What are the origins of Cockney Rhyming Slang?
It is disputed area, no one is totally sure when it began but it seems to started to arise in the latter part of the 18th century in the speaking community of low life criminals and down and out petty criminals in the London area. It is often claimed that it was introduced as a secret language code to discourage people who were not in their circles from knowing what they were talking about. There was a great fondness for secret language and ‘punning’ in the 18th and 19th century. Not just rhyming slang but things like ‘Back Slang’ where you pronounce the word backwards and something called ‘Pig Latin’ where you take the last letter and stick it on the front. It’s always seemed to me that the main motivation was just having fun with words. Is it still going strong? It seemed to have gone into something of a decline and people were talking about it dying out in the early 20th century. Orwell made a reference to it in the 1930s when he said that no one uses it anymore. But it’s still aliv
