People outside England will probably assume Cockney Rhyming Slang is one of those things that nobody actually uses anymore and is just done in bad films to play up Englishness and to invoke a feeling of London... but it's actually pretty common to hear people using it naturally and un-ironically in speech here - especially examples like 'I haven't got a Scooby, mate' or 'let's go for a Ruby after this'.
I'm not a Londoner, I come from further south, in an area that has an almost "Received Pronunciation" way of speaking.
When I moved to the US, I discovered I used two bits of it really often. "Scooby", that you mentioned, and "Butchers". Butchers Hook -> Look, e.g. "If you can give me a couple of minutes, I'll take a butchers at it, see if I can see what's going on".
I had to break out of that habit fairly quickly, cut down on a bunch of confusion for folks. A coworker at the time half-jokingly commented that he didn't understand half the things I said, but always figured it out from context.
This reminds me of Ocean's Eleven, where everyone in the group effortlessly understood the Chinese member, but noone understood the British member when he said stuff like "We're in Barney" which he had to explain as "you know, Barney Rubble, trouble".
A second-level joke is that in reality "barney" is slang for "argument" or "fight", which British slang got from Australia in the 1920s according to Partridge. Its introduction to Britain pre-dates the invention of the cartoon character by about four decades.
In sporting slang from the century before, it used to mean a race/fight/contest that had been fixed or that was in some way unfair, a swindle.
"Butchers" was the word that made me realise how much Cockney Rhyming Slang I used and why it was not always appropriate. I had a Polish housemate and needed to speak s-l-o-w-l-y in order to be understood. Having to spend time explaining what a butcher's hook was and what Cockney Rhyming Slang was, in a word - 'whoosh!'.
As the article states, multi-culturalism just leads to less use, and I am guilty of changing my ways to stay away from beloved terms, for instance 'Barnet'.
A variant of the phrase 'nicely chipped Barnet' can be used to acknowledge someone having a fresh haircut. Delivered with a nod and a smile this is neither a gushing compliment (to make them feel awkward) or ignorance of their fancy new hairdo. There is an aspect of friendliness and humour to it. It just breaks the ice. Of course this is lost on anyone from outside the UK (even Americans - as you discovered - although Australians and New Zealanders get with it).
As for Received Pronunciation, and 'almost'. That 'almost RP' is the pronunciation you want. RP isn't what it was, maybe Radio 4 English Accent is where it is today. People from all walks of life are okay with this 'posh' but not too posh accent. It is respectful of the person you are speaking with in much the same way as written English is respectful of the reader's time if you use spelling, punctuation and some structure.
With 'posh English' it has to be with the words Orwell would use - short ones rather than long ones. Yet we have a few people in public life such as the current Prime Minister who do the exact opposite, to bamboozle people with vocabulary, making them sound 'public school posh'.
I used to use Cockney Rhyming slang every day at work.
A fair few of the guys trading derivatives when I started were "locals" is two senses of the word: they were from London and they they traded as market makers.
You'd have special words for numbers like donkey and monkey. Combined with general market terms you'd say things like "I'll lift you for a donkey", IIRC meaning I'll buy 250 of those contacts.
Good question, it would be hidden. You'd ask a guy wtf "Lady Godiva" meant and he'd say "Fivah". The animals for numbers, I don't remember. Possibly some connection ages ago that you similarly needed to have the story for.
It is London slang, but it isn't necessarily Rhyming slang. In fact, these terms are generally understood to have originated as racing/bookmakers' slang, and go back to at least the end of the 18th century. This is a 19th century slang dictionary.
At first I was skeptical and assumed that you had not realized the parent comment to which I had replied. But I checked and was still skeptical when I checked 'monkey' but indeed there was an alternate definition that was numerical. However I can't find one for 'donkey'. But maybe the parent's memory is faulty or more recent slang has added these numerical denotations in a greater context than just the parent's past workplace.
One of those lemmata casts doubt on the veracity of "Port Out, Starboard Home." I also enjoyed the dual meanings of pot-walloper, similar to "cutting coupons" shifting semantics at opposite ends of the NRS social grades.
Is it the general "algorithm" that's still in use? Or is it more like there's a collection of known slang phrases, that happened to have been generated that way in the past, that are known and used.
For example, what's the newest example in use? For that matter, do people still use it as sort of a "puzzle" for their friends? Or do they mostly use phrases that are known by all already?
It’s a mix of known terms and newly invented ones. Obscure cultural references are popular, whether recent or not. My favorite... Jecklls = trousers. Reasoning thusly:
Jeckll from Jeckll and Hyde. Hyde rhymes with stride. Stride is Australian slang for trousers.
I explained this to a linguist at my university and she was beyond ecstatic.
That's excellent. Also normally I wouldn't care but because it's your favorite and you will probably have occasion to write it out again, it's spelled Jekyll. :)
There is 'Sherman' for an American which is Sherman Tank -> Yank. So that can only be WW2 onwards. And 'Ruby' for curry (Ruby Murray) is from the fifties. Those are the most recent I can think of.
In case anyone's wondering, Lionels -> Lionel Blair (a British entertainer of the 1970/80s) -> flairs
I used to row with a Cockney. He had a few good sayings. One of my favourites was "Woah, that got the strawberry goin'" (strawberry -> strawberry tart -> heart) which was visually appealing too.
For anyone like me wondering what these brits are on about, here’s a decoding:
“Scooby” => “Scooby Doo” => “Clue”, making
“I haven’t got a clue, mate”
“Ruby” => “Ruby Murray” => “curry”, making “let’s go for a curry after this”.
After dog detective scooby doo resolved to “clue” I was hoping that there was at least internal consistency between the rhyming phrase and the intended word, but as far as I can tell there is no relationship between a Northern Irish actress from the 1950’s and Indian cuisine.
