DOES ANYONE STILL USE THE SLANG?

Confused? Don’t worry – most Londoners would also be mystified if you came up and told them of these dinner plans with your best Dick Van Dyke impression. For contrary to the ideas those 1960s films give other countries about London, the vast majority of natives do not speak like Victorian chimney sweeps. Indeed, it is debatable whether Cockney rhyming slang has ever really been used in normal conversation. East London market traders did use it in the mid-1800s, and while it might have spread to the other inhabitants of the city, artistic license has since established a probable fiction as certain fact. A hundred and fifty years later, the whole of London is still assumed be ordering “rubies on the dog” and eating them with their “trouble and china”.