makes cockney rhyming slang one of the most exuberant linguistic forms slang can take.
The etymology of the word 'cockney' takes us back to the 14th century, when it was originally cokene-ey, meaning a "cock's egg" (Middle English coken 'of cocks' and ey, Old English æg, ?g 'an egg', most likely relating to Old English cocena "cock's egg". The term was first applied to the small misshapen, usually yolk-less egg occasionally laid by young hens, or 'the runt of the clutch'. In Middle English the forms cokeney or cokenay came to mean 'a foolish or spoilt child' or 'a simpleton'. The second form appears in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with the meaning 'a child tenderly brought up, an effeminate fellow, a milksop'. By the 1520s the meaning of the word extended and it came to be applied derisively by country folk, the majority of the population, as a derogatory reference to 'townsfolk' or 'effeminate town dwellers' in...