That is the view of one artist, who wants to reintroduce the dialect to a new generation of Londoners and international visitors by drawing attention to its creative nature.
Michael Landy's Lemon Meringue, which has been installed in London's East Bank, consists of a series of large fluorescent signs depicting different cockney rhyming slang - rhyming phrases used to replace everyday terms.
The installation includes phrases such as apples and pears (stairs), S Club Seven (heaven), duck and dive (hide), April showers (flowers) and dog and bone (phone), as well as newer additions to the dialect such as chicken jalfrezi (crazy) that speak to more recent diasporic influences on the area.
"The Museum of London asked people whether they had ever heard of cockney rhyming slang, and a lot of people hadn't," Landy said of his inspiration.
"And the ones that did said it would be an awful shame if it died out completely because it's part of east London's identity. Cockney slang was first chronicled in 1857, but it obviously existed verbally before that too."
A number of surveys have shown the vast majority of Londoners are unaware of the meaning of phrases that were in common use just a generation ago.
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