Rhyming slang and toad" (the main road) and "apples and pears (stairs), as well as many more obscure examples, e.g. "Battle of the Nile" (a tile, a vulgar term for a hat), "Duke of York" (take a walk), and "Top of Rom" (home). It remains a matter of speculation whether rhyming slang was a linguistic accident, a game, or a cryptolect developed intentionally to confuse non-locals. If deliberate, it may also have been used to maintain a sense of community, or to allow traders to talk amongst themselves in marketplaces in order to facilitate collusion, without customers knowing what they were saying,
British slang (1937). It was not until the 1950s that slang began to make regular appearances in books and in the relatively new media of motion pictures and television. There are a number of different varieties of British slang, arguably the best known of which is Rhyming slang. Chiefly associated with cockney speech spoken in the East End of London, words are replaced with a phrase which rhymes. For example: "plates of meat" for "feet", or "twist and twirl" for "girl". Often only the first word is used, so "plates" and "twist" by themselves become the colloquialisms for "feet" and "girl". Thieves'