Let it Snow
It is a while since I last blogged, if that is now a verb, as I am sure it is. It is strange how nouns become verbs, one of my favourites is ‘to bin’ as in put something in a bin, so if I see some litter on site I may say to someone “bin that please’.or I binned last weeks paper. (using the recycling bin of course)
On the subject of ‘bins’ this expression is the cockney rhyming slang for glasses, as in reading glasses, so if someone is having trouble looking up a number in a telephone book you might say put on your ‘bins’.
The logic behind this is a little more tortuous than with most Cockney Slang, usually the rhyme does just that, it rhymes , so Apples and Pears is the stairs, or Trouble and Strife is wife, though I suspect in the latter there is more than just the alliterative value of the rhyme invoked.
Another word for glasses is spectacles and that rhymes with another word for bin which is receptacle, basically the rhyme should be put on your receptacles but that just not as good as , put on your bins.
Cockney rhyming slang is an evolving ‘language’, a lot of the older terms were named after famous people of their day so a cigarette or fag was known as a Harry Wragg, a famous jockey in the 1930’s. Today the names of present day sports people are used in the slang such as Becks and Posh, ie David Beckham and his wife ‘Posh Spice’.
So when someone says’ I can’t go out tonight I have no Becks’ what they mean is they have no spending money. Can you work out the link?
Becks and Posh rhymes with dosh and dosh means money, itself a slang term which is now an accepted usage but of very uncertain origin.
Given the present economic situation we are all a bit short of Becks.
One of my favourites is ‘Get on your Dick Van Dyke’ i.e. ‘get on your bike’, which is usually used as an expression to clear off.
