While much has been written on the linguistic and sociolinguistic features of rhyming slang, the literature on the subject remains remarkably silent on its socio-geographical distribution in Ireland. Building on the findings of an article published by the author in 2004, this new study moves the analysis on to consider the recent growth of rhyming slang in the language of the young generation living on the Southside of Dublin. More generally, this article seeks to demonstrate that, far from having disappeared from Dublin usage, this kind of slang is in fact gaining substantial ground in the speech of the capital.

Since the coronavirus outbreak began to spread worldwide in the early months of 2020, English speakers have been coming up with new names for the disease at a rate of knots. The myriad unofficial synonyms for COVID-19 that we currently have at our disposal provide an extreme example of overlexicalisation, and it is not so much the number that is impressive as the sheer speed at which they have been coined. This study is based on a personally compiled corpus of tweets covering the period from late January to late May 2020 and aims to work out what mechanisms underpin the creation and use of some two hundred and seventy synonyms, paying particular attention to the role of slang, wordplay, verbal humour, bigotry and xenophobia. The author identifies and discusses a set of categories that help to better understand the attitudes behind these words, some of which bespeak a desire to confront the grim reality of disease, while others – the majority, in fact – seek to denigrate and stigmatise its “ideal victims” (the baby boomers) or its “evil perpetrators” (the Chinese). In a different context, this study might be deemed just a celebration of the creative levity and wit of English speakers when faced with adversity. In these dark times, it is also a sad testimony to how some of our primitive fears have come to be reflected in our pandemic lexicon.

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A report on, and a glossary of, imaginative usage in the world of drug-taking.

Knowledge of how rhyming slang works has often led scholars and laypeople to assume, without a shred of evidence, that many words of unknown derivation have their origins in this form of slang. Some of these assumptions are based on the premise that, if two synonymous words or phrases rhyme, one of them must derive from the other, while others hinge on the supposed existence of a full form whose second element helps unravel the puzzle. This tendency to folk-etymologise by resorting to rhyme is also reflected in many terms resulting from a conflation of a non-rhyming slang word and an underlying rhyme, the former usually being regarded as an elliptical version of the full rhyming slang term, rather than one of its etymons. Drawing on data from a range of primary and secondary sources, this article examines the inner workings of a number of false but widely entertained rhyming slang etymologies and shows how some of the mechanisms that triggered them have long been used in the creation of genuine folk-etymological elaborations.