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,
Apples and oranges example, apples and pears are compared in Danish, Dutch, German, Spanish, Swedish, Croatian, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovene, Luxembourgish, Serbian, and Turkish. In fact, in the Spanish-speaking world, a common idiom is "sumar peras con manzanas", that is, "to add pears and apples"; the same thing applies in Italian ("sommare le mele con le pere") and Romanian ("a aduna merele cu perele"). In Portuguese, the expression is "comparar laranjas com bananas" (compare orange to banana). In Czech, the idiom "míchat jablka s hruškami" literally means 'to mix apples and pears'. Some languages use completely different items, such as the Serbian