For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Driving my Droschky (10.09.13)

In 2006 Stuart Pessok, Managing Editor of the trade’s biggest-selling newspaper Taxi ran a series entitled ‘We Speak Your Language’ in which he invited readers to submit examples of cab slang in an attempt to keep the language alive.

He put together a ten-page glossary of the cabbie’s lexis. It was divided into locations and buildings, ranks and shelters, drivers, cabs, passengers, the Public Carriage Office (The Knowledge and subsequent technicalities), money, the police and miscellaneous. Thus he produced the bible of the cabbie’s universe.

The Bell and Horns cab shelter will resound to tales of trapping a job as you set down a punter at the Shakespeare during the kipper season and take a bowler-hat to the Inside-Out Building only to find that he is a bilker.

Driving a cab is a lonely profession, for much of your working life is spent with only strangers for company. So when cabbies meet colleagues it is hardly surprising that much banter takes place.

As London’s cabbies have been working the streets for nearly 400 years it should come as no surprise that the trade is rich in parochial slang. We learned acolytes of The Knowledge have our own language, although, since it stems from a closed, occupational group it should properly be referred to as jargon. In this case, it is taxi-speak, which seems to have existed since the mid-19th century. It is, one might suggest, the ultimate take on ‘London in Slang’.

A butter-boy whose a Gantville Cowboy can easily find him (or her) self fouling the rank, which is not that he has enjoyed a curry the previous night. The Grapes of Wrath are a common occupational hazard another is finding one caught short. Should this happen when you are near the Aztec Temple the Iron Lung is but a short drive away. This is a urinal in Regency Place opposite Portuguese Tony’s Café where you can have a splosh with other mushers.

Jargon proper comes from within: the drivers and the vehicles. An owner-driver has been a musher since the 1880s; the cab roof being equivalent to a mush, an umbrella. The Gantville cowboys: predominantly Jewish cabbies who live around Gants Hill, Newbury Park, Ilford and Claybury; Copperarse or Leatharse: one who works long hours hence the condition of their trousers; Butterboy: a novice, likely to be that butter that won’t melt in an innocent mouth, this cabbie jargon, like many words is used by other professions, in this case the police.

To suck the mop is to be left on a rank when everyone else has got jobs (literally trips, figuratively passengers). Ranking on a long ’un is driving around in search of fares and hanging it up waiting outside hotels, lights off, ready to jump on the Billy Bunters (punters; an old squirt is an ageing gent, a mystery a young woman). A shtumer, originally a bad cheque, is a booked job that on arrival has evaporated.

Driving your sherbet you might be given a shtoomer by your radio circuit or at Harabs when on point you could forget to hit the zeiger (the meter maker’s name) when a punter gets in which would mean that you would do a stalker as you duck and dive through the Dirty Dozen in Soho.

Many nicknames for the destinations and ranks seem to have fallen into disuse: The lines of cabs that once marked The Ditch (Fleet Street) are no longer needed. The punning and disinformation terms have fallen out of favour. Bishopsgate: the Athenaeum wherein crowd the senior clergy; The Deaf and Dumb: the wartime ministry of information, The Flowerpot: Covent Garden market. Harley Street was The Resistance: as in fighting c. 1945 against the nascent NHS.

The Dirty Dozen refers to twelve streets that take you from Regent Street to Charing Cross Road without using Oxford Street: Crossrail has seen that one off. It’s a long time since anywhere in Soho qualified, as once did Archer Street, as Poverty Corner, the poverty presumably being that of the musicians who sought work there, rather than the drug dealers who traded amongst them. Admirals the name of Dolphin Square which has mansion blocks bearing the names of maritime heroes. Dead Zoo unsurprisingly refers to the Natural History Museum. Anyone who has been involved in lengthly litigation would like the name given to the home of many top solicitors’ offices Bedford Row – Shark’s Parade.

New ones have been invented The Wet Doughnut for the Diana memorial and the unlamented bendy-buses were dubbed sixty-foot accordions. The cab itself, better known as a sherbert (dab) has been given the moniker after a popular modern author Sandy McNab, while many of the old hands still refer to it by it Russian-Jewish name a droshky.

