Coronavirus rhyming slang

Most people are remarkably calm. I was in my local last night and the mood was, “if I get it, I get it”. The most heated thing said about covid19 was whether to call it the Miley or the Billy Ray! (Twitter user from Manchester, March 14, 2020)


Introduction
This paper discusses the emergence of new rhyming slang (henceforth RS) for the concepts surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.Given that RS is not currently at its most productive (see Thorne, 2014: x-xi;Green, 2017: 1;Burridge & Manns, 2022), it may be surprising to learn that a new set of words has been created to refer to a new reality of pandemic life.In this respect, it is worth noting that RS serves one of the main purposes of slang in general (see Partridge, 1970: 6) which is to function as a coping strategy for the primal fears of disease and death.The coping function of slang (see Benczes & Burridge, 2019: 75-76;Burridge & Manns, 2020) is indeed one of the major reasons for the proliferation of light-hearted slangisms over the past couple of years (Thorne, 2020), including a host of blends (Roig-Marín, 2021a, 2021b)-upwards of 40 per cent of all new coronavirus-related words (Moldovan, 2020)-and a whole glut of synonyms for COVID-19, the latter a subject I have dealt with elsewhere (Lillo, 2020).

Purpose and method
In this paper, I provide a snapshot of the coronavirus-related RS that was forged in the period from late January 2020, some six weeks before the virus outbreak officially became a pandemic, to the time of writing in late February 2022.Even though these words may prove ephemeral, they are worth recording both for their value in capturing a tiny corner of today's lexical zeitgeist and as part of the ongoing story of RS.
The study relies on data extracted from Twitter, the most widely used microblog site and one of the most popular social media platforms in the world for news, debate, gossip and banter (see Murthy, 2018).Despite Twitter's massive size 1 , the evidence obtained for this study is limited to 288 tweets posted between January 2020 and February 2022.Coronavirus RS is a quantitatively insignificant part of slang, a speck of dust in the universe of language.
The method of collecting citations was exploratory and involved following different approaches to locate examples of RS.I often searched in places where RS is most likely to be found, such as tweets and threads from people who are fond of using slang and wordplay, such as Irvine Welsh (@IrvineWelsh) and David Astle (@dontattempt).Sometimes, in order to identify new rhymes, ANTONIO LILLO is a Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Alicante, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in lexical morphology and applied phonetics.He has a broad range of interests in linguistics, with a primary research focus on slang lexicology and lexicography.He is the author of Aspectos lingüísticos de la rima en el argot inglés (1995) and Transcribing English (2 nd edn.2012), co-author of A Dictionary of English Rhyming Slangs (2017) and Grammar in Gobbets (3 rd edn.2021), and has co-edited several volumes, including David L. Gold's Studies in Etymology and Etiology (2009).Email: antonio.lillo@ua.esdoi:10.1017/S0266078422000347224 I looked for keywords such as (rhyming) slang and corona or booster and their collocations.I also searched for word sequences such as (get a) dose of and first * jab.The method worked well enough, but was far from perfect.For example, tweets containing words that appeared without context have been excluded from the study.One such example is Desdemona, a supposed synonym for corona which I have only found in lists.
Although we know that anyone can make up their own RS (see Ayto, 2002: xi-xii), as noted by Wheeler and Broadhead (1985) and more recently Evans (2018), I have thought it appropriate to exclude from this snapshot any individual attempts at lexical tomfoolery, instead examining only those lexemes which occur in at least three tweets by three different users.This way we can be nearly certain that these items have gained at least some slight traction and are not mere nonce formations. 2 Each of the words and variants mentioned below will be illustrated with just one quotation, followed by the date of the posting and a geographical label that identifies the dialect of the author.The quotations have been selected on the basis of their illustrative value and do not necessarily represent the earliest appearance of the words on Twitter.The geographical label is based on the linguistic features of the text, the permanent location information in the author's profile and the content of his or her feed.
On the nature of coronavirus RS RS tends to be associated with Cockney and popular London English, but it is also relatively common in other urban dialects in Britain, Ireland and Australia (see Seal, 2009;Lillo, 2010Lillo, , 2012Lillo, , 2013)).We all know how it works.Take any word in the English language, face, for instance, and replace it with another word or, more commonly, a multiword expression with which it rhymes, like the phrase boat race.Although there is many an RS term that is invariably used in its full form, many can also be abbreviated and more than a few are never used in full.A person's face can be their boat race or their boat.Their ears are their King Lears, not their *kings. 3 The pandemic RS lexicon works on the same principle as other thematic subsets of this slang.A face mask, for example, can be referred to as a coffee and flask.I have found no evidence that this phrase can be shortened.Perhaps it never will be, the abbreviation of RS terms being unrelated to frequency of use or familiarity (Green, 2014: 210).
(1) Can't go into a shop now without your coffee and flask on.(July 22, 2020; UK) Unlike most RS, which is more often than not a product of the spoken medium, coronavirus RS has been mainly coined and popularised in online written form.But this is true of the bulk of the informal lexis created during these times, when lockdowns and social distancing spurred us to turn to social media more than ever.This RS is well documented on Twitter and its users, hardly a sociolectally homogeneous bunch, mostly hail from Britain, Ireland and Australia.This may suggest at least some of these terms are likely to lead an offline life too (see Eisenstein et al., 2014).

