British state, public and political figures of the late 20th - early 21st century in rhyming slang

Abstract

The article aims at providing an adequate linguistic and sociocultural description of rhyming slang based on the use of the names of prominent British government and public figures and politicians, who were widely represented in the British media at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, and are thus included in modern cultural collective memory of the carriers of the English lingual culture. The rhymes contain precedents of onyms − the personal names of well-known, fashionable, popular, or scandalous politicians. The noted tendency of the preferred creation of new rhymes, exploiting the precedent onyms, has become dominant in the development of rhyming slang at the turn of the century. The emergence of rhyming slang units based on the use of the precedent names of politicians and statesmen is a relatively new and insufficiently studied phenomenon while onomastic rhymes that exploit the names of celebrities from the world of cinema, pop music, popular culture and sports are more common and are better studied. The article contains the rhymes that have not yet been recorded in authoritative slang dictionaries. They surely deserve linguistic and sociocultural descriptions.

The authors focused on a special and research-promising layer of vocabulary that reflects the sociocultural and historical items in the context of the so-called cultural literacy and is of certain value from the point of view of culture-oriented linguistics, cross-cultural communication and the general study of culture.

The results of the research can be useful and interesting for specialists who develop topics of cross-cultural communication, culture-oriented linguistics, linguistic culturology, euphemy, contrastive linguistics of the English and Russian languages.