· Sky Pilot - The Padre - he's got his head in the clouds talking to his boss.
· Stripey - Sergeant.
· Teeny-weeny Airways - The Army Air Corps.
· Warry (or War-y) - aggressive, militaristic; can be an insult.
· Webbing - cotton for belt as worn by the type of ladies I never get to meet, and several dodgy RM types down Union St.
There are more than a hundred words for "police" in different glossaries.. And this is by no means a unique case. [21]
Names taken from the coloring of police clothes or the coloring of police cars:
blue boy, blue jeans, man-in-the-blue, salt and pepper, black and white, blue and white;
A female police officer:
girlie bear, honey bear, lady bear, mama bear, sugar bear,smokey beaver;
A city policeman or rural police:
citty kitty, country Joe, country mounty, little bear, local yokel;
state police:
boogey man, boy scouts, state bears, whatevers;barnies, bear, bearded bubby, big brother, bull, Dudley, do-right, Peter Rabbit;
An unmarked or hidden police car:
brown-paper bag, night crawler, pink panther, slick top, sneaky snake;
A radar unit:
shotgun, electric teeth, gunrunner, Kojak with a Kodak, smoke screen
A police helicopter:
bear in the air, eye in the sky, spy in the sky, tattle tale
There have found new expressions for an already established concept; such expressions that make them appear to be saying one thing while they are really communicating something very different to insiders.
While the origins of these slang terms are many and various, certainly a lot of English money slang is rooted in various London communities, which for different reasons liked to use language only known in their own circles, notably wholesale markets, street traders, crime and the underworld, the docks, taxi-cab driving, and the immigrant communities. London has for centuries been extremely cosmopolitan, both as a travel hub and a place for foreign people to live and work and start their own businesses. This contributed to the development of some 'lingua franca' expressions, i.e., mixtures of Italian, Greek, Arabic, Yiddish (Jewish European/Hebrew dialect), Spanish and English which developed to enable understanding between people of different nationalities, rather like a pidgin or hybrid English. Certain lingua franca blended with 'parlyaree' or 'polari', which is basically underworld slang.
Backslang also contributes several slang money words. Backslang reverses the phonetic (sound of the) word, not the spelling, which can produce some strange interpretations, and was popular among market traders, butchers and greengrocers.
Here are the most common and/or interesting British slang money words and expressions, with meanings, and origins where known. Many are now obsolete; typically words which relate to pre-decimalisation coins, although some have re-emerged and continue to do so.
Some non-slang words are included where their origins are particularly interesting, as are some interesting slang money expressions which originated in other parts of the world, and which are now entering the English language. [9, 15 ].
Here are some examples of money slang words:
archer = two thousand pounds (?2,000), late 20th century, from the Jeffrey Archer court case in which he was alleged to have bribed call-girl Monica Coughlan with this amount.
ayrton senna/ayrton = tenner (ten pounds, ?10) - cockney rhyming slang created in the 1980s or early 90s, from the name of the peerless Brazilian world champion Formula One racing driver, Ayrton Senna (1960-94), who won world titles in 1988, 90 and 91, before his tragic death at San Marino in 1994.
bag/bag of sand = grand = one thousand pounds (?1,000), seemingly recent cockney rhyming slang, in use from around the mid-1990s in Greater London; perhaps more widely too.
bar = a pound, from the late 1800s, and earlier a sovereign, probably from Romany gypsy 'bauro' meaning heavy or big, and also influenced by allusion to the iron bars use as trading currency used with Africans, plus a possible reference to the custom of casting of precious metal in bars.
bender = sixpence (6d) Another slang term with origins in the 1800s when the coins were actually solid silver, from the practice of testing authenticity by biting and bending the coin, which would being made of near-pure silver have been softer than the fakes.
bees (bees and honey) = money. Cockney rhyming slang from the late 1800s. Also shortened to beesum (from bees and, bees 'n', to beesum).
big ben - ten pounds (?10) the sum, and a ten pound note - cockney rhyming slang.
