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 suburban London and into the Home Counties - in particular the London Borough of Havering and throughout Essex county. Today Cockney-speaking areas include parts of Ilford, Dagenham, Barking, Billericay, Brentwood, Romford, Chigwell, Cheshunt, Brimsdown, Loughton, Harlow, Basildon, Thurrock. Cockney speakers have a distinctive accent and dialect, and occasionally use rhyming slang. The Survey of English Dialects took a recording from a long-time resident of Hackney, and the BBC made another recording in 1999 which showed how the accent had changed. John Camden Hotten, in his "Slang Dictionary" of 1859, makes reference to "their use of a peculiar slang language" when