Costermonger a secret language, a code which only other costermongers understood. In her book, "Shadows of the Workhouse", Jennifer Worth observed that "Costers... spoke to each other almost entirely in back slang; incomprensible to an outsider." Many costermongers also used "rhyming slang"; where any word can be substituted with another word that rhymes with it. Examples of rhyming slang include: "tin lids" or "dustpan lids" for "kids"; "jimmy grant" for "emigrant"; "apple and pears" for "stairs"; "rubbidy dub" for "pub" and "trouble and strife" for "wife". The selection of rhyming words often suggested a symbolic association. For example, a "sorrowful tale"
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