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,
Discworld characters reveals that in Dimwell slang, ""syrup of prunes"" means wig. (In Cockney rhyming slang, the expected derivation would be ""syrup of figs".") Another example given in the text is ""cup-and-plate""—no definition is given, but ""He's a bit cup-and-plate in the head"" implies it means ""not quite right"." Tolliver also had a very small part in "[[Wintersmith]]". The wintersmith approaches him to take some sulfur, so that he would become a man. This incident was reported in The Ankh Morpork Times, and a widow approached him, swayed by 'a man who knows his hygiene.' It is now believed that they are