American presidents and politicians in rhyming slang

Abstract

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.