Gates of Rome – Home. The giant gates (porta) built into the walls of ancient Rome would have beckoned in countless returning military heroes from far-off foreign lands.
Whether you’re a centurion or a Cockney barrow boy, home is always where the heart is.
CAT AND MOUSE – House
A natural choice of rhyme given that the two creatures often do battle for the same domestic space.
Here is a selection of words on a domestic theme.
* Apples and pears – stairs. One of those slang expressions that the world and his wife knows.
* Artful Dodger – lodger. Referencing the streetwise child pickpocket (real name Jack Dawkins) in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. His own lodgings, shared with the criminal gang managed by Fagin, were far from exemplary. Alternatively, Jolly Roger, after the skull-and-crossbones flag flown by pirate ships, perhaps implying a certain distrust of the stranger living in your property. The rhyme also harks back to the figure of Roger the Lodger, a popular personification of sexual voraciousness (‘roger’ being slang for the sex act). Take, for instance, the following limerick: ‘There was a young maid from Cape Cod / Who thought children came only from God. / ’Twas not the Almighty / Who pulled up her nightie, / ’Twas Roger the lodger, the sod.’
* Aunt Maria – fire (as in ‘source of domestic warmth’). Sometimes replaced by Ave Maria.
* Black Maria – fire (in the sense of an uncontrolled blaze). Black Maria is the name given to a police vehicle used for transporting prisoners. There is, thus, the idea here of a destructive fire started deliberately.
* Bob Hope – soap. Bob Hope was a comedian, actor and performer and one of the twentieth century’s biggest stars. He was born in Eltham, south London, moving to the USA only when he was four. Incidentally, his first show on American network radio was called the Woodbury Soap Hour.
* Bride and groom – broom. The rhyme may have taken some inspiration from the ritual traditional to several cultures of a bride and groom ‘jumping the broom’.
* Cain and Abel – table. A mid-Victorian rhyme recalling the sons of Adam and Eve, whose relationship ended in murder.
* Charley Mason – basin. It is not certain that the rhyme is based on any specific individual, though there was a Charlie Mason who played for Wolverhampton Wanderers in the 1880s, including the 1889 FA Cup final, and appeared for England three times.
* Dog and bone – telephone. Another of the classics of the rhyming slang lexicon. In the days before the world mumbled through mobiles, phone receivers did bear a passing resemblance to a bone. An alternative rhyme is trombone, an instrument which (with a little squinting) can claim a certain similarity to old-style telephones and also brings to mind another slang expression for the phone, the blower (see Percy Thrower, here).
* Duke of Kent – rent. After a man one might suspect does not have to overly worry about such matters. Alternatively, Burton on Trent after the town in Staffordshire with a long tradition of ale brewing. Here an association is thus forged between rent money and beer money.
* Enoch Powell – towel. Recalling the former Conservative MP whose name will forever be associated with the debate on immigration. In light of the provocative speech he made in 1968, perhaps he wanted his towel to mop up his predicted Rivers of Blood.
* Funny feeling – ceiling. Anyone who has ever laid on a bed a little the worse for wear and stared at the ceiling as the room spins around them will shudder at this rhyme.
* Harry Randall – handle. The same rhyme is used for a candle too. Randall, born in Holborn in 1857, was a music hall and pantomime star. His 1930 autobiography, Old Time Comedian, is considered one of the most enlightening insights into life on the vaudeville circuit ever written.
* Hat and scarf – bath (requiring the pronunciation ‘barf’). Perhaps harking back to the days when a dip in a lukewarm tin bath was the best many could hope for.
* Knobbly knee – key. Knobbly knees became a minor working-class obsession for a while in the twentieth century as the focus of seaside holiday camp competitions. An understandable rhyme, given the uneven profile of a key.
* Little brown jug – plug. No doubt originating from the drinking song written by Joseph Winner in 1869 in celebration of spousal alcohol abuse. Its lyrics include: ‘Me and my wife live all alone / In a little log hut we call our own; / She loves gin and I love rum, / And don’t we have a lot of fun! / Ha, ha, ha, you and me, / Little brown jug, don’t I love thee!’
* Little Nell – bell. Little Nell was Nell Trent, the tragic heroine of Charles Dickens’s 1841 novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, who ultimately suffers a death guaranteed to strain the readers’ tear ducts. The rhyme thus offers a pun on ‘knell’ and the solemn ringing of bells for a funeral.
* London Bridge – fridge. There can be no more London-y rhyme. Originally a wooden bridge was built by the Romans across the Thames around AD 50, it has been rebuilt and developed countless times since. The current incarnation was opened by Elizabeth II in 1972.
* Merry old soul – coal. A simple play on the nursey rhyme ‘Old King Cole’, with its lines: ‘Old King Cole was a merry old soul, / And a merry old soul was he.’
* Mona Lisa – freezer. The most recognizable painting on the globe, produced by Leonardo da Vinci between 1503 and 1519. An alternative rhyme is an even cooler customer, Julius Caesar, the brilliant military leader who expanded the Roman Empire’s dominance in Gaul and made the first incursions into Britain. He became a virtual dictator before his murder by political rivals on the Ides of March, 44 BC.
