Pony up means to settle the bill, so you might think that we are back in the realm of Cockney slang with a Pony being East End parlance for £25, but only a few of the Cockney money denominations are rhyming slang – in fact, the expression “Pony up!” has nothing to do with this particular slang at all, but while we are here – let’s list those that are amounts, rhyming or not…
- £1 – Nicker/Nugget/Alan Whicker
- £5 – Deep Sea Diver/Lady Godiva
- £10 – Ayrton Senna/Cock and Hen/Cockle
- £20 – Score
- £25 – Pony
- £50 – Bullseye
- £100 – Ton
- £500 – Monkey
- In fact, Pony and Monkey are thought to have come from British soldiers returning from India where the Old Indian rupee banknotes had animals on them and it is said that the 500 rupee note had a monkey on it and the 25 rupee note featured a pony.
However, the expression “Pony up!”, mostly, but not exclusively, an American phrase, in use since the 19th century, comes from the Latin saying “Legem pone mihi Domine viam iustificationum tuarum” “Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy statutes” and since this expression is used in reference to March 25th – a traditional day for settling debts, this is a further pointer to a Pony being £25. According to Wiktionary, this etymology has been accepted by the American Heritage Dictionary. The Latin phrase is part of a psalm sung on the 25th and if debts were settled on that day, perhaps the association with pone is credible. Perhaps the British use of pony up, is a phrase that might have passed to us from our American cousins and maybe in the British imagination it has to do with Cockney slang for £25 – certainly that is what I thought until now…
In Cockney Rhyming Slang, pony has also become code for “rubbish” as in Pony and Trap – Crap!
The Cant languages listed below include Polari and here we are truly in the realm of secret languages. We saw the use of “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” under F, but here is a whole language to achieve the same aim – to hold a conversation without the meaning being detected by outsiders from an age when homosexuality was illegal in Britain and elsewhere. You can read more about Polari here, as well as the Wikipedia link below, and see a short film spoken in Polari here.
A Pipe Dream is a dream of, or plan, which is not likely to come to much. This is not the backwards-looking reverie of an old man (or woman) smoking a ruminative pipe in front of the fire, but the more sinister use of the Opium Pipe! There were in the US, and indeed any city that had a substantial Chinese population, in the second half of the 19th century, many opium dens and the effect of the drug, when smoked and probably when ingested as laudanum, was to promote dream-filled sleep. There is much debate about whether drugs, opium, marijuana or cocaine, promote creativity as many artists claim, or saps the will and lead merely to pipe dreams. I think the evidence is increasing that it adds nothing and takes away plenty…
from The Graphic (London) – 23rd October 1880
A Pig in a Poke refers to the practice of selling piglets at market in a sack or bag because otherwise, these energetically wriggling creatures would be too difficult to manage – so the buyer is buying sight unseen and this leads to the practice of substituting another small wriggly creature but of no financial worth – a cat instead of a piglet – hence the expression “Letting the cat out of the bag!” when the trick is revealed…
Cant Languages beginning with P, including Polari
- Padonkaffsky jargon (or Olbanian) from Runet, Russia
- Pig Latin
- Pitkernese
- Podaná, from Greece
- Pajubá, from Brazil a dialect of the gay subculture that uses African or African-sounding words as slang, heavily borrowed from the Afro-Brazilian religions
- Polari, a general term for diverse but unrelated groups of dialects used by actors, circus and fairground showmen, gay subculture, and the criminal underworld (criminals, prostitutes).