A far reach from Cockney to Chinook?

[David Robertson]

Hello, na shiks, pi lhush chxi san,

Qhata mayka?  I've been reading "A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang", a
compendium of the more or less secret language used by the Cockney English
people.  This was a book I'd picked up to entertain myself, and there's
plenty of humor in this slang, for example "plates of meat" means the
"feet" at the end of your legs.

But one item has intrigued me, in the strange way of sounding like a
Chinook Jargon phrase.

The Cockney phrase "carving knife" is or was used with a meaning "wife".
The phrase "charming wife" was the rhyming-slang equivalent of "knife".
See where I'm going yet, Chinook speakers?

You may recall seeing the phrase in Chinook Jargon sources, "opitsah
(yaka) sikhs" (literally, "knife (its) friend", for a "fork", but also
having the meaning "sweetheart".

Did rhyming slang, or for that matter some popular song known to speakers
of English, influence CJ to create this phrase for "fork / sweetheart"?

Or perhaps the lack of a forklike implement among the indigenous, knife-
wielding people of the Pacific Northwest led them to make the simile.

This is a subject for farfetched speculation, and clearly one I'm bringing
up more for entertainment's sake than for serious discussion.  But it's a
very good question to wonder about the origin of such an odd phrase in
Chinook.

(The book was written by Julian Franklyn, author of "The Cockney", and
published by Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 2nd edition, 1960.)

Dave



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