* Percy Thrower – blower (as in telephone). Thrower was a horticulturalist who gained wide exposure on various BBC shows, including Gardeners’ World and as the architect of the Blue Peter garden.
* Richard Burton – curtain. A rhyme most likely referring to the Welsh-born twentieth-century actor rather than the nineteenth-century English explorer. Burton the actor was a hell-raiser touched with genius who was nominated seven times at the Oscars but never won. He was five times married (twice to Elizabeth Taylor).
* Ronnie Biggs – digs (as in accommodation). Biggs is the Lambeth-born criminal best known for his involvement in the 1963 Great Train Robbery, in which over £2 million was stolen and the engine driver, Jack Mills, beaten with an iron bar. Biggs spent many years holed up in Brazil before returning to serve a portion of his prison sentence in 2001.
* Rory O’More – floor (and also door). Colonel Rory O’More was one of the leaders of the Irish Rebellion in 1641 and gives his name to a bridge in Dublin. The same name was also used for the hero of a ballad (1826) and novel (1837) by the Irish writer Samuel Lover,
* Semolina – cleaner. Paying homage to the wallpaper paste-like pudding made from milk, sugar and grain that has haunted countless childhoods over many centuries.
* Shovel and broom – room. A 1920s successor to the rhyme birch broom, which in days of yore would have been used to keep a house clean.
* Sir Walter Scott – pot. An unlikely commemoration of the great man of Scottish letters, though he did spend his last years in debt, a condition summed up in the phrase ‘without a pot to piss in’.
* Tommy Trinder – window. A rhyme demanding the Cockney pronunciation ‘winder’. Born in Streatham, south London, Trinder was a great of British comedy, his popularity peaking between the 1930s and 1950s. Also used (especially for windows plural and again relying on an adapted pronunciation) is Polly Flinders, star of the nursery rhyme that runs: ‘Little Polly Flinders / Sat among the cinders, / Warming her pretty little toes.’ (Polly Flinders is sometimes used as a rhyme for cinders too.)
* Trafalgar Square – chair. Trafalgar Square is perhaps the most famous of all London squares and is home to Nelson’s Column, a fitting monument to the great Admiral’s victory against the Napoleonic forces at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Having stood atop his column since 1843, Nelson might himself fancy a chair and a five-minute sit-down. An alternative rhyme is Vanity Fair after the 1848 novel by W. M. Thackeray.
* Uncle Ned – bed. A rhyme that also suggests the metaphorical description of sleep as ‘the Land of Nod’. Cain fled to the original Land of Nod, according to the Book of Genesis, after killing Abel.
* Vancouver – hoover (as in the eponymic brand of vacuum cleaner). Vancouver is the largest city of the Canadian province of British Columbia.
* Weeping willow – pillow. One might easily imagine a quick forty winks beneath the pendulous branches of just such a tree on a river bank in summer time.
DOLLY VARDEN – Garden
Dolly is a character in Charles Dickens’s 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge (set at the end of the eighteenth century), the beautiful daughter of Gabriel and Martha Varden. In the 1870s there was a fad for retro women’s fashions during which time a certain sort of bustled, brightly coloured dress came to be known as a Dolly Varden. It inspired a song by Alfred Lee that contained the following lines: ‘Have you seen my little girl? She doesn’t wear a bonnet. / She’s got a monstrous flip-flop hat with cherry ribbons on it. / She dresses in bed furniture just like a flower garden / A blowin’ and a growin’ and they call it Dolly Varden.’ An alternative, and rather less interesting, rhyme is beg your pardon.
* April showers – flowers. Recalling the old maxim ‘April showers bring May flowers.’
* Baden-Powell – trowel. Born in Paddington, London in 1857 Robert Baden-Powell was the British hero of Mafeking, the founder of the Cub Scout movement and a man who truly understood the joys of the great outdoors.
* Lord Lovell – shovel. The rhyme possibly refers to the ballad Lord Lovel, which first appeared in print around 1770. Alternatively, it might relate to the English aristocratic Lovell family. Francis, 1st Viscount Lovell was a noted ally of Richard the Third.
* Old iron and brass – grass. Recalling the memorable chant of the rag and bone man, preserved for ever in the music hall song ‘Any Old Iron’, written by Charlie Collins, E.A. Sheppard and Fred Terry.
* Uncles and aunts – plants.
SLANG IN ACTION
The mortgage was so much on our cat that we had to get an artful. A nice chap – always keeps his shovel neat. Only, one day he left the toaster on and it started a black. He was in the hat at the time, up the apples. The smoke was so bad he had to jump out of a tommy. He squashed all my aprils and uncles in the dolly. So we’ve put his duke up from next month.
Translation
The mortgage was so much on our house that we had to get a lodger. A nice chap – always keeps his room neat. Only, one day he left the toaster on and it started a fire. He was in the bath at the time, up the stairs. The smoke was so bad he had to jump out of a window. He squashed all my flowers and plants in the garden. So we’ve put his rent up from next month.