SUSIE DENT: Rhyming slang isn't brown bread - and it's all down to Kylie and Miley By Susie Dent Published: 00:00, 23 June 2024 | Updated: 00:05, 23 June 2024 e-mail View comments Last week I caught a Vincent thanks to a Miley Cyrus – though to be fair I’d been standing in a George and got myself into a right two-and-eight. I was already feeling a bit Moby while preparing to get on the Oxo after a business Ronan, but then my friend called on the dog and bone to say that she was too boracic to join me. My guess was that she’d been Santa’s grotto the night before.
Still, I put on my Posh and Becks and sent her some April showers before settling down to a Rosie Lee at the gates of Rome instead. My hunch is most of you will have automatically decoded a fair bit of the above, but if any of it felt baffling that’s a testament to the enduring power of Cockney rhyming slang – the coded banter and wordplay that has survived for centuries and was originally intended to be impenetrable to outsiders. But while there’s a new art installation in East London by Michael Landy designed to introduce the dialect to younger generations, is rhyming slang something from the good ol’ days that’s destined to become a linguistic fossil? Susie Dent: '‘Vincent’ and ‘Miley Cyrus’ are part of ‘popney’, a sub-category of Cockney from the early Noughties with rhymes based on the names of the famous A ‘Miley Cyrus’ is a virus and a ‘Vincent’ (van Gogh) a cough Susie Den.
