Double talk
A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative. LESS ... MORE
The use of language as a form of deliberate miscommunication
In a London pub I heard a man at the bar expressing displeasure about something or other, saying 'Up the Khyber'.
He wasn't talking about a trip he'd made to the mountain pass close to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border; he was using what is called Cockney rhyming slang to vent annoyance.
In the Cockney argot of London's East End, Khyber refers to a person's derriere, Khyber Pass rhyming with the vulgarism for one's bottom, or what in American English is called an ass.
Cockney rhyming slang is a coded language, or cryptolect, which is said to have originated in the 1840s among residents who lived 'within the sound of Bow Bells', referring to an area around the Church of Saint Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside.
The first published record of this form of double talk is the Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words, compiled in 1859 by James Camden Hotten.
Rhyming slang was devised as a coded sub-language, which only the initiated could understand, and which would be meaningless to unwanted outsiders and eavesdroppers, like policemen.
So, a 'tea leaf' means thief, and a 'pork pie' is a lie. With its misogynistic overtones, 'trouble and strife' stands for wife, and 'China', short for China plate, refers to a mate, an idiomatic term for a friend.
To compound confusion, the second word, which rhymes with what's being referred to, is often dropped. To say 'I'm going up the apples' means 'I'm going up the stairs', apples and pears chiming with stairs.
While Cockney slang has rhyme if not reason, similar double talk in other parts of the world has its own motivated reason, if not rhyme.
For instance, in India's political patois, 'urban Naxal' refers to anyone whose ideology is different from that of the speaker, an alternative trope being a 'subversive element'.
But perhaps the most confounding example of double talk, which is really doublespeak, is to be found in Pakistan, where the term 'freedom fighter' is a code term for terrorist, a word that does not exist in Islamabad's lexicon.
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