London cabbies once called the minicab men touts or scabs if they were illegal and little people if not. Now their cars are big and shiny, determine themselves as ‘private hire vehicles’ and pose as cut-price challenge the traditional cabbies. Do Addison Lee’s drivers have their own jargon? Is any among them likely to collect it? It is unlikely as has happened with the London Taxi profession.

Sarf London boy Graham Gates who passed The Knowledge in 1992 has continued compiling the original list started by Stuart Pessok and has written a book on this fascinating subject London Taxi Driver Slang published by Abson Books. Be Lucky!

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Is Cockney Rhyming Slang Really Dying or Is Someone Telling Porkies? (06.09.13)

A recent survey by the Museum of London suggests that the use of Cockney rhyming slang, a tradition which originated with the market traders and street vendors of London’s East End in Victorian times, is gradually dying out. As successive generations become attuned to different nuances of a constantly evolving language, it appears that Cockney rhyming slang has largely been superseded by the language of the internet age. Although immortalised in countless films, television programmes and written works it seems that Cockney rhyming slang, whilst still a recognisable mode of speech, is no longer regularly spoken even by East End Londoners themselves.

What is Cockney rhyming slang? Cockney rhyming slang involves the substitution of a common word with an alternative phrase that, in part, rhymes with the original word. The non-rhyming part of the phrase is then uttered in place of the original word, leaving the listener to work out what the speaker is referring to. For example, in Cockney rhyming slang the word ‘telephone’ is substituted for the phrase ‘dog and bone’. In usage, the phrase is shortened simply to ‘dog’. Therefore, in Cockney rhyming slang you might tell someone that you were going to telephone your wife by saying “I’m going to call my trouble on the dog”. (Trouble and strife = wife). Since a vast lexicon of Cockney rhyming slang phrases entered into common usage amongst East London’s tradesmen from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, conversations between those fluent in the language could be difficult to decipher by anyone not familiar with the practice. Opinions vary as to the purpose of Cockney rhyming slang; some believe that it enabled traders and criminals to discuss matters amongst themselves in a way that could not be understood by the casual listener, whilst others suggest that the adoption of a particular language register among a group of people acts as a means of strengthening and unifying the group. Or, it might simply have evolved to enable people to communicate more easily in the noisy environment of a crowded London marketplace.

The Evolution of Cockney Rhyming Slang Although its original purpose may have been lost, the appeal of Cockney rhyming slang sustained its continuing use and adaptation until well into the twentieth century. In their depiction of characters from the East End of London, television shows such as The Sweeney ( the title itself an example of rhyming slang for a unit of the Metropolitan police; ‘Sweeney Todd’ = ‘Flying Squad’), ‘Minder’ and ‘Only Fools and Horses’ popularised Cockney rhyming slang, spreading its appeal to a national rather than regional audience and prompting the expansion of its vocabulary with contemporary additions. Perhaps the best-known and most widely used modern example of a modern-day addition to Cockney rhyming slang is the phrase “It’s all gone a bit Pete Tong” whereby the famous dance DJ’s name popularly replaces the word ‘wrong’. Similarly, phrases such as ‘cream-crackered’ meaning ‘knackered’ (i.e. tired or worn out), ‘Barney Rubble’ for ‘trouble’ and ‘Hank Marvin’ for ‘starving’ have entered the public consciousness and remain in popular everyday use.

The Future of Cockney Rhyming Slang The findings of the Museum of London’s investigation into the currency of Cockney rhyming slang reveal that many people still recognise phrases that have entered into the widest usage throughout history, for example, ‘apples and pears’ for ‘stairs’, ‘plates of meat’ for ‘feet’ and ‘pork pies’ or ‘porkie pies’ for ‘lies’ but that this recognition no longer extends to actual regular usage of Cockney rhyming slang in speech, even among Londoners. Whilst new phrases have been introduced in the last two decades (‘Britney Spears’ for ‘beers’ for example) many of these new additions have failed to capture the wider public’s imagination suggesting that in the longer term, Cockney rhyming slang is losing its relevance for a contemporary and technologically literate generation. Sadly, it seems that where once we were having a ‘bubble bath’ (laugh), nowadays we’re content to LOL.