Odd English words are doing the rounds

The English language is a beautiful thing if you hear it spoken correctly by native English speakers.

- Birjees Hussain

Most will use Cambridge and Oxford educated individuals as prime examples of well-spoken words. But there have always been two distinct forms of English. The posh kind and the cockney accent riddled with Cockney rhyming slang.

The age-old slang that most British English speakers are aware of are phrases like ‘trouble and strife’ for wife, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, ‘dog and bone’ for phone, ‘mince pies’ for eyes and to ‘take a gander’ for ‘to take a look’. There are, of course others, that are often mistaken for slang but they're not.

A very good example is ‘mind your Ps and Qs’. This is a generally accepted idiom where the ‘P’ stands for ‘pleases’ and the ‘Q’ for ‘thank yous’. Even the most educated person might use this idiom, but they'd never use slang except in jest.

But sadly the English language is evolving, and not in a good way. Whereas in times gone by the evolution seemed acceptable because it made sense, nowadays new slang and strange vernacular has arisen mostly at the hands of little kids in school or teens with nothing better to do.