Tea-Leaf

Cockney Rhyming Slang and the Tea-Leaf

Cockney rhyming slang works on the principle of collocations; only in this case it is the collocation of commonly associated words with the final word being the placeholder for another word that was really intended. Thus, a Tea-leaf is cockney rhyming slang for ‘thief’ (leaf – thief). Cockney slang contains a lot of innuendo and humor, so ‘the trouble and strife’ is your wife, and ‘Gary Glitter’ is slang for….well, let’s just say it’s a euphemism for the toilet. It is said that Cockney rhyming slang developed as a type of street slang, allowing criminals to hold coded conversations within earshot of the law without being understood. Two fellows could be standing alongside a constable of the realm and have the following exchange:

“I don’t adam and eve’ it, the ‘trouble and strife’ was out with some ‘tea-leaf’ in a ‘whistle and flute’ tucking into some ‘Becks and Posh’.”

What Google translate would be unable to tell you is that one man has just told the other that he can’t believe that he saw his wife out with a thief in a suit eating some food.

“I don’t believe it, the wife was out with some thief in a suit tucking into some nosh (food).”

As it was a spoken form of language, it is difficult to pin down the exact moment Cockney slang appears. What we do know is that Cockney was, in the 18th century, discredited in print as the language of crime, poverty, and the uneducated. This didn’t stop it, however, from being liberally used by writers such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Bernard Shaw, and with the transportation of criminals (mainly from London) to the new world of the Australian prison colonies, its reach has stretched across the world.