The article is aimed at identifying onomastic rhymes as part of rhyming slang and analyzing them from a socio-cultural perspective. They are built on the names of American celebrities from the world of politics and social activities and believed to be fixers of cultural and historical items that are of certain value from the point of view of culture-oriented linguistics, cross-cultural communication and the general study of culture. TThe research methods applied are determined by the purpose and objectives of the research and include a descriptive and a linguistic ones, the latter comprising context and definitional analysis, and also semantic interpretation. The rhymes are based on the names that have been widely represented in the media from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day, thus forming part of the modern cultural collective memory of the carriers of the English-speaking culture. The noted tendency of preferential creation of new rhymes, exploiting precedent onyms, became dominant in the development of rhyming slang at the turn of the century. The authors come to the conclusion that the rhymes illustrating the world of high politics have been added to the well-mastered and familiar onomastic rhymes, built on the names of celebrities from the world of cinema, pop music, popular culture and sports. The article brings to light the rhymes that have not yet been recorded in authoritative slang dictionaries. The research results can be of interest to the specialists working on the topics of intercultural communication, linguistic and cultural studies, cultural linguistics, political linguistics, euphemization, contrastive linguistics of the English and Russian languages.
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.
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