Cockney Rhyming Slang

Have you guys heard of Cockney Rhyming Slang?

Basically, it's this slang/word game that uses pairs of words to represent something else, with the second word in the pair rhyming with whatever you are referencing. The second word is then dropped, and the the first word is used in lieu of the original word. For instance, from the Wikipedia article, "Apples and pears" would represent "stairs", and you would say "Apples" for "stairs".


I don't really know why, but this is incredibly compelling to me. I am sitting here spending copious amounts of thought on this mental exercise. Of course, the exercise is not, as you might think, creating and decoding these terms, but rather, trying to figure out WHY IN THE HELL ANYONE WOULD EVER DO THIS AND DAMN THIS IS THE STUPIDEST THING I HAVE EVER HEARD OF.

Seriously, how arbitrary can you get? For example, I have just made up the following rhyme slang:

Bale of hay.

Now, this shortens down to

Bale.

Bale of what, though? If all I saw was "bale" I might think, bale of alfalfa, bale of tobacco, bale of wheat, or bale of hay.

Okay, lets say I want to brute force this. Lets say I start with "bale of wheat".

Bale of wheat could be:

seat
feet
feat
heat
peat
treat
beat
meat
neat
etc.

Next up I try the real deal, "bale of hay".

Bale of hay could be:

spay
may
day
nay
neigh
lay
ray
segway
pay
cray
say
way
quay
etc.

I can't really think of things for tobacco and alfalfa, so I'll leave them alone- my point still stands.

After this analyzation of the word "bale", I have come up with twenty-two different words that it could represent, with no guarantee that any of them is actually the word that I had originally chosen to form the rhyme and thus replacement word (in this case it was "segway").

Thus, I have scientifically proven that Cockney Rhyming Slang is the stupidest mental exercise ever created. If I ever hear a human using this kind of slang (and I'll know they are because I'll go, "What does that even mean?" and they'll say something like, "Hubble. Hubble Telescope. Nope. You are so stupid, obviously 'Hubble' means 'nope'"), I will kick them square in the balls. And balls here doesn't mean "Balls of wax, thus, backs", but, you know, testicles.