Most people know that rhyming slang is a colorful addition to British English, where someone says something that is not the intended word but rhymes with it. For example,
He was brown bread.
might be understood to mean
He was dead.
When I watch British films I hear a lot of it, and some of it I get and some of it I don't. Is the expectation that some of it will be deliberately obscure, or is it just that my American ears aren't attuned to it? Are the instances that appear in movies in common usage, and so understood right away, or are they often created on the spot, verbal riffs that the listener has to think about and may or may not understand?
Best Answer
I say it very much depends what Britons you are talking about. It is a dialectical style, found in a few places, but the most famous and that which tends to travel internationally is the East London, Cockney Rhyming Slang.
Now, most Londoners know a fair bit of it, growing up hearing it. But it depends what area of London you were brought up in, and more importantly what class you were. A lot of my friends use quite a bit of it, but not continuously like you see on films, it crops up as slang words, in the way that any other colloquialisms do.
Often, people do not know the etymology of the words they are using and do not know the rhyming part. Commonly used words such as barnet, boracic, china, cobblers, mickey, scarper and butchers are used frequently, but few know the rhyming component for them, they just use the words. Cobblers and mickey are more widely used than just London, not sure about the others.
As requested by Robusto, a brief set of rhyming expansions for the words I quoted above.
Hope that is of some interest to some of you, I do love etymology, particularly for obscure colloquialisms. :-)