Down with the Miley:
The bug in RS But some RS terms are less arbitrary, and thus easier to decode, than others.In the wider realm of traditional RS, the link between dickory dock and the sense 'a clock' (Gray, 1934: 34) was triggered by the opening lines of the nursery rhyme we all know so wellhence also the cabbies' hickory for a taximeter (Munro, 2005: 187) (January 25, 2020; IRELAND) Kerry Katona, Virgil and Ovid, My Sharona and Come on Eileen have something else in common besides their reference to the disease: they are brand-new additions to the RS lexicon.There are other words whose novelty lies not in their form, but in the meaning that is attached to them.And when we look at them more closely, we can see that even their meaning is not that new after all.Two prime specimens are Miley Cyrus and Billy Ray Cyrus, courtesy of the famous American singers.It may be argued that the use of these names to refer to the coronavirus disease was almost inevitable, for both had earlier been deployed to refer to a virus of one kind or another (see Lillo & Victor, 2017).Unlike all the other RS terms for the bug, these two often occur in elliptical form (Miley, Billy Ray), sometimes with an -s tacked on the end (Mileys, Billy Rays) on the analogy of other names of diseases and illnesses.
( Getting Jeremy Paxxed: The vaccines and vaccination in RS The words mentioned above reveal a major feature of slang in general, namely the proliferation of synonyms for certain key referents and concepts, a phenomenon known as 'overlexicalisation' (Halliday, 1976: 571) or 'hypersynonymy' (Wescott, 1977: 117).They are at the same time testimony to the abundance or rather overabundance of names in modern RS (Ashley, 1977;Ayto, 2002: xi) CORONAVIRUS RHYMING SLANG Some final remarks Some diseases have traditionally been a fecund breeding ground for RS.These include AIDS (lovely maids, ace of spades, hand grenades, etc.), sexually transmitted diseases (handicap, via the rhyme on the clap, jack in the box, rhyming with the pox, etc.) and cancer (tap dancer, Mario Lanza, etc.), among others.Interestingly enough, no epidemic or previous pandemic has had any significant effect on RS.The unprecedented impact the current crisis has had on this slang is both a result of the tsunami of new words that the pandemic itself has brought and a reflection of the essential role of linguistic creativity as a coping mechanism in times of hardship and limited in-person interaction.
It is likely that many, if not most, of the words I have examined here were born in cyberspace, but that, of course, does not make them any less authentic.The internet has brought about a genuine paradigm shift in the way we communicate, and it would be astonishing if this were not reflected in the way new RS words are minted and gain currency.As I am writing these final paragraphs, chances are some of these coinages have started to spread in the offline world too.Miley and Billy Ray already did at the outset of this calamity.Little did we know then that two years later the words, like the virus, would linger. 2 I say 'nearly certain' because a nonce word can be created independently by more than one individual.This probably happens more often than we can imagine.3 Here are some examples: 'Must admit that CFCI Geezer put a smile on me boat race sataday' (Daily Star, July 19, 2021, 37); 'He's got a double-cute smile on his boat' (Connolly, 2001: 199); 'Rattling, shunting engines, thundering in your King Lears' (Brody, 2019).4 The pronunciation of Covid with the same vowel as in cod is uncommon, but not rare (see Lindsey, 2020).For those speakers who pronounce it that way, Virgil and Ovid rhymes perfectly with Covid.5 In fact, My Sharona virus started doing the rounds on Twitter as far back as late January 2020, thus slightly predating the World Health Organization's official declaration of the pandemic.6 'He has some unusual nicknames like the PigDog, Miley, Billy Ray, etc.' (Chowdhury, 2015).

Notes1
As of October 2021, Britain, by far the most fertile hotbed of RS, had a staggering 19.05 million Twitter users, according to figures from Statista (2021).
Dancing Queen or Torvill and Dean, we need to know that in those early, heady days of the pandemic it was near enough impossible for anyone living in the Anglosphere to escape the catchy strains of any of the numerous coronavirus-themed parodies sung to the tune of the 1982 hit by Dexys Midnight Runners: 'Covid-19, / You're scary and mean./Gotta selfquarantine, / Cancel everything'.The same is true of My Sharona and My Sharona virus 5 , which soon caught on thanks to the popularity of parodies of the Knack's 'My Sharona' (1979): 'Ooh, my little deadly one, / My deadly one, / Symptoms don't show up for some time, Corona./[ . ..] m m m My No one else better get the my sharona in the next 3 weeks so we can go back to normal.(March23, 2020; UK) (7) I like to call it the "my sharona" virus.
Jocularity is in the DNA of RS.Because of that, the effect this or any other tongue-in-cheek coinage may have on the growth of our coronavirus vocabulary should not be underestimated.One cannot help but wonder, for example, if Scott Styris is used to refer to the disease because the name of the former Kiwi cricketer rhymes with coronavirus or rather because, besides the rhyme, there is a covert pun that links that name to Miley and her country singer dad.During his playing days Styris was known as 'Styris the Virus' or the 'Virus' (nothing unpredictable there).In some quarters at least, he also went by the nicknames 'Miley' and 'Billy Ray'.6(15)He won't admit he caught the Scott Styris.(February 5, 2021; UK) Wife had the old dear Liza, no side effects at all so far.(February 26, 2021; IRELAND) (19) I got the Pfizer, the ol' can of Tizer[.] + mRNA + immunity, with a play on community) is variously known as Appletiser, apple (after a branded fruit juice), dear Liza (from the children's song 'There's a Hole in My Bucket'), can of Tizer and Fizzy Tizer (based on a popular soft drink).(39)I really don't get the thinking of basement jaxxers.(February 4, 2021; UK)