I don’t know. Jimmy Nail is a Geordie, however, and maybe “Nail” comes closer to rhyming with “hell” in a Geordie accent (and thus how he himself would have said it) than it does in most dialects of English - just a WAG. (I am pretty sure they do not come close to rhyming in Cockney itself.)
I just finished reading **Call The Midwife **and there is a fairly meaty section in the appendix about Cockney - the difficulty in putting the accent in writing but a lot more besides.
heh, i’ve NEVER understood this.
It is difficult to put any accent in writing really, unless the reader already knows how it should sound.
Nah. “Nail” and “hell” aren’t any nearer to rhyming in Geordie than they are in any other accent.
Cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk also lists “Jimmy Nail” as rhyming slang for “email” and “jail”. I suspect that, somewhere along the line, someone’s typo has substituted “hell” for “hail”.
I’ve seen the “plaster / Aris”, etc., rigmarole in Bryson’s book, and concur with you both: Bryson quite often seems not to give a damn about the truth, if it impedes his being funny and / or attracting attention; and the whole thing appears wildly complicated and convoluted. Also – perhaps I’m being patronisingly classist here; but I’d reckon the makers of Cockney rhyming slang, as mostly poorly-educated types: I’d I’d imagine that there would be few of them, to whom the name Aristotle meant anything.
There comes to mind, something a bit similar, though it’s not directly rhyming slang as such – and I forget where I came across it, but I don’t think it was from Bryson… the IMO least unlikely explanation I’ve found, for the Australian slang word “Pommy” or “Pom”, for an “incomer” from Britain.
I gather that many of the criminals transported to Australia two-centuries-plus ago, were Londoners; this having an effect on the local variety of English which grew up – including the Australian accent having some derivation from the Cockney accent of those times. The P-word: supposedly a product of the Cockney love of wordplay, as shown in genuine rhyming slang. Taking off from “immigrant”, as applied to a non-convict, voluntary British settler in Australia, arriving there later than the convicts; that word corrupted to the name of an imaginary guy, Jimmy Grant; that corrupted again to “pomegranate”; and shortened to “Pommy”, shortenable still further to “Pom”.
The main possible question-mark I see to that one is, once again, possibly down to snobbery on my part: one wonders whether former London low-lifes would have heard of such a thing as a pomegranate…?
Thoughts about this derivation, on the part of of any Australian participants, would be interesting.
I have always vaguely assumed that the Australian “pommie” had something to do with the French pomme (apple) - that the English were being called apple eaters, or something. (Now I have articulated that, it does not seem very plausible.)
As for pomegranates, are they perhaps grown in Australia, perhaps even around the Botany Bay area? I should have thought the climate might be suitable for them. If so, they might have been familiar to the Australians even if they were not initially familiar to the English lowlifes who were the ancestors of many of them.
“Pom” for an Englishman is not recorded before the early twentieth century; long after the convict era had ended.
Pomegranates grow readily in Australia, and I doubt they were a rarity a hundred years ago. But, even if they were regarded as slightly foreign, might that not intensify a pomegranate/immigrant allusion?
In small pockets. Cockney culture really dates back to London market life (cockney = a costermonger, which is an itinerant market trader common in London ‘back in the day’). You can visit some traditional old markets, such as Billingsgate fish market and find it populated by traders who would certainly walk and talk like a cockney of your imagination.
There’s this notion that a true Cockney must be born with the sound of Bow Bells – the bells of St Mary Le Bow in Cheapside in the City of London, a very small area. This area is now London’s equivalent of Wall Street and is full of offices, so you would really struggle to find anyone who has been born there in the last 50 years, much less a traditional market trader.
The cockney culture is kept alive by the Pearly Kings and Queens – a charity group that dress up in decorated suits of pearl buttons (it is worth checking the link to see the outfits), sing traditional songs, turn up at fairs and processions and collect money for London’s poor. The founder of the Pearly Kings was a costermonger, and the title of ‘king’ and ‘queen’ is passed down through the old east end families.
“Pom” is one of those words for which I fear the true etymology has gone the way of the Tasmanian Tiger and no-one really knows any more.
One of the folk explanations I’ve heard is that the convicts had jackets with “POHM” (Prisoner of His/Her Majesty) emblazoned on the back, but that never happened (the convicts who were uniforms had broad arrows stamped on them), so that’s not correct.
I’ve heard the Pomegranate/Immigrant connection before too, sometimes with an addendum about the British arrivals rapidly turning red (like pomegranate seeds) from spending so much time in the sun (London not being noted for its regularly sunny and smog-free weather the way Australia was/is). The similar version of “Pom” coming from the French “pomme” (apple) (which were typically red, much as the immigrants because from spending too much time in the sun) also seems unlikely because, among other things, the sort of people living in Australia at the time weren’t generally noted for their Francophone tendencies.
The short answer is: No-one knows for sure but I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere along the line it was a corruption of a (possibly not very complimentary) Aboriginal word.
An interesting datapoint: Brits are (usually affectionately) known as “Poms” in New Zealand too, which is noted for neither a convict heritage or its expansive pomegranate plantations; the term undoubtedly made its way across the Tasman from Australia.
CRS was supposed to be a way for minor criminals to discuss their exploits without being understood. This seems unlikely.
There was a tendency, in the first half of the last century, for groups to make up their own languages as a form of self identity. If you think that CRS is obscure, try polari. This was a ‘language’ widely used by homosexual men, and while some words are totally obscure, they borrowed from many other languages, mainly Italian. Here is a small sample
batt = shoe;
bevvy = drink (or possibly an abbreviation of beverage, or both);
bijou = small;
bimbo = dupe, sucker;
bona = good;
camp = excessive or showy or affecting mannerisms of the opposite sex;
charper = to search (leading to charpering
omi = policeman);
dolly = nice or pleasant;
dona = woman (hence the Australian slang word donah);
drag = clothes (and so possibly via the gay world to the informal but widespread use meaning to dress in the clothes of the opposite sex)
You can see that many have entered the general vocabulary.
See here for more info. http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/polari.htm
Try translating this:
As feely homies, we would zhoosh our riahs, powder our eeks, climb into our bona new drag, don our batts and troll off to some bona bijou bar.
I think the word comes from Arras, the French area which was on the Western Front in WW1. A derivation of of the English slang word"arse".
Again. it’s just speculative, but it has been suggested that British emigrants to Australia rapidly turned a pomegranate colour after being exposed to the sun.
BTW, not an Aussie, but a fan of Bill Bryson:)
Hmmm. Not too sure about this. Although I’d be surprised if the typical Cockney had a close familiarity with Aristotle’s work, I wouldn’t be surprised if they recognised his name which, after all, is all that’s required to use it in a rhyme.
It’s not the only example of a classical reference in CRS either… cf. Brahms and Liszt.
“Aris” or “arris” is certainly quite well known to mean “arse”, but taking it one step further to “plaster” seems a bit of a stretch. I think it helps that “arris” is so similar to “arse” in the first place - kind of a double joke.
bob++, you might know this… Wasn’t there a BBC radio or perhaps TV show where they got away with a lot of quite near-the-knuckle stuff by slipping in some polari? (fnar)
I think that would be Julian and Sandy on Round The Horne (Horn?)…am American who has never heard the show, but i think there was a BBC podcast re Polari that referenced it…
Aha! Thank ye!
Just Googled “round the horne polari” and it’s returned a few likely looking hits.
Thanks, to all commenters !
With the fruit thus easily grown in Australia – and the whole thing seen as coming about long after convict times – “I get you”. I’ve perhaps been fixating on the accounts often heard, of the first convict settlements: their being pathetically ill-conceived, and poorly equipped to support themselves in any way or grow anything, let alone exotic luxury fruits.
If only the poor old Tazzy Tiger might be – against most hope and probability – discovered still alive and well in the wild: I’d value that far above learning the true-and-for-certain derivation of “Pom” !
The general picture I get, is that acronym-based folk etymology from any time predating World War II, is almost certain to be fallacious.
It would seem indeed that probably we’ll never know for sure, about this one !
Plaster of Paris / Arras – with a “French connection” to boot – one to like ! It’s generally felt that the simpler explanation for something, is likelier to be right, than the more abstruse and complicated one.
My sentiments about Bryson are of the “little girl with the little curl” kind.
I’d like to feel that I was wrong in my cultural snobbery. I do wonder, though – Brahms and Liszt – maybe invented in recent decades by switched-on educated types; becoming popular subsequently, among less cultivated folk who had never before heard of the musical gents concerned? (As ever, I’d be glad to be found wrong.)
While the derivation of “Pom” may be lost, all Aussies have no doubt what it means now. Soap avoiding, crooked toothed, pasty, flabby, whinging citizen of England.
Which reminds me, the 3rd test starts Friday and we’re 2 nil up.
Looking forward to sitting back in front of the idiot box, putting up the plates and having a few brittainy’s watching the Poms get FUBAR’d:D
You can listen to an edition of Round the Horne right now over streaming audio, if you like. BBC Radio 4 Extra (essentially a web based streaming station) is currently “broadcasting” an episode every week (and it remains available for a week after the original webcast). Every show has a Julian and Sandy sketch, with the polari, as the last major segment. Normally, Julian and Sandy have a business called “Bona [something or other]”, and Kenneth Horne, as the straight (in both senses) man attempts to use their services and gets mercilessly sent up. Julian is played by Hugh Paddick and Sandy by Kenneth Williams, both of them were gay, as was the show’s chief writer, Barry Took. Williams would also occasionally slip a bit of polari in elsewhere in the show.