Over Easter weekend in 2015 burglars broke into the vault of a London safe deposit establishment and stole millions in cash and jewelry.  The police identified the villains quickly and made secret audio recordings of them.  Among other things they picked up a boast from the sixty-year-old Daniel Jones: “The biggest cash robbery in history at the time and now the biggest tom history in the fucking world, that’s what they are saying.”  By “tom history” he meant “tom robbery history,” but what does “tom” itself mean?  It’s another term for “ice” or “sparklers” (as people used to say) or “bling” (as they say now), that is, for jewelry.  “Tom” is short for “tomfoolery,” and “tomfoolery” rhymes with “jewelry.”  What we have here, recorded on the police tapes, is rhyming slang.

Criminals have long used rhyming slang, and that includes American criminals.  In Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel The Dain Curse, a character refers to “dice” as “rats and mice.”  Still, rhyming slang has usually been associated with London’s East End, hence been called Cockney rhyming slang.  It’s a variety of canting language, a way for speakers in a group to hide meaning from those not in the group—a “cryptolect,” to use the technical term.  If you were an old-fashioned Cockney like Daniel Jones and you wanted to refer to your wife, you might say “storm and strife”; referring to your feet, “plates of meat”; referring to your head, “loaf of bread”; referring to your shoes, “rhythm and blues.”  Then, further to obfuscate the message, you might omit the second, rhyming part of the phrases: “I complained to the storm about me plates and she told me to use me loaf for once and get new rhythms.”  Lexicographers, for example Eric Partridge in the Historical Dictionary of Slang, 1972, have studied rhyming slang in depth, tracing its origins to the East End in the 1840s.  It’s been noted how often rhyming slang refers to specific localities in London—the suburb “Peckham Rye” (see stet) stands in for “necktie”—and how quickly it responds to pop celebrity, as with “Britany Spears” standing in for “beers.”  In the United States, it’s possible that “bread” in the sense “money” comes from rhyming slang (“bread and honey”), though the OED is non-committal on this.

To hear rhyming slang in operation, go to British crime films like Sexy Beast or The Limey, or better yet Guy Ritchie’s 1998 comic, foul-mouthed take on the genre, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which features a sequence set in a nuclear sub
(= “pub”) where various low-life types order up an Aristotle ( = “bottle”) and get into fights.  Have a butcher’s ( = “have a butcher’s hook” = “take a look”) at the sequence, which helpfully includes subtitles: