Now the streets will hear it and will use it: it is one of
Jock's souvenirs from his campaign.
I am afraid that another triviality which has hitherto been to the taste
only of the south of England is fated to "catch on," by means of the
same missionaries, from Land's End to John o' Groat's, and even in the
colonies. Rhyming slang is extraordinarily common in the army, so common
that it is used with complete unconsciousness as being correct
conversational English. My friend of the king-like toe spoke of his feet
as "plates of meat"--and this though he was an Australian, not a
cockney. If he had had occasion to allude to his leg he would probably
have called it "Scotch peg." A man's arm is his "false alarm"; his nose,
"I suppose"; his eye, "mince pie"; his hand, "German band"; his boot,
"daisy root"; his face "chevvy chase"; and so forth--an interminable
list. What exactly was the _raison d'etre_ of this pseudo-poetic mania I
do not know, but I suspect that it originated, in the distant past,
with the poverty of rhyme-invention on the part of the writers of the
cruder kind of pantomime songs--"round the houses," for example, being
both a rhyme to and a synonym for "trousies" (garments beloved of those
bards!)--and thus the vogue developed.
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