EVER cosmopolitan, we sought last week to reposition the Great Dialect Discourse with a few references to the mesmeric delights of Cockney rhyming slang.

Hard upon John Thaw's passing, Alan Hogg in Durham recalls a favourite line from The Sweeney - "You come in 'ere flashing your 'ampsteads" - whilst Redcar and Cleveland Council leader David Walsh is much taken by references to Prince Philip as the Big Bubble.

Confused? Hampsteads = Hampstead Heath = teeth; bubble = bubble and squeak = Greek.

David also recalls that in his misspent teenage years in London people would leave the bar for a snakes, or sometimes even for a pony.

The first lesson complete, readers must work out the last two for themselves.

FURTHER education is available on a rhyming slang link to the Sweeney website - www.thesweeney.com

Some is still fairly elementary - titfer = tit for tat = hat; boat = boat race = nice legs; porkies = pork pies = lies - others refer to people and places.

A ruby = Ruby Murray = curry and a Vera (with which to wash it down) is a gin for reasons which should not now need explanation; Duke is rent (Duke of Kent), a Desmond is a jacket (after Desmond Hackett, a one-time Daily Express journalist) and Gregory = Gregory Peck = neck.

A Peckham (as in Peckham Rye) is something to wear round your Gregory, your Barnet (as in Barnet Fair) may be your crowning glory and Chalfonts (as in Chalfont St Giles) may be something altogether more painful.

Some of it is A-level stuff, like "aris" - a favourite, memory suggests, of the emaciated old man Steptoe. Aristotle, it transpires, is rhyming slang for bottle (and glass). "Glass" in those parts is pronounced as in "farce".

Bottle and glass? Just think of old man Steptoe.

NONE of that Cockney crammer may be adequate preparation, however, for the lesson set by retired teacher Jack Thornback, 50 years exiled to Chester-le-Street and still affectionately known thereabouts as the Cockney Git.

Jack recalls a talk he gave many years ago to Durham Referees' Society - "what it had to do with football or refereeing I really don't know" - in which he committed a sort of rhyming slang-bang on the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Translation notes are at the foot of the column but, helped so far up the Great North Road, readers may wish to stand on their own plates.

This geezer goes for a ball down the frog to the rubber for a glass of pig's. As he turned the johnny, two teas set on him and knocked him into the stammer.

They hit him in the minces, the I suppose and in the north, broke his Hampsteads and punched him in the derby. They half inched his bees and tom and scarpered.

One of his own chinas came along, took a butcher's and scarpered. Then a grass arrived. He also took a butcher's and then scarpered. A bit later a fourby came along, went over to the geezer, got him on his plates and took him to his own house.

There he cleaned him up, took off his whistle, dicky and daisies, carried him up the apples, put him into his own uncle and looked after him until he was better.

Who was the real china to this geezer? "The fourby, of course," came the reply."

MICHAEL Hunt has rung with a linguistic puzzle of a rather different measure: what of "the whole nine yards"?

It's not only the title of a new Alan Titchmarsh-type series on Tyne Tees Television - a gardener called Simon Cross being up front out the back - but a tolerably well known phrase, meaning to give it everything.

"The sort of thing I first read in Ed McBain detective novels," says Michael from Low Pittington, near Durham.

He'd no idea of its origin, however. Neither had the column, neither had Paula Marshall, the series producer.

Possibly something to do with golf, she suggested, and - as if that weren't improbable enough - second-guessed that it might have been the nine yards long ammunition belt carried by British soldiers.

If they carried nine yards of ammunition, observes Michael, they wouldn't be able to walk.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable was unhelpful; even the Oxford English Dictionary offered no suitable yardstick. Finally and for the usual fee - a ham and peas pudding sandwich in the Brit - we persuaded Mr Chris Willsden into the branch library.

Finally, famously, he emerged triumphant: nine cubic yards is the capacity of a standard cement mixer: something concrete to go on at last.

AAPPROPRIATELY headlined "A load of nonsense", last week's Gadfly pronounced itself a column for silly Billies - "as Mr Denis Healey would have observed".

No he wouldn't. Eric Smallwood in Middlesbrough saw a recent Mike Yarwood appreciation programme in which Yarwood and Healey agreed that the former Chancellor had never used the phrase. Yarwood had simply made it up.

It was definitely Denis Healey, of course, who suggested to the House of Commons that being criticised by Sir Geoffrey Howe was akin to being savaged by a dead sheep. He will be affectionately remembered for it.

UNPROMPTED, the nonsense continues its absurd flow. Dave French in Hartlepool recalls the flea pit days of his sixpenny stalls youth, in which "Oh Susannah" seemed always to be playing in the background.

"George 'Gabby' Hayes played a mean version on the mouth organ while waiting for Randolph Scott to turn up," he remembers.

It was only later that he learned the unauthorised version, the second verse probably much the same as the first:

Oh it rained all night on the day I left,

The weather it was dry,

The sun so hot I froze to death,

Susannah don't you cry!

Oh Susannah, oh don't you cry for me...

And so, of course, it goes on.

THERE is more but it must wait its turn. Since one of her most affectionately remembered childhood nonsense rhymes involves buttered toast, however, Janet McCrickard in Darlington offers her favourite Jewish joke as well:

A Jewish woman is buttering toast when a slice flies off the plate and lands buttery side up. Breathlessly she runs to her Rabbi exclaiming that it's a miracle, but is gently counselled otherwise.

"I'm sorry Rebecca, it's no miracle," says the Rabbi. "You just buttered it on the wrong side."

The rhyming slang translation notes now follow. You'd never get stuff like this in the Currant.

Translation notes: ball/ball of chalk/walk; frog/frog and toad/road; rubber/rub-a-dub/pub; pig's/pig's ear/beer; johnny/johnny horner/corner; teas/tea leaves/thieves; stammer/stammer and stutter/gutter; minces/mince pies/eyes; I suppose/nose; north/north and south/mouth.

Hampsteads/Hampstead Heath/teeth; derby/derby Kelly/belly; half inch/pinch; bees/bees and honey/money; tom/tom foolery/jewellery; scarper/Scapa Flo/go; china/china plate/mate; butcher's/butcher's hook/ look; grass/grass hopper/copper; fourby/fourby two/Jew.

Plates/plates of meat/feet/ whistle/whistle and flute/suit; dickey/dickey dirt/shirt; daisies/daisy roots/boots; apples/apples and pears/stairs; uncle/Uncle Ned/bed.

Published: Wednesday, March 6, 2002