boodle = money.
bunce = money, usually unexpected gain and extra to an agreed or predicted payment, typically not realised by the payer.
cabbage = money in banknotes,
carpet = three pounds (?3) or three hundred pounds (?300), or sometimes thirty pounds (?30). This has confusing and convoluted origins, from as early as the late 1800s: It seems originally to have been a slang term for a three month prison sentence, based on the following: that 'carpet bag' was cockney rhyming slang for a 'drag', which was generally used to describe a three month sentence; also that in the prison workshops it supposedly took ninety days to produce a certain regulation-size piece of carpet; and there is also a belief that prisoners used to be awarded the luxury of a piece of carpet for their cell after three year's incarceration. The term has since the early 1900s been used by bookmakers and horse-racing, where carpet refers to odds of three-to-one, and in car dealing, where it refers to an amount of ?300.
chip = a shilling (1/-) and earlier, mid-late 1800s a pound or a sovereign. According to Cassells chip meaning a shilling is from horse-racing and betting. The association with a gambling chip is logical. Chip and chipping also have more general associations with money and particularly money-related crime, where the derivations become blurred with other underworld meanings of chip relating to sex and women (perhaps from the French 'chipie' meaning a vivacious woman) and narcotics (in which chip refers to diluting or skimming from a consignment, as in chipping off a small piece - of the drug or the profit).
clod = a penny (1d). Clod was also used for other old copper coins. From cockney rhyming slang clodhopper (= copper).
coal = a penny (1d). Also referred to money generally, from the late 1600s, when the slang was based simply on a metaphor of coal being an essential commodity for life. The spelling cole was also used.
cock and hen = ten pounds. The ten pound meaning of cock and hen is 20th century rhyming slang. Cock and hen - also cockerel and hen - has carried the rhyming slang meaning for the number ten for longer. Its transfer to ten pounds logically grew more popular through the inflationary 1900s as the ten pound amount and banknote became more common currency in people's wages and wallets, and therefore language. Cock and hen also gave raise to the variations cockeren, cockeren and hen, hen, and the natural rhyming slang short version, cock - all meaning ten pounds.
commodore = fifteen pounds (?15). The origin is almost certainly London, and the clever and amusing derivation reflects the wit of Londoners: Cockney rhyming slang for five pounds is a 'lady', (from Lady Godiva = fiver); fifteen pounds is three-times five pounds (3x?5=?15); 'Three Times a Lady' is a song recorded by the group The Commodores; and there you have it: Three Times a Lady = fifteen pounds = a commodore. (Thanks Simon Ladd, Jun 2007)
cows = a pound, 1930s, from the rhyming slang 'cow's licker' = nicker (nicker means a pound). The word cows means a single pound since technically the word is cow's, from cow's licker.
deep sea diver = fiver (?5), heard in use Oxfordshire late 1990s, this is rhyming slang dating from the 1940s.
dosh = slang for a reasonable amount of spending money, for instance enough for a 'night-out'. Almost certainly and logically derived from the slang 'doss-house', meaning a very cheap hostel or room, from Elizabethan England when 'doss' was a straw bed, from 'dossel' meaning bundle of straw, in turn from the French 'dossier' meaning bundle.
dough = money. From the cockney rhyming slang and metaphoric use of 'bread'.
dunop/doonup = pound, backslang from the mid-1800s, in which the slang is created from a reversal of the word sound, rather than the spelling, hence the loose correlation to the source word.
flag = five pound note (?5), UK, notably in Manchester.The word flag has been used since the 1500s as a slang expression for various types of money, and more recently for certain notes. Originally (16th-19thC) the slang word flag was used for an English fourpenny groat coin, derived possibly from Middle Low German word 'Vleger' meaning a coin worth 'more than a Bremer groat' (Cassells).
flim/flimsy = five pounds (?5), early 1900s, so called because of the thin and flimsy paper on which five pound notes of the time were printed.
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