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 niú bù xiāng jí), literally meaning "horses and cattles won't mate with each other", and later used to describe things that are totally unrelated and incomparable. A number of more exaggerated comparisons are sometimes made, in cases in which the speaker believes the two objects being compared are radically different. For example, "oranges with orangutans", "apples with dishwashers", and so on. In English, different fruits, such as pears, plums, or lemons are sometimes substituted for oranges in this context. Sometimes the two words sound similar, for example, Romanian "merele cu perele" (apples and pears) and the Hungarian "szezont a fazonnal"