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,
Cockney describing the costermongers of London's East End. In terms of other slang, there are also several borrowings from Yiddish, including "kosher" (originally Hebrew, via Yiddish, meaning "legitimate") and "stumm" ( originally German, via Yiddish, meaning "quiet"), as well as Romany, for example "wonga" (meaning "money", from the Romany "wanga" meaning coal), and "cushty" (Kushty) (from the Romany "kushtipen", meaning good). A fake cockney accent is sometimes called mockney. By the 1980s and 1990s, most of the features mentioned above had partly spread into more general south-eastern speech, giving the accent called Estuary English; an Estuary speaker will use some but