Cockney Rhyming Slang
Meaning
This is actually a slang in which writers replace the words with any phrase which rhymes.
Origin
This phrase was used by Hugh Bigot, Earl of Norfolk:
Was I in my castle at Bungay,
Fast by the river Waveney,
I would not care for the king of Cockney;
The first rhyming slang that could be traced was by Edward Jerringham Wakefield’s in Adventures in New Zealand, 1845:
“The profound contempt which the whaler expresses for the ‘lubber of a jimmy-grant’, as he calls the emigrant.”
The systematic record was in ‘The Vulgar Tongue by Ducange Anglicus. Anglicus includes these example in 1857:
Apple and Pears, stairs.
Barnet-Fair, hair.
Bird-lime, time.
Lath-and-plaster, master.
Oats and chaff, footpath.