One of the most popular soap operas in the UK today is East Enders, a four-day-a-week series that is based on the everyday lives of people in the East End of London. The other day, one of the characters, a very rough-and-ready old Cockney woman called Mo said “Me Farmer Giles ain’t half giving me gyp!” A little later on she referred again to being in a bad mood because of her “Farmers”.

I had heard “gyp” before - it means trouble or pain. No one is sure of the origin but it is possibly derived in a derogatory way from “Gypsy”, although the Collins dictionary gives the probable origin as a contraction of “gee up“. I have heard old people say, “My hip is giving me gyp today.” However, I had never heard of Farmer Giles. Nevertheless, I knew exactly what Mo meant the moment she said it (excuse the pun).

I knew that she was using Cockney Rhyming Slang. This is a sort of code using rhyming words. For instance:

• Dog and bone = phone
• North and South=mouth
• Trouble and strife=wife

A lot of rhyming slang has become common usage in spoken English in the UK and, to a lesser extent, Australia and New Zealand. You’ll see examples of it in films, comedies, soaps and advertising. A few examples that most English people will know are:

• Use your loaf! (loaf of bread=head)
• Are you telling porkies? (porky pies=lies, fibs)
• Would you Adam and Eve it?! (Would you believe it?)
• Give us a butchers. (Let me have a look. Butcher’s hook=look)
• When he saw the police he scarpered. (Scapa or Scarper from Scapa Flow=go, or perhaps direct from the Latinate escapa/scapa as in escape)
• I never said a dickey bird! (dickey bird=word)
• Bristols. (Bristol Cities=titties. A vulgar and very un-PC reference to breasts. Benny Hill used it in his songs.)
• He went for a jimmy riddle. (jimmy riddle=piddle, pee)
• You’re having a giraffe, aren’t you! (Giraffe=laugh. You must be joking! You can’t be serious!)
• I’m Hank Marvin. (starvin’, starving, hungry)

All these phrases are in common, informal usage today in the UK and some have found their way to Australia, New Zealand and even to the US. “Porky Pies”, for instance, has been taken up by British, Australian, Canadian and American press in connection with the Bush/Blair use of security service reports on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify war in the Gulf.

It is interesting that sometimes you have to use the whole rhyming phrase as in “Would you Adam and Eve it?” Sometimes you can use the whole phrase or cut it: “Are you telling porky pies?” or “Are you telling porkies?”. Sometimes the full rhyming phrase is never used: “Bristols” and “Use your loaf!”, for example. We would never say, “Use your loaf of bread”.

By the way, we only use “loaf” in “Use your loaf”, meaning “think what you are doing/use your common sense”. We’d never use it to refer to “head” literally as in “He banged his loaf on the low beam” or “I’ll knock your loaf off!” (I’ll knock your block off!). In fact, any attempt to use “loaf” to mean “head” in a concrete way sounds very funny: “The surgeon made a deep incision in his loaf!”

“Giraffe” in rhyming slang is very phrase-specific. We only use it with pronoun + having a giraffe. We would never say “Don’t make me giraffe.”

It is said that Rhyming Slang developed as a code so that Cockneys could speak without strangers and the police understanding. No one really knows but what is certain is that it survives today because like all idiomatic expression it signals membership of a community. It also cheers us all up because it is cheerful, cheeky (irreverent), colourful and full of life.

Which brings me back to Mo in East Enders. What did she mean by “Me (my) Farmer Giles ain’t half giving me gyp today!”? Well, what rhymes with Giles?

The answer is, “Piles!”

Teaching Notes

“Adam and Eve it”. This is a great phrase for practising linking. To pronounce this successfully you have to link the “m” in Adam to the “a” in “and”, elide the “d” and link the “n” in “and” to “Eve”: Wouldja adamaneevit